Could The Void be the future of virtual-reality?
Company seeks to merge VR with real-life environments.
As cool as it is to don a VR headset and look into a new world, our bodies are stuck in cluttered environments, full of things to bump into and trip over. VR company The Void can't turn your apartment into an expansive forest, but it can build specific centers tailored to deliver physical experiences that work in tandem with the virtual ones manifested by your hardware.
Here's a pitch video explaining what it hopes to soon bring to various cities across North and South America, Asia, Europe and Australia:
"Our advanced Virtual-Reality technologies allow you to see, move, and feel our digital worlds in a completely immersive and realistic way," the company stated on its homepage.
To do this, The Void adorns each player with quite a lot of hardware. As reported by Road to VR, The Void's setup includes a VR headset along with a motion-tracking vest, gloves, and a backpack with a laptop in it. Since none of this is developed for commercial release, that frees The Void to focus on some rather extravagant high end computing. The Rapture HMD tech being used to develop the experience consists of the following:
- Dual High-Density Curved OLED Displays (1080p per-eye, initially).
- Quantum Dots (nearly doubling perceived resolution color range).
- Custom Optics (proprietary lens-in-lens design).
- High-Quality THX Headphones (featuring in-game binaural sound design).
- Super-Gain Inline Microphones (for in-game communications).
- Proprietary Global Head Tracking Sensors (running at 120Hz).
As snazzy as this looks, it's still a far ways from a Holodeck. For example, you won't be able to interact with very many objects, save for a prop of a weapon or lantern that you wield. The gloves and vests will offer haptic feedback, but that's still a far cry from touching an actual object or creature. And while the vests, headsets and gloves are cool, I'm curious how The Void will handle leg motion tracking, lest things get trippy in all the wrong ways.
Still, it's an intriguing start to strange and scary future. The Void is based in Utah where its initial prototype will launch, though no date has been set for this.
