Virtual Reality Roller Coasters Are Here (and Everywhere) – IEEE Spectrum

Virtual Reality Roller Coasters Are Here (and Everywhere) – IEEE Spectrum

Everything is black. I feel my body tilt forward, then lurch into motion. 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. Up ahead, there’s a portal waiting to launch me across the galaxy. A synthetic voice counts down: “Three, two, one….”

I’m through the portal, and to my left a planet explodes. “You’ve just witnessed the birth of a new sun,” explains Eve, my AI tour guide. 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. And then I’m exiting a third portal, dodging giant icicles on a frozen world that looks a lot like Krypton.

Alarms sound. From Eve’s technobabble, I gather that something’s gone wrong—something about timing, a portal closing. And then, my spacecraft rights itself and lands. I take off my Samsung Gear VR headset as a teenager in a uniform exclaims, “Welcome back, Galactinauts!”

Oh, right. I’m at Alton Towers, a theme park in Staffordshire, England.

The content may be sci-fi, but the physical experience is the real deal. 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. 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.

Galactica isn’t the world’s first virtual reality roller coaster. It’s actually the second, or third…or sixth, depending on whom you ask. This year and next, about 20 VR roller coasters are set to debut across Europe, Asia, and North America. Most of those rides are coming from just two companies: Germany’s VR Coaster and the United Kingdom’s Figment Productions, which designed Galactica.

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.

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.

For 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.

“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. “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.

Yet adding VR to a roller coaster could also be a terrible idea. We’re talking about the marriage of two of the most notoriously nauseating activities on offer. I, in particular, should steer clear: I get sick reading my Kindle in the passenger seat of a car.

Strangely, though, bringing the two together may actually be the solution to the nausea problem. Experts say the most likely culprit for motion sickness in VR is “cue conflict”: the stomach-curdling disconnect you feel when the visual cues you’re getting from the virtual world don’t match the signals from the natural gyroscopes and accelerometers of your body’s vestibular system.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/reviews/virtual-reality-roller-coasters-are-here-and-everywhere