Dev makes a virtual reality discovery experimenting with two Vives
He can touch his toes! Kick things over! It's like Friday!
First we put our heads inside virtual reality, then with special controllers we brought in our hands and arms. But what about entire bodies? They're still only basically represented. That's where developer CloudGate Studio comes in.
CloudGate wanted more than hands and arms, to see if it could make a convincing copy of whole human body in a virtual space. With two Vives and four wireless controllers, CloudGate appears to have succeeded.
"This was our first experiment in seeing if we could give you a VR avatar that lined up with where you expected your human body to be, in VR," CloudGate's video description reads.
The experiment resulted in a virtual body that could be patted and touched - knees and toes and all - in exactly the same way as the player's body in real life. A solid body; a body whose feet could even independently kick out at objects in the virtual world.
"Think of what this would look like for multiplayer, for social aspects, for everything, right?" The demonstrator in the video, Steve Bowler, said.
It's not clear exactly how CloudGate is achieving it, nor how the two Vives are set up, but the demonstration is convincing enough.
CloudGate studio is working on a VR dinosaur survival game called Island 359, which is in Steam Early Access now.