Virtual reality technology, especially in the gaming space, won’t surpass the Xbox and the PlayStation until it can offer the kind of experience that high-end consoles can’t. It has to be something more than immersion, or gorgeous graphics, because today’s AAA games already boast that. No, to really be the next big thing, VR has to make you fly, or make you feel 300-feet tall.
The motion capture company Logemas has done the latter with a demonstration that puts you into the body of a legendary city-smasher: Godzilla.
For this demo, Logemas puts you inside the body of the beast by combining the renderings of the Unreal game engine, motion tracking with infrared cameras on 7 body points, and a Godzilla POV via an Oculus Rift.
“The Godzilla demo is awesome because it’s one of the few VR demos that really leverages using a game engine,” Logemas Sales and Support Engineer Max told the company’s blog. “There’s destructible buildings, physics for the tail and all sorts of other tricks…There’s added immersion from being able to interact with the environment — you feel like you have a physical presence in the virtual world when you step on a building and see it crumble and hear it crash.”
Max says that there is a bit of vertigo that comes along with embodying the 80-meter (260-foot) monster — I found out first hand how disorienting VR can be — but the fun, and potential benefits, outweigh the queasiness. “There’s no technical limit on how many people could be recorded at once, so I could see this being great for military simulators, design and ergonomic reviewing prototypes or rehabilitation.”
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IMAGES: Logemas
