VirZOOM & FOVE @Boston VR Meetup 6/24

[rustysawdust]

This time we're featuring VirZOOM, a Harvard Square based startup building a stationary bike based gaming experience and FOVE, a company building an exciting new head mounted display with built in eye tracking! As usual we'll also be showing a number of Boston homegrown demos being developed by our members.

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From the creative minds that brought you Guitar Hero, Rock Band and Dance Central, VirZOOM is a unique application and set of experiences in Virtual Reality. By using intuitive activity on a bicycle that creates parallel motion in a virtual world, pedalling and steering becomes a means to propel yourself through a new experience. This type of motion is natural for the user – as easy as riding a bike, and exciting as you want to make it. Don’t think of VirZOOM as a bike race, this is anything that you want it to be. Be the horse in the race, the tank in battle, the fire breathing dragon... Your actions on VirZOOM are real – which makes your experience feel real. This is a way to bring your dreams to virtual reality. VirZOOM is creating a constant stream of new experiences while also evolving existing ones that all can be experienced on our unique application. The bonus: you get an awesome workout while having fun.

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FOVE is the world’s first eye tracking head-mounted display for gamers, people with disabilities and technology enthusiasts. FOVE combines cutting-edge display, eye tracking, orientation sensing, and head position tracking into a single package, allowing users to control the 360°/360° of virtual world freely with their eyes.

FOVE tracks user’s gaze and parallax to determine where in 3D space a user is looking at. In addition to depth of field simulation, this enables the graphics engine to adjust focus and allocate rendering resources accordingly. Additionally, FOVE’s eye tracking technology allows users to quickly and accurately control 3D virtual experiences more naturally than, rather than relying extensively on the mouse or other input optimized for a 2D setting.
For full details & to sign up please visit the event page:
http://www.meetup.com/Boston-Virtual-Re ... 222398795/

[cybereality]

Good luck!

[Dom]

Hi, How well is it to have a Vr headset on and ride a bike that you cannot see? So doesn't that lose presence and also that you could forget where buttons are if there are buttons. In first thought it seems like a good idea to use external controllers, even an xbox controller. But really all those input devices you cannot see.

I think that is a huge detachment unless someone has a better explanation, I've never tried VR and this is one thing stopping me from getting involved.

[rustysawdust]

Hi, How well is it to have a Vr headset on and ride a bike that you cannot see? So doesn't that lose presence and also that you could forget where buttons are if there are buttons. In first thought it seems like a good idea to use external controllers, even an xbox controller. But really all those input devices you cannot see.

I tried it last month and I really didn't mind not being able to see the bike; it was really cool to look down and see a horse or a pegasus instead! Of course it does limit presence somewhat because you're holding onto handlebars instead of reins but the gameplay was so fun I didn't really care. The experience I tried didn't require buttons but I think they are going to feature them and if they're mounted at the top of the grips or even on the grips themselves they really wouldn't be hard to find.

I think that is a huge detachment unless someone has a better explanation, I've never tried VR and this is one thing stopping me from getting involved.

You really shouldn't let that keep you from enjoying VR! There are actually some great experiences you can have without even using a controller at all. Lighthouse looks like a great solution and hopefully Oculus will announce an input solution at their event on Wednesday. It will be a long time before we have accurate and believable haptics and if you're waiting for that you're going to miss out on all the fun!