Virtual Reality, The Non-Nerdy Kind
To most of us, virtual reality seems distant and futuristic. It's a premise usually confined to sci-fi books and movies like Snow Crash and The Matrix. Maybe you heard about an arcade game ten years ago called Dactyl Nightmare, where players put on an enormous goofy helmet and try to shoot a polygon pterodactyl. And maybe a small few of you played Nintendo's Virtual Boy, an infamous bomb of a system that was really just a gimmicky 3D Game Boy. To some, the idea of virtual reality seems like a pathetic excuse to ignore reality. It's like hey computer nerds, real life isn't good enough for you? We see this public sentiment towards MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role playing games) like The Sims, where you control a digital character on a digital planet who interacts with thousands of other players all across the world. Crazier yet, games like Warcraft let you take the role of everything from demons to werewolves, entering a fantasy universe where clans form and fight in a virtual space. Again, the general public associates this sort of person as the epitome of a loser. Sure you might be Sh'Karli the Shadow Hunter in Warcraft, but you're still working the late shift at Best Buy. Some unfortunate kid was so attached to the virtual Everquest world that he committed suicide when a supposed friend turned out to be a traitor, "stealing" all of his virtual stuff.
Okay, so let's step back for a second and strip virtual reality of all the nerdy and negative stigmas it's become associated with. A fresh start. Now pretty much everyone has dreamed of flying at one point or another, but most of us lack jetpacks or wings. So what if we could create an experience that somehow tricks you into thinking you're flying through a mountain range? You effortlessly jump off a cliff, naturally soar up into the clouds, and feel a weightless sensation and wind resistance. Everything else in this environment is real except for your ability to defy gravity and breathing at a high altitude.
Is this experience feasible? Definitely. We've got incredibly realistic computer graphics now with decent physics - the main drawback today is the relatively slow speed at which they can be rendered. Sensations of wind, mist, temperature, sound and smell can all be manufactured by machines. The weightless feeling would have to be the result of a spinning mechanism or zero-gravity chamber, or some sort of suspended harness on a crane...that seems to be the major problem in this plan, but for the sake of argument let's say Andrew figured out how to do it. You would probably wear a pair of goggles that project a three-dimensional view of a pre-programmed world, which realistically and immediately correspond to the direction you're looking in. And there you go; you can fly. Sure there are kinks and flaws in the system, but it's plausible. What if a company offered this flight experience, not in a cramped arcade or on your computer screen, but in a massive soundstage? Even if they offered thirty minutes of flight for $300, it would be worth it if the experience was "realistic".
I started thinking about this while watching the last Harry Potter movie. There's an imaginative scene where Harry is riding on the back of Buckbeak (a winged creature called a hippogriff), who is flying over a lake. Harry stretches his arms out and closes his eyes, feeling completely free. It looked like a lot of fun to me, but it is obviously impossible in reality. Then I played Sarah's video game version of the movie at home, and there's a stage where you can do the same lake-skimming thing from the film. Sure it wasn't overly realistic, but it was still pretty fun controlling Buckbeak to get a running start and take off into the air, swooping under castle arches and over treetops. What if you could recreate that experience to become as real as possible? What if you could recreate Hogwarts, the castle where Harry goes to school, in virtual space? You could create a building of secret passageways and tunnels that wouldn't have to follow the normal rules of architecture. Taking it a step further, what if you could actually perform magic spells by yelling out a command, seeing their effects realistically rendered in this world?
This fascination with impossible dreams like flying is what prompted the initial idea of Cadence of Seasons, where you will take on the role of a bird and fly within the first scene. Technology allows us to create interactive experiences that can provide an escape from, or a mirror to, reality. My definition of virtual reality can be pretty low-tech too: a lot of modern restaurants use a flavoring called "liquid smoke" now that makes you think your food has been slow-cooked on a grill by giving it an artificial taste. It's only a slight misperception of what's real, but it affects a small part of your dining experience. So maybe we won't see something as complex as virtual reality flight in our lifetimes, but the barriers towards creating something like it are diminishing every day.
Monday, September 27 at 3:51 PM
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