Duo Sneak an Oculus Rift Onto Roller Coaster For a Wild Ride

New submitter bobbrocolli (3647945) writes "Equipped with a hidden laptop and Oculus Rift, O'Driscoll may be the first person to have ever gone on a 'Real VR' roller coaster with perfect motion feedback. The duo's system displayed a virtual version of the exact same roller coaster that O'Driscoll and Forder were on. With some practice they managed to sync the virtual reality roller coaster to the real rollercoaster."

Staged

[madprof]

Ah yes. I forgot how easy it was to sneak a laptop and a VR headset onto a rollercoaster. This is almost certainly planned by a PR agency. It probably happened but quite deliberately to get us to pay attention to their VR tech.

And the point is ...

[stevez67]

pointless.

What's next?

[Anonymous Coward]

Donning a Rift so you can enjoy virtual sex while your body does the real thing with your wife? FFS. People need to spend less time interacting with their gadgets.

Re:What's next?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, if I was banging your wife, I'd want to make her look like someone else too.

Re:What will they think of next

[Jarik C-Bol]

The point was, if you can sync up the movements if the meatspace ride with the movements of the virtual ride, you then have an infinitely configurable ride experience, where you can change the visual setting and theme at will. They propose that there could be roller coasters in theme parks that each seat is equipped with a Rift like device, and you could select the theme of your ride, be it say, flying a fighter jet, or racing through an abandoned mine, or dodging asteroids in space, to any other of a galaxy of possibilities.

Re:And the point is ...

[Anubis IV]

I thought so too, until I read why they did it. They weren't just doing it for the lulz by riding a virtual coaster at the same time they were on it. The point was that you could use the coaster's tactile feedback with anything at all in VR. They used a virtual coaster because it was the simplest thing to test, but that is by no means where they want to see it end.

Put differently, people could make tracks in VR that sync up to a roller coaster track, but then change out the scenario entirely. So instead of just riding a virtual coaster while on the coaster, you're suddenly piloting a jet in a dogfight, riding on the back of a dragon, swimming through blood vessels, or chasing a bounty target in space. It'd be the same tactile experience for all of them, but they would all seem wildly different.

It seems like exactly the sort of thing that might have applications in a theme park. It may also be useful for training purposes or for some weirder applications, such as trying to acclimate people to the nausea that might come from keeping the video out of sync with the tactile sensations.

Definitely not the first, not by a long shot...

[Guspaz]

LaRonde (SixFlags) in Montreal did experiments with this nearly a year ago:

https://developer.oculusvr.com... [oculusvr.com]