VR (Virtual Reality) is finally on its way to change the world and it’s no joke. From how Nurses train to provide the best health care, allowing scientists to walk around a cancer cell up close and personal, theme parks adopting VR for their roller coasters, to our very own gaming consoles and home VR equipment. Virtual Reality as we all believed it would be, is finally here! Hello, I’m Dukane Stevenson, writer and editor for The VR Sofa and now here, on WeR1YouR2 for the ‘Game Grid’. I have had a passion for VR for many years, both on and off the screen. My first memory of wanting Virtual Reality to become something I could own started on the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) playing Duck Hunt. I remember how blown away I was that you could hold a real gun at the TV, pull the trigger, and the duck on my TV would fall down into the grass. Now that dream has become a reality and it’s within the grasp of so many, it’s become my task to tell you what this technology is really capable of. ‘…Could it actually be like the Matrix?’ First off, if you haven’t tried VR yourself, this will probably already be a question you’ve asked already ‘What is it actually like? Could it actually be like the Matrix?’ The answer is yes. I’ve flown over my home in the UK in VR and while I haven’t been to space myself to compare, there’s nothing quite like looking back at the Earth from low Orbit and realising that you really are just a speck on a dot. This was not a small, or fake feeling, it was real. VR lends itself to immersion, from serious training to save lives, to fighting a dragon, you will feel fear, you will realise that it’s not about having a screen in front of your face. It’s about the experience itself. Well, it’s about having a 360 degree view, surround sound and relative tracking in a virtual space. In some cases, even controls that follow your hands to allow you to reach out and touch the VR world. These leaps in interactive media have lead to a huge market in Virtual Reality that’s been growing into almost all areas of modern society. But we aren’t all training with VR to save lives, or wanting to open our minds to a greater cause by going to space. Some of us just want a new way to entertain ourselves, which leads me neatly onto our next topic… VR at the Theatres is likely one of the first things people imagine when somone mentions Virtual Reality to them. The idea of watching a film, or better yet, being there inside the film, is an idea that has been in sci-fi for decades. From the years of Star Trek and it’s holodeck many of us have dreamed of stepping into our favourite movies and it seems we were not alone.. In an interview on CNET, Yelena Rachitsky [executive producer of For VR experiences at Facebook and Oculus] had this to say on the concept of VR movies: “We’re really interested in, how do you create that experience of live actors without needing to be in a site-specific location,” she went on to say that “It’s a great way to scale (VR).” And not just movies. If you have a VR head set on PC (and certain event’s on PSVR or Android Headsets) you can watch a live event as if you were in the stands right now! Saturday Night Live have placed a 360º camera in it’s studio, Football have made a move to do the same, as have Formula 1, (which can be viewed normally here https://www.vrfocus.com/tag/formula-1/,) who now show highlights and recorded footage from the cars themselves in glorious VR or 360 video. Allowing you to finally get a closer look, and more importantly, FEEL closer to the action that before now, has seemed so far away on the other side of a flat screen. ‘DO YOU KNOW DE WA- NO!’ Next we can turn our keen eyes to the social applications for VR. From more well known apps like VR Chat, ‘DO YOU KNOW DE WA-’ NO! Sigh- VR chat aside, there have been many very well made social apps for VR. There are games like Star Trek VR, where a team of friends can pilot a Starship from the latest movies or the classic episodes of Star Trek. Almost going full circle on the old classic holodeck idea. …
