Tag: Virtual Reality

Rec Room: A Brief Introduction

I just realized today that there is one fairly popular social VR/virtual world platform I haven’t covered in this blog yet, and that is Rec Room by the company Against Gravity, which was first released in 2016.

Here’s the description of the social VR app from its Oculus Home description:

Welcome to Rec Room, the virtual reality social club where you play active games with friends from all around the world. Customize your appearance, then party up to play multiplayer games like Paintball, 3D Charades, Disc Golf, and even four player co-op adventures! Or just hang out in The Lounge (free membership required). Plus new activities and fun stuff added frequently.

The first thing I noticed about Rec Room was the avatars, which are blocky and cartoony, basically a head, torso and hands, without arms, legs or a neck.

Rec Room 14 Apr 2018

Now, those of you who read this blog regularly know that I have a pet peeve about cartoony avatars (hello, Facebook Spaces!). However, in the case of Rec Room, there is more of an emphasis on an all-ages, children-friendly environment, so I’m more willing to accept cartoon avatars. (Kind of like those Saturday morning cartoons I used to spend all Saturday morning watching as a kid. Is that still a thing?)

The emphasis in Rec Room is on fun and games. The main room is a gymnasium, which is usually full of other avatars running around and yelling (mostly children). There are about a dozen doors leading to separate game-playing areas: everything from disc golf to paintball to laser tag, even charades! You can earn in-world currency by completing activities and completing daily challenges, which you can then spend on exclusive merchandise (like a red fireman’s hat) that you can wear.

If you’re looking for something different and fun, Rec Room might just be up your alley. It’s available as a free app for the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and the PlayStation VR headset. (Note that there is no desktop-only version of this app; you do need to have one of the three VR headsets to play.)

New Omnidirectional Treadmill for Walking Around Within Virtual Reality

This is a very interesting video showing off a new omnidirectional treadmill which allows you actually take steps and walk around in virtual reality experiences! Apparently, this treadmill actually appears in the movie Ready Player One. According to the description in the YouTube video from Adam Savage’s Tested channel:

We step onto the Infinadeck, the omnidirectional treadmill seen in the movie Ready Player One. This treadmill lets you walk freely in virtual reality, in any direction. We learn about how it works and give our impressions on the state of the technology today

They actually talk about using this 500-lb. rig for fitness applications and firefighter training. Very cool—and probably also very expensive! (No price for this product has been announced yet.)

It would be so cool to be able to walk around inside Sansar experiences or High Fidelity domains, though!

30 Days in VR, 5+ Hours a Day: Could You Do It?

One of the problems in virtual reality is that the current level of hardware is still somewhat bulky and uncomfortable to wear for long periods of time. I get tangled up in the cable, on warm days sometimes it gets sweaty inside the headset, etc. My personal limit when I wear my Oculus Rift VR headset is about two hours, then I definitely need to take it off and rejoin the real world! Most people probably wouldn’t (or shouldn’t) use a VR headset for more than an hour a day.

So, how would you feel if you spent all day, every day in VR for a whole month? Someone in Italy is doing just that. His name is Enea Le Fons and he is a VR developer.

Enea in VR 12 Apr 2018
Enea Le Fons (from the blog The Ghost Howls)

Skarredghost of the blog The Ghost Howls has blogged about the HTC Vive-sponsored marathon:

And he loves VR, he loves experimenting and he also loves opensource and free software. He has this idea of making the world better, of letting people live freely and exchanging their expertise. He has this idea of a VR ecosystem that is completely free of chains. So he proposed to HTC to live 30 days in VR in a way that in these 30 days he could develop very cool things like AI bots and VR locomotion systems while being inside virtual reality with other people helping him remotely… and then share everything developed there to the community as open source software. Isn’t it cool? Yes, it is. That’s why HTC couldn’t do anything but accepting his proposal. This way has born the #30DaysInVR project.

…

Of course he won’t stay 24h a day in VR for 30 days, this would be potentially too extreme for his health at this point of the technology (even if he actually told me that he would really love to stay for a month completely in VR). He has started with five hours of immersion each day and has incremented the duration of his immersions until he has arrived to many hours a day. That’s impressive.

It looks like he is going to document his 30-day journey on YouTube. Here is the video from Day 1:

And you can follow him on various social media:

Sinespace Launches Virtual Reality Beta

Sinespace has launched their virtual reality beta. As I wrote about earlier, the last time I tried out their VR client using my Oculus Rift, it was still too buggy for me. But maybe you’ll have better luck. If you do, please let me know.

Sinespace VR beta 18 Mar 2018

You can download their OpenVR viewer for Windows here.