UploadVR went hands-on with the latest in virtual reality “arcades”
The near-constant screaming coming from visitors on the VOID’s stage makes it difficult to follow instructions. Some people, it seems, are afraid of ghosts.
Despite the distraction, I nonetheless get locked and loaded for my journey into Ghostbusters in about 15 seconds. I lock the first strap of my backpack across my chest and the rest of the magnetic clasps find each other and snap into place. The VR helmet fits securely over my head and I’ve suddenly transported from a loading room in Lindon, Utah into a virtual world that looks just as crisp as the ones I visit in my Rift or Vive back at home.
Yet I’m free — totally untethered. I’m giggling already because I’m starting to believe. This startup born in a picturesque valley far from Hollywood’s 360-degree videos and Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists actually produced the ultimate in virtual realism.
When it first launched at Madame Tussauds in New York last year the VOID made some compromises most visitors wouldn’t notice but were obvious to close watchers of the industry. Those issues are gone now, and the “Vision Of Infinite Dimensions” imagined by this startup’s leaders is actually in sight.
The main compromises inside the initial VOID setup were frame rate and resolution. The first VOID location came online with a headset that hands-on reports indicated was a Rift development kit (DK2) running at 75 frames per second. While this frame rate produces a virtual world that appears solid for some, it falls significantly below the 90 frames per second standard in consumer hardware like Rift and Vive. The DK2 also had a lower resolution display compared with what consumers eventually received when finished headsets started shipping roughly one year ago.
As you move through a virtual world, the underlying frame rate and resolution are what most convince your mind that what you experience is real. If the frame rate is too low, you notice a kind of blur to the virtual world as you move. If the resolution is too low, it looks like you’re seeing the world through a screen door because you can actually see the individual pixels. Valve Software and Facebook’s Oculus settled on 90 frames per second and a resolution of 1080×1200 per eye as the threshold which would be most comfortable to the largest segment of people in the first generation of consumer VR hardware.