Strangely, though, bringing the two together may actually be the solution to the nausea problem. I, in particular, should steer clear: I get sick reading my Kindle in the passenger seat of a car. We’re talking about the marriage of two of the most notoriously nauseating activities on offer. Yet adding VR to a roller coaster could also be a terrible idea. “I grew up in the ’80s with Star Wars-so of course it was flying around the galaxy.” A roller coaster, he says, is the perfect way to bring that dream to life. “When we first started, we all sat around thinking, ‘What was the one thing we most wanted to do in VR but couldn’t?’ ” says Reveley. In VR, presence is it.”įor the past 18 months, Reveley’s company, based in Guildford, England, has worked with the theme-park design group Merlin Magic Making to transform Alton Towers’ 14-year-old roller coaster-once called Air-into a trip to an unknown solar system. “In every form of entertainment and experience, there’s, like, a holy grail-there’s, like, one thing you want to get. “If you’re a surfer, the ultimate thing is catching the tube in the middle of a wave,” he tells me. Simon Reveley, founder of Figment Productions, sees the arrival of VR roller coasters as another step in the VR industry’s pursuit of presence-that transcendent moment when you lose yourself in an imaginary world and forget you’re wearing a headset.
The point is, virtual reality roller coasters are having a moment, thanks to the availability of decent mobile VR headsets, a tech ecosystem that’s finally matured around virtual reality, and a few engineers who’ve developed a knack for being at the right place at the right time. Most of those rides are coming from just two companies: Germany’s VR Coaster and the United Kingdom’s Figment Productions, which designed Galactica. This year and next, about 20 VR roller coasters are set to debut across Europe, Asia, and North America. It’s actually the second, or third…or sixth, depending on whom you ask. Galactica isn’t the world’s first virtual reality roller coaster. In addition to all that, riders strap on virtual-reality goggles meant to transport them right out of the English countryside and into another galaxy. On Galactica, Alton Towers’ newest attraction, which opens on 24 March, riders fly facedown around an 840-meter track, Superman-style, reaching 75 kilometers per hour and 3.5 g’s-more force than an astronaut feels during a rocket launch. The content may be sci-fi, but the physical experience is the real deal. I’m at Alton Towers, a theme park in Staffordshire, England. I take off my Samsung Gear VR headset as a teenager in a uniform exclaims, “Welcome back, Galactinauts!” And then, my spacecraft rights itself and lands. From Eve’s technobabble, I gather that something’s gone wrong-something about timing, a portal closing. And then I’m exiting a third portal, dodging giant icicles on a frozen world that looks a lot like Krypton.Īlarms sound. Before I can think twice about whether that’s even scientifically possible, I’m thrust through another portal, which shoots me over rivers of lava on a volcano planet.
“You’ve just witnessed the birth of a new sun,” explains Eve, my AI tour guide. I’m through the portal, and to my left a planet explodes. A synthetic voice counts down: “Three, two, one.” Up ahead, there’s a portal waiting to launch me across the galaxy. The world around me blinks into being, and I find myself floating through a long metal conduit, which opens beneath me, leaving me dangling over a massive space station inhabited by spiderlike robots. I feel my body tilt forward, then lurch into motion.
0 kommentar(er)
