Sorry for your headset :( Hope you'll fix it easily. What happened to it, btw? I create VR parks with free roam and custom content, and now we have to upgrade our old CV1s to something new, looking for a candidate, but damn, everything around seems to have so many troubles.
That's kinda complicated story. Speaking very short - we (Senso Devices) developed our own tracking technology (Gloves + Haptic suit + Optical cameras) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMsDHbxtjHw and started separate project to utilize and popularize this technology - sfera.one - https://sfera.one/en We use wearable PCs (backpacks) and develop our own VR content for this. Its absolutely freeroam, no wires, walking area is around 100m2. We track whole body (actualy I believe sfera.one is the only park in the world to have actual body tracking, tracking all joints and even hands and fingers (and not IK by few spots). So the movement looks very natural. We also use Senso Gloves to have haptic feedback from VR. We currently have two spots in Russia, raised some investments to scale to China market and were opening our first spot in Shenzhen in February, when this coronavirus thing started. So now the project is paused, I wait while I can travel back to China and go on :)
That's in short - feel free to ask if any specific thing is interesting to you!
That's awesome! I don't think I've seen that level of tracking and freedom in a VR experience video. There are things like "The Void" but they seem to focus more on real world objects providing feedback or regular motion controls. I would love to try this experience if it ever comes to my area of the US...would love to help bring something like that here really. That's the kind of futuristic VR that I dreamed about when I was so pumped for things like the original Vive, Magic Leap, Virtuix Omni, etc.
I've dreamed about a using VR on a scale even larger than that experience for a while now but understand it's not feasible in the near future. When I mentioned the paintball match size before, I'm thinking of an indoor/outdoor modular arena that can be mapped and manipulated for various VR game modes. So for instance you could have an FPS game where players get guns and simulate an airsoft/paintball match in a fantasy realm (think Pavlov but actually being able to move around the world with real time tracking). You could setup LARP events with real magic and swords/shields/arrows/etc. with kingdoms/castles (even buildable to an extent). You could setup obstacle courses that look like players are walking over a tight rope or through fire...so many options.
I obviously don't know how you'd manage or track it at that scale; (as you know) I'm sure it would require a very intensive and low latency backend. My guess is you would have to have a defined area and tons of tracking points like the current experiences or perhaps even drones that are constantly patrolling and tracking positions of both the field and players in real time combined with feedback from the player's devices themselves.
Well that's it for my daydream rambling, love what you guys are doing and can't wait to see how it develops further in the future.
Technically the tracking area is unlimited in our current solution. Though, speaking about LBE (location based entertainment) - this is retail business and one of the most important KPIs here is revenue per square meter. And having 100m2 playarea (i'm not even talking about bigger ones) - is a tough challenge to be honest. You must be SO much better than any other VR arcades to justify much higher price people have to pay.
Speaking about VR paintball/ lasertag - thats pretty obvious conception and there are a lot of implementations on the market. Noawadays its getting even popular with Oculus Quests. Though for me its not that interesting as VR have much more to offer, we just need to reinvent game concepts :)
Speaking about VR paintball/ lasertag - thats pretty obvious conception and there are a lot of implementations on the market.
Just to be clear I wasn't speaking about a VR paintball/lasertag game, simply the idea of an arena that large :P
I was thinking of an outdoor arena that large that could accommodate large groups of people. The arena itself could have certain permanent base points for navigation and tracking purposes but overall would be modular physically (moving of objects such as structures/rooms/etc.) and mapped virtually based on the type of game wanted to be played. So you could host an FPS type game on it if you wanted to, but also you could transform it into a virtual obstacle course that looks like it's on the moon. You could setup a murder mystery that has clues all over the arena. You could setup a rescue the princess game where one side has to storm the castle. You could create games with mechanics where people have to enter physical buildings to avoid cluster strikes.
There's so many opportunities with AR and VR that are yet to be explored, and like you said it's not really financially feasible to do something like this, but that's my dream.