Holger Frydrych

VR Development and Consulting

About Me

Hi, my name is Holger and I am a Munich based developer specializing in Virtual Reality and stereoscopic rendering. Are you planning to port your existing game or experience to Virtual Reality? I can help you!

I have been involved in several successful community-driven VR ports for classic games and understand the challenges involved. Rendering games in VR is a performance-critical task that requires special considerations to make it work well. Techniques like instanced and multiview stereo rendering and (fixed) foveated rendering can help reduce the performance overhead. Additionally, it is crucial to understand the essential gameplay features that must be implemented to make VR gamers happy.

If you think you can benefit from my experience, don’t hesitate to contact me!

My VR game conversions and VR tools

Half-Life 2: VR

halflife2vr.com

Rise and shine, Mr Freeman. Rise and ... shine.

Half Life 2: VR is a third-party modification of the 2004 PC gaming classic by Valve Software, which adds full Virtual Reality support to the original game.

The project was originally started over a decade ago in the early days of Oculus. It successfully passed Steam greenlight in 2017, but then ran into trouble and was all but abandoned. I joined the project in July 2021 as part of an influx of new team members to revive it and finally get it out of the door. As the lead developer, I made sure to keep the project focussed on the essentials and slowly transform it into a playable and enjoyable experience. The project entered a private beta test phase in May 2022 and launched publically in September 2022 on Steam. It was met with an overwhelmingly positive reception by the VR community.

Built on the Source 2013 SDK and using OpenVR and a customized dxvk build to implement the VR rendering.

Far Cry VR

farcryvr.de

Welcome to Cabatu!

Far Cry VR transforms the classic 2004 shooter into a full virtual reality experience with motion controls.

With the help of the Far Cry Mod SDK, I created a total conversion of the game to make it a native VR experience. Full stereoscopic VR rendering combined with motion controller support lets players experience Jack Carver’s visit to Cabatu from a whole new perspective.

Built on the Far Cry Mod SDK and using OpenVR and a customized dxvk build to implement the VR rendering.

Maximum immersion!

Crysis VR is a work-in-progress Virtual Reality adaptation of the notorious 2007 shooter.

I implemented stereoscopic rendering and basic motion controller support that allow you to experience this still gorgeous game in glorious VR.

Built on the Crysis Mod SDK, it incorporates a D3D10 to D3D11 bridge to bring the rendered images to the OpenXR runtime.

The Dark Mod is a free community-developed stealth game in the spirit of the Thief series. I have created a VR adaptation that currently allows the game to be played as a seated keyboard+mouse experience in virtual reality, with motion controller support in the works. In the process, I have contributed many improvements to the game’s renderer to make its performance meet the needs of VR rendering. Working on this project has taught me most of what I know about 3D rendering and VR, specifically knowledge in OpenGL, OpenVR and OpenXR.

VR Performance Toolkit

github.com/fholger/vrperfkit

This tool can inject upscaling and fixed foveated rendering into existing VR games, giving users tools to improve rendering performance with an acceptable loss of visual fidelity. The tool works by injecting into D3D11 and VR render calls.

Experience

TNG Technology Consulting

Senior (since 2018) Software Consultant

April 2016 - Present

tngtech.com

We solve hard IT problems.

TNG is a value-based consulting partnership focused on high end information technology. I have worked and consulted on several projects for our clients. These projects include:

  • big data processing in privacy-compliant ways on AWS cloud infrastructure and K8s with Flink and Akka
  • modernizing a legacy client-facing desktop application and bringing it into the cloud as SaaS
  • building modern web applications with .NET, ASP.NET Core and Typescript/React
  • internal AR/VR showcases with Microsoft’s Hololens and various VR headsets

Technische Universität Darmstadt

Research assistant

2011 - 2016

www.tu-darmstadt.de

Doing research and completing my PhD in the field of theoretical quantum information theory.

Education

TU Darmstadt

PhD Physics

2011 - 2015

Research in theoretical physics with a focus on quantum information and quantum cryptography.

Title of PhD thesis: “Advanced dynamical decoupling strategies for simulating Hamiltonian interactions”