We’ve all had that moment, the one where something in real life looks so deliciously game-like that we just wish we could dive in right there and start playing. Say you’re walking through a carpark on a hot summer’s day, feeling bored. Next thing you know, you’ve lost yourself in a fantasy where you’re pressed against the side of the black 4WD to your left, wincing as bullets ricochet off the bonnet.
You’re suddenly wearing power armour and clutching at a chainsaw combined with an assault rifle, screaming at your best friend to get behind cover because there’s a fresh round of Lambent coming from the other side of the carpark.
OK, so maybe that’s just my fantasy. But in either case it’s always been held back by the annoying fact that my eyeballs are stuck inside my head, unable to give me the disembodied third-person perspective I recognise from classic games like Gears of War, Mass Effect and Grand Theft Auto.
A new DIY rig for the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset posted on the Polish open-source technology collective Mepi takes the first step towards turning this fantasy into a reality, of sorts:
Bartosz Barlowski, one of the creators of the new prototype, told a 3D printing-focused website that his goal with the new device is to grant users a third-person perspective (TPP) “for use in virtual reality devices and solve real world problems by using it to help users be more aware of their environment.”
Like many Oculus Rift-enabled prototypes, the thing is very silly-looking and not entirely effective…yet. But these are the sorts of ideas are also what makes virtual reality so compelling. Just like the gender-swapping experiment done with the Oculus Rift, the third-person rig offers users a perspective on life that’s genuinely new.
That’s something purely virtual games have already been doing for a while, of course. But the “reality” part of “virtual reality” is what makes it exciting all over again.
Comments
3 responses to “Virtual Reality Mod Lets You Change The Camera Angle On Your Life”
He’s not wearing the rift in the gif, so that’s not exactly what you would see. You would see yourself with a big black box strapped to your face.
Funny how you see that as a big problem.
No, I was juts amazed at how good it looked in the gif, then realised that was not what you would experience. I wonder how long it would take to get used to. I’m sure I would be falling over.