Gadgetory

hey everyone we just got done at GDC 2015 we are here at PAX East now flying across the country for that GGC still has another two days for it but we're focusing on pax east for this weekend and the last thing we did at GDC was valves virtual reality demo which is a full room full-scale virtual reality demonstration where you put on a head-mounted display similar to the oculus rift but a bit more advanced and different in scope in that the room actually has what's called lighthouse a valve technology and lighthouse is a pair of IR sensors that mount in the corners of the room and these currently use lasers to scan the room actively you can think of this as a much more simplistic form of what automated cars use when they're scanning the road they scan the room actively determine the players location determine the players proximity to the walls so that the system can tell the player when they're approaching that wall because you have no perception of the outside environment when you're in the virtual reality headset valves VR demo has been in development for a while now and it's a bit different than oculus in that they are using two wiimote like controllers that you hold in each hand and they've got the head mount display itself which is developed by HTC called the vibe and the vibe has several I our receivers on the front of the head mounted display or the hmd so this allows it to receive signal from the lighthouse set up in the corners of the room when you put the head mounted display on it's just like oculus in that you've got a somewhat wide field of view wrapping around to create presence in the game so this provides the player more than the usual 90 degrees field of view presented by a monitor which they to deplane and that means that the visor sort of wraps around your eyes like that and this provides you a more immersive experience and it looks more like you're in the actual environment this also assists in producing the three dimensional appearance of the virtual reality setup so in this demonstration we played a few different types of games one of them was a painting game where I was given the two controllers and one of them represented a palette for paint and you rotate that left right to access different tools like in Photoshop where you have different brushes erasers and colors the right one was the actual paint gun and you sort of point that around the environment and are able to draw different objects and materials in three-dimensional space to this end it is more like sculpting than painting and it's actually a little bit difficult to get used to because everything everything we've learned from using computers tells us to draw as if on a two-dimensional canvas unless you're a 3d modeler walking around the environment was actually pretty easy it wasn't too disorienting and it was very quick for me to get used to your mileage may vary at the end of the demonstration when I took the headset off I had a sort of interesting experience with distorted vision so because of the way the visor warps around your eyes to present the wider field of view and the more immersive experience and the appearance of 3d my vision was sort of blurred toward the edges where the visor was was at its limits and this persisted when I removed it and went back to the actual real world and to this end the presenter from valve almost looked like a two-dimensional npc from a game it was very strange it was sort of like your brain is very clearly tricked into thinking that it is in another environment so you're existed in two places at the same time and when you can hear someone in the room talking to you but you can't see them because you have this headset on and you hear them moving because they're trying to stay out of your way as you move in three-dimensional space it's actually somewhat disorienting to get used to but I do think that is something you would get used to over time we were told after a couple of hours of use most players had a very firm grasp of their VR technology so that is valves VR in a very brief form if you want more information on the headset how it works and HTC's version of the technology with my impressions using the technology you can click the link the description below for more information do follow the channel 4 packs updates as we were here all weekend and we will see you all next time you