It’s easy to look out on the E3 show floor and see into the future of gaming—a future dominated by virtual reality. Walking into the show floor it’s impossible not to see how quickly VR tech has become one of the dominant industry forces—despite its relative elusiveness in the commercial market.
505 Games stunned audiences by showing off ADR1FT with the help of the Oculus Rift. There was also the ANTVR hardware on display, throwing gamers into the middle of a tense gun battle. But out of all these companies, no one is doing VR quite like Cyberith.
With its Virtualizer rig, Cyberith is pushing the boundaries of fully-immersive gameplay by strapping gamers in and letting their whole body become the controller.
“Immersion is key for us,” said Philipp Berdenis van Berlekom, Head of Marketing & Public Relations for Cyberith. “That is why we have the integrated decoupling functionality, which is, for us, the most important part of our virtual reality. That means you can walk in one direction while looking in another, completely independent from each other. That is something that is highly complex, but we finally managed to pull it off and it’s working extremely well for us.”
Unlike most VR games where you simply sit in your most comfortable chair and play along like a (mostly) standard video game, the Virtualizer puts players in charge of character movement. The rig responds to movements such as walking, jumping, crouching and all head movements—and anything you do in the rig, your character will mimic.
“It’s a vertically movable ring construction, so you can run and you can jump,” Berlekom continued. “We measure that to a precision of one centimeter, so we know exactly where you are.”
At the show, testers were playing the title Acan’s Call, a game created by Cyberith to show off the rig’s functionality. Imagine an Indiana Jones-type adventure title, just with you literally doing all the legwork.
While the Virtualizer demo at the show was using the Oculus Rift, Berlekom stressed that the Virtualizer is not shackled to just one device, just so long as that device wants to support the rig. There is even bluetooth functionality so players can combine it with mobile head-mounted displays.
If tech like the Virtualizer can pull off what it sets out to do, the gaming world will soon achieve the type of sci-fi ideas we've only seen in movies and books like The Matrix and Ready Player One. Hopefully things go a little smoother, for our sake.
Almost a year after its successful Kickstarter campaign, the Virtualizer can now be pre-ordered from the company’s website, with shipments expected to go out this year.
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