ncubeeight

At last year’s Game Developers Conference I had the chance to experience new immersive video environments that are being created by game developers releasing titles for the new Oculus and HTC Vive and Google Daydream platforms.  One developer at the conference, Opaque Mulitimedia, demonstrated " Earthlight " which gave the participant an opportunity to crawl on the outside of the International Space Station as the earth rotated below.  In the simulation, a Microsoft Kinect sensor was following the position of my hands.  But what I saw in the visor was that my hands were enclosed in an astronaut’s suit.  The visual experience was so compelling that when my hands missed the rungs of the ladder I felt a palpable sense of urgency because the environment was so realistically depicted.  (The space station was rendered as a scale model of the actual space station using the "Unreal" game physics engine.)  The experience was so far beyond what I’d experienced a...