High on a platform suspended in the middle of a concrete cavern, an armoured space warrior is dodging lasers. Somebody -- fiendish villains? ill-advised security consultants? -- has placed a laser shield in the path of the exit and it is extremely important that the space warrior negotiate his way round it.
Simultaneously, in a booth in the Test Lab at WIRED 2015, a WIRED journalist is prancing around a fluorescent blue and pink floor, strapped into a backpack and wearing a virtual reality Oculus Rift headset. The WIRED journalist also has motion sensors attached to his hands, feet, legs and chest. His movements are being tracked in real time, information which is communicated to the headset via the processor in the backpack, giving the Oculus Rift a view of the journalist / space warrior’s every move.
This is a full-body virtual reality experience -- full-body because in the virtual world you have a body. Such virtual embodiment is surprisingly rare. Most virtual reality experiences do an incredible job of envisioning an environment, but a poor job of placing you there. You look around and see a breathtaking landscape, but when you glance down, there is nothing to see. You are a disembodied head floating in space.
"That’s what makes this experience different from anything that I’ve ever tried before, and I create VR experiences for a living," says William McMaster, Head of VR at Visualise, the company which created the experience, known as The Cell. "This was really an exciting project for me, because now I can finally experience what it’s like to see my whole body in VR and move around."
The gameplay in The Cell is simple and straightforward. Guided by a live voiceover, you weave around the space, completing various laser-themed tasks in order to escape the room. (Fans of Nineties TV shows will instantly recognise it as cross between The Crystal Maze and Knightmare.) Even so, it was instantly engaging. It speaks directly to the gaming instinct; as soon as I’d figured out what was going on I was jumping around getting on with my mission. Once I’d finished, I did the whole thing over again.
The presence of a virtual body helped this integration enormously. When you look down in The Cell, and see a silvery suit of robotic armour, instantly you know what kind of game this is, and what you are meant to be doing. Although there is a voiceover to guide you, very little explanation is needed. You are in space armour. Enough said.
Giving virtual reality adventurers bodies also helps resolve the motion sickness that is so often the downfall of VR. "If you’re sitting in a chair and watching someone skydive, that difference is going to cause motion sickness," says McMaster. "This experience is really comfortable for most people because you’re whole body is there and you can see your whole body and you feel really grounded in your surroundings."
The set-up is still a work in progress. The motion sensors on the hands currently only track the palms, leaving your gauntleted fingers stuck together in a permanent karate chop, as if (appropriately enough) you were just about to do the robot. McMaster says this could be easily resolved by attaching extra sensors to other parts of the body.
"We could have built the experience so that you could use a full body suit motion track system, so you could have 60 or 70 markers all over across your body: you could have fingers with motion, really delicate wrist motion, full shoulder motion... It can absolutely be done, it’s just not viable if you want to have a hundred people going through it in the course of the day."
Motion tracking brings the science fiction vision of virtual reality one step closer. It also advances Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of VR, as a social platform for truly immersive digital communication. "So much about VR is going to be about the social element: people interacting with other people," says McMaster.
"All those gestures and body language needs to be translated into VR to work as a social experience." VR masks are already being fitted with eye trackers and motion sensors to build up fully realised pictures of wearers’ facial expressions. "That’s the goal of VR: to give you presence and really immerse you somewhere."
All this is some way off. Not because the technology is lacking: rather, what is missing is the content making know-how necessary to create convincing VR experiences. "The revolution will be slow coming," admits McMaster. All the same, it is on its way. Robocop on the inside, prancing idiot on the outside. Coming soon to a living room near you.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
