Ride Research
parkworld-online.com
continued from page 42 Interaction
Right from the start, we had the idea of incorporating on-board gaming. For instance, you can control some giant virtual cannons that are mounted next to you on your virtual vehicle or spacecraft, simply by moving your head. These cannons follow your head movement, so you can aim intuitively with your viewing direction. In order to fire these cannons, we just had to add buttons to the handles of your coaster seat so you can take part in an epic space battle. Using a game pad and pressing buttons actually isn’t too difficult during a rollercoaster ride – even if it’s one as intense as Blue Fire.
CONCLUSION
Why not just use a simulator or a motion base you may ask? On a real rollercoaster, you can have real g-forces and also real zero gravity during airtime hills or drops, which is not possible in a usual simulator or motion ride. These real feelings, which are amplified in the VR space, are exactly what made this experiment so amazing.
Even people who knew the appropriate coasters at Europa-Park well quickly lost their orientation and were totally surprised by all the ride sequences. Also, we can make the track appear much larger in the virtuial reality environment, so everything seemed much more impressive to our testers, especially when riding on relatively small coasters like Pegasus that had been extended in VR.
We are now working on a developing our research into a commercially available option together with Mack Rides and I am convinced that this can become a very popular extension to any kind of rollercoaster in the future. In the meantime, you can see videos of our experiments at Europa-Park on the official VR Coaster website below.
vr-coaster.com
The University of Applied Sciences in based in Kaiserslautern, Rhineland- Palatinate, Germany (
fh-kl.de). Professor Thomas Wagner can be contacted via
tw@gamesmold.com and will be on the Mack Rides booth (#2650) at IAAPA to discuss the VR Coaster project
Professor Wagner during tests at Europa-Park
66
NOVEMBER 2014
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