As of recent, virtual reality experiences have been increasing in popularity across the globe, especially within the gaming industry. Some of the most recent advancements have been made by the company Disney, as they created a VR force feedback jacket. The jacket also comes along with a VR headset and two motion sensitive controllers that track arm movements. Below is a picture of a woman wearing the entire outfit and experiencing a VR snowball fight.
Here, you can see both how the jacket looks as well as her perspective through the VR. When she moves her arms or torso, the controllers and jacket will track this movement and the digital character will synchronically move. There are also air compartments within the jacket that can inflate to exert force on the body. There are 26 compartments within the entire jacket. They created a prototype VR application of a snowball fight, and confirmed that players could indeed feel the impact of the snowball when they were hit. Read more about it and watch the video here.
Disney also created a system that enables users to accurately catch a real ball in VR. To do this, they track the projectile motion of the ball as it is moving, and the ball is virtually displayed to the VR user (shown below).
In addition to this, they proved that the VR user could successfully catch the ball while only seeing either the predicted trajectory of the ball or the target catching point on the predicted trajectory.
On the left, the VR user can only see the projected trajectory of the ball, yet he was still able to catch it. It is important to note that he is wearing gloves which virtually display where his hands are, so it makes it easy for him to catch the ball. On the right, only the catching of the point is displayed. Again, the user was easily able to catch the ball. Watch the full video here.
This connects to our class as we played the VR bomb manual game, Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, and experienced how immersive VR games can be. With newer technology, developers will have more to work with, making the future of VR a promising one. In the future, how will the popularity of VR experiences change with the arrival of this new technology?