Welcome to the Holodeck, That'll be $30: MakeUseOf Chats with "The Void"
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The Void is a new virtual reality experience opening in Utah in summer of 2016. Let's get an idea of what they're trying to do and the exciting possibilities in store for us. The Void is a new virtual reality experience opening in Utah in summer of 2016. To get an idea of what they're trying to do, check out their trailer below. What the Void is promising is nothing less than the : untethered virtual reality in a physical space, with physical props. It's the . Inside, the experience can consist of anything game designers can conceive of. And, most importantly, it can be as large as the user wants. In virtual reality, locomotion remains a huge unsolved problem. Moving with a joystick is sickening. Moving with your feet is amazing, but there's only so much free space in a typical person's living room. Thus VR experiences either have be pretty cramped, or compromise their comfort and immersion to some degree. The Void, and experiences like it, offer a third path: provide large, dedicated VR-ready spaces that can be stretched to infinite size using software tricks. These facilities, in principle, can provide a far better experience than VR at home -- for a price. When I first saw the Void's pitch, I was very skeptical. What's shown in the trailer is extremely ambitious, and some of the technologies shown do not, to the best of my knowledge, exist. Can a company that I've never heard of before pull off such an impressive technical achievement? To address these questions, I had a conversation this week with CEO Ken Bretschneider. Content
To start things off, I asked about content creation. As a new platform, the Void needs to attract high quality content creation, which can be a challenge without an established user base. reported that the Void is working with "some of the top-rated game developers in the world," and that these studios are "really excited" to produce content for them. In short, he says, the Void is operating in a separate market from Oculus and Valve. It also has a business model that can be profitable immediately, and has been proven in other contexts (he compares the economics to haunted houses and IMAX theaters). He compares this to Oculus and Valve, who may take the better part of a decade to establish a thriving ecosystem. also mentioned that The Void is in negotiations with several major theme parks to build facilities at their locations, and develop VR experiences based on their IP. So, for example, you might go to Universal Studios, and take part in a "Terminator" themed VR experience. This kind of thing, I suspect, could prove really popular over the next few years. I'd be amazed if Disney isn't investigating this technology for their parks and rides. Business Model
Each Void location will consist of eight pods (though some special locations will have more). Each pod will be sixty-by-sixty feet in size, and physically designed for a specific experience. The centers themselves will be somewhat more than thirty thousand square feet - the size of a large house. New content will come out quarterly, although popular experiences may last longer. Users will be put on the Void's custom VR suit, and go into a pod. Six to eight people will use the same pod together and share the same experience, at a cost of $29-$39 per user. The experiences will last half an hour, although users will be able to stretch them to a full hour for twice the price. I'm on the fence about this, and worry that the Void might get undercut by competitors offering a slightly lower-end experience (using off-the-shelf consumer hardware), for a much more reasonable price. The Void's first location is currently being built in Pleasant Grove, Utah, but the company has global ambitions, in the relatively near future. Bretschneider expressed an interest in establishing Void franchises in gateway cities across the US, and eventually worldwide. Technology
Next, I talked to Redirected Walking
Redirected walking works because human proprioception (our sense of our body and how it's moving) isn't very accurate in an absolute sense. If you blindfold a person, they find it nearly impossible to walk in a straight line. This effect can be exploited in virtual reality. If you set a person in an empty space, and subtly rotate their virtual self as they move, they'll correct for it without even noticing. If they march off into the wild, virtual blue yonder, their path in real life will actually form a circle inside the room. No matter how they choose to walk, the system will always loop them back in on themselves, preventing them from ever running into a wall. This provides the illusion of an infinite space - without ever leaving the same small tracking area. This is how The Void can stretch its 60x60 meter space into an unlimited gameworld. According to "We've developed our own method of redirected walking... we've actually developed some IP around it. It's a really advanced form that actually takes in some technology, it's not just a methodology. And we've been developing that over a couple of years now, and just really perfected it about five months ago. So, we're able to basically create environments in a 60-by-60 foot pod, and we can make the world as big as you can possibly imagine." However, In contrast, using the Void's solution, " Custom VR Helmet
Right now, the Void is testing using the Oculus Rift DK2. However, they're also developing their own VR helmet. This is one of the red flags that jumped out at me when I initially saw The Void's trailer. Developing an HMD is hard. There are real ergonomic, optical, and graphical hurdles you need to clear before you can provide a good experience. So why not use an off-the-shelf HMD like the Vive or the Rift? Why roll your own hardware? "Oculus does amazing things with very limited hardware. You know, they have to use cheap plastic lenses, and [...] they need to get the best price they can on their OLED screens. We're going to the cutting edge using curved, flexible screens, and we're using hardware to accelerate refresh rate well above 120 hertz, and we're doing other hardware acceleration to deal with other latency issues [...] but it costs a lot of money." Large-Scale Tracking
One interesting thing I found out is that The Void is not using traditional optical tracking. While they experimented with motion capture, using many overlapping cameras, they found that heat changes inside a building could throw off optical tracking, causing glitches. They also spoke to Valve about using their , but ultimately decided not to. Eventually, the Void opted to go with a proprietary tracking technology based on many high-frequency radio base stations, which claims to provide sub-millimeter accuracy and extremely low latency. Unfortunately, in some markets, the RF spectrum is so heavily regulated that The Void has been unable to get a license to use this technology. Obviously, that's not much to go on, but I have a feeling that they may be doing something similar to the famous "Valve room" demo, which covered the walls of a space with tracking markers to allow the headset to be tracked via a single headset-mounted camera. This isn't practical for the home market, but there's no reason the Void couldn't do something similar. Hand Tracking
In the promotional video for the Void, we see a user activating a control panel using his hand. Free hand tracking is a very difficult problem to solve, so I was curious whether this was a planned feature, or something the Void had actually implemented. I asked Ken about it, and he said that that demo relied on , something that was ultimately found to be too slow and jittery to be useful at this point. Instead, the Void has opted to use custom gloves, using tiny IMUs and their global tracking system (presumably in conjunction with some sort of bend-sensor arrangement). The gloves use Bluetooth, and are nearly ready for testing. Haptic Feedback
The Void's hardware also includes a number of "5D" effects -- misters to simulate rain, strings to simulate spider webs, etc. Much of the haptic feedback comes in the form of physical props, which take on new properties in virtual reality. However, the suits also come equipped with more traditional haptic feedback mechanics. Portable Rendering
Right now, wireless virtual reality is not a practical option, for the most part - and would be a major mood-killer. That means that in order to render the Void's games and scenarios, you need to carry your computing power with you, which is easier said than done. The Void is using a "backtop" form factor -- an ultraportable gaming PC that you wear on your back, built into the haptic vest. Bretschneider revealed that the company is currently using dual GTX 980M's -- as their desktop counterparts -- to drive the experience. In other words, the Void has plenty of graphical horsepower to drive its experiences. He also revealed that their target weight for the whole assembly is less than five pounds. The batteries will last more than an hour, and be hot-swapped for freshly charged units in-between experiences. Is The Void a Contender
After talking to Ken, I feel more confident that the Void is a serious project that may be able to make good on some of its ambitions. I still think that a lot of what they're targeting is implausibly ambitious, and they'll probably fall short in some respects. But if they can provide a good experience and attract good content for their platform, they do seem extremely well-positioned to dominate the VR installation space for the foreseeable future. I'm curious who their "large partner" is, and I look forward to seeing more from this project in the future. What do you think? Would you pay $30 for half an hour in VR? What experience would you like to try in this sort of facility? Let us know in the comments! Image Credits: Via Shutterstock