Ride Research
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Sensors were attached to Blue Fire to monitor track position and speed of the wheels
heartline roll and the final brake run. With a length just over 1km (1,056m/3,464ft) and a duration of 2.5 minutes, it also allows us to tell a longer story in the virtual world. This launch sequence is a very interesting part in the choreography of the virtual interpretations. The very first VR test run on Blue Fire was based on the assets of Blood Roofs, an iOS game from Gamesmold,
where a giant monster walks over the rooftops chasing a virtual rollercoaster train.
The students who were most afraid of rollercoasters felt much more comfortable when wearing the headset, but some others watched the media content on laptops mounted to the train. In order for the operators to be able to control the applications, we put all major functions on keys that are easy to reach with the thumbs while holding onto the casing. Using the touch pad and mouse cursor during the ride, however, quickly turned out to be impossible! We had to be extremely careful about anything that could fall off. Not only because it would be very dangerous for the passengers, but also because damaging a €20 million rollercoaster would cause some serious liability issues. As such, Mack provided us with special mountings, fitting exactly the coaster seats and our MacBook Pro laptops. On our very first tests, we wore bicycle helmets to make sure the Oculus Rift headsets wouldn’t fall off. It quickly-turned out that they weren’t necessary and after some members of the Mack family tested it without helmets and told us that they found it totally safe, we were confident enough to leave them off. As it happened, the helmets made for some quite unintentionally funny photos. It also turned out that the headsets kept working precisely throughout the entire ride, even within the strong magnetic field of the LIM launch section of Blue Fire (this was a concern, as the Rift also measures the magnetic field of the earth, pretty much like a compass). Pegasus is a family coaster featuring a classic lifthill and a top speed of 60 km/h, and for some of our students this ride was their first step into the world of rollercoasters.
In our first demo, passengers entered the world of Shadow Vamp with its floating islands. Although not as intense as Blue Fire, it turned out to be a great playground for testing how you can intensify a ride experience through virtual reality. As there are no inversions on this ride, we didn’t need any special mountings or racks for the laptops. The operating students simply tied them to their legs with a cord. After those initial tests in April, we performed more than 100 rides over the weeks and months that followed and made some amazing discoveries. While working out technical solutions and patent matters, we weren’t able to go public with any of our findings. Now we’re happy to finally disclose our adventure to the rest of the world! Here’s what we discovered:
BELOW: Professor Wagner on Blue Fire with a gaming console and (inset) what he can see on the VR headset as he rides BELOW RIGHT: The augmented Blue Fire test track using content from the game Space Mine
THE FINDINGS
No motion sickness! Other than the feeling of “riding” an Oculus Rift coaster while sitting in front of your desktop computer, there is no additional motion sickness or dizziness occurring when experiencing this on a real coaster. If the VR ride is synchronised to the real coaster, the sense of balance actually delivers exactly the right feedback to fit the VR simulation. Also – and what is even more fascinating – these “augmented thrill rides” feel much more comfortable than riding the real coaster without wearing the Rift. There is probably due to several reasons: First, depending on the VR track layout, you can eliminate the most common factor that causes fear and insecurity among riders, namely the vertigo while being pulled up the coaster's lift hill. Why not simulate green hills next to the virtual car, like riding a “ground coaster”? Also, a well designed and choreographed VR track probably won’t have to expose the entire track right from the start. Much like a classic dark ride, it can tell a story and surprise the riders with what is happening before the main action begins. While it would be way too expensive to build halls for the full-scale theming of today’s mega coasters, this is no problem at all in the VR world as it all happens inside the headset.
You don’t need rails
The rails of a rollercoaster track give away pretty much the entire ride – the passenger knows exactly in what direction the train will go next and when a drop or a loop will occur. When, in the VR world, you don’t show the rails, the ride gets much more exciting, and a drop that comes out of nowhere feels even more impressive than without the headset. You can still have a kind of “helper” that hints on what direction one may go next, such as a plane or a spaceship that pursues the passenger's vehicle in an aerial or space combat situation, however the experience gets more interesting and surprising if you play around with “false information”. Imagine rolling down a visible track that seems to turn left in the distance. Then appears a giant creature and bends the track all the way to the right – which of course turns out to be the real direction that the coaster train will take. Or you’re going up a seemingly never-ending stairway when, all of a sudden, the stairs break away and you’re falling down (while actually going down the first drop of the coaster in the real world).
The VR track can be more complex than the real track. When we started our tests, we thought that the one thing we could never change was the given orientation of the passengers at each point of the ride. Therefore, at first, we just focussed on playing around with increased dimensions and higher simulated speed, but we were not aware of the amazing possibilities that lay before us.
Then one time, when the synchronisation of a test ride went terribly
wrong, one of our students experienced a part of the track riding backwards in virtual space (while the real car kept going forward) and, surprisingly, he felt that this experience was still totally convincing! This insight led to many subsequent new ideas and experiments.
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