I admit I love reading about these sorts of things because I (naively) thought I'd "invented" the next awesome thing as a teen in the 90's when I thought of a similar concept.
It was during the mainstream of DOOM and the peak popularity of "Laser Tag" when the home/toy version of the game had given way to warehouses with backpack-powered systems and centralized scoring/tracking.
I figured you could build a laptop/small form factor PC that would fit in a backpack and power a VR rig to overlay a virtual environment on the "warehouse". Since the play space was a known environment and could have tracking beacons, orientation would be relatively simple and the computers could communicate with a central server. Since laser tag was already like a first-person shooter, it wouldn't require much more than graphics to visualize the "laser beams" and maybe add some texture to walls and surfaces. No need to simulate movement or the tactile feel of platforms and such because they exist in real life.
Of course I had no concept of the processing power needed to do this or how it compared to a laptop/sff PC of the time. I also had no idea of just how tough it would be to achieve usable latency on such a system. But hey...it was 1994 and I was 16. I thought we'd all be playing VR DOOM laser tag within a few years as soon as someone got around to building it.
I guess my timeframe was off by 25 years or so, but maybe in another 5 it'll be commonplace.
I've seen installations like this in a lot of high-traffic areas like malls and amusement parks. Interestingly, they all seem to use rather bulky setups involving laptops in backpacks attached to wired PC VR headsets. Two years ago though, Oculus demonstrated a similar system that requires nothing but a large empty space and a $400 standalone Oculus Quest for each player[1] (no backpack PCs or external tracking hardware required). This seems like a much cheaper solution, so I'm a little curious as to why arcades haven't started adopting it yet. Is it just because there's no official support for this feature from Oculus yet?
Oculus Quest hasn’t even been on the market for a year yet, so give it some time. Also, the Quest is a bit more closed than other platforms, it isn’t clear how they will handle custom VR experiences yet.
There are some beta games coming out with this kind of functionality (shared roomscale) for Quest. When they get released, it will lower the cost of VR arcade substantially.
I think there are some really cool club level things that could come out of it as well. Get together with friends in a sports hall to play VR sports together in a shared space.
This might sound crazy, but is there such a thing as programmable terrain? I can see this being technically feasible and adding realism to a VR game, but it might be cost prohibitive or a liability when people fall.
You can't see your legs in VR (at least VR of today). This makes it quite dangerous to have uneven terrain. Even something as small as a carpet can throw you off. Especially as you tend to move in circles and backpedal a lot more than in real life. I guess it could work in a big roomscale space with perfect 1:1 matching (and visible feet).
I found this really interesting from the ecosystem point of view. You've got the hardware manufacturers (Oculus / HTC), the studios creating VR content, content creation tools (Unity), accessory manufacturers, distribution of content (Steam) but then The Deep team came in and created another set of knowledge/hardware/software for multiplayer venues, a distribution mechanism for multiplayer games, and a franchise model for venues - and they needed to create the first few games to prove the model / jump-start the market.
hardware matters here -- apple is probably going to launch some kind of wearable headset which will make these things a million times easier to bootstrap
also think of their screen streaming & radio expertise, they'll have a shot at dealing w/ the interference issues
hard to know if VR hardware is waiting for a software killer app, or if the equipment is not there yet
cheaper positioning will also matter -- need to locate the equipment, locate obstacles / other players, and provide VR layers on real-world objects. Varjo is starting to do this with built-in hand-tracking but too soon to say what tech can reliably scale to various physical objects / content.
It was during the mainstream of DOOM and the peak popularity of "Laser Tag" when the home/toy version of the game had given way to warehouses with backpack-powered systems and centralized scoring/tracking.
I figured you could build a laptop/small form factor PC that would fit in a backpack and power a VR rig to overlay a virtual environment on the "warehouse". Since the play space was a known environment and could have tracking beacons, orientation would be relatively simple and the computers could communicate with a central server. Since laser tag was already like a first-person shooter, it wouldn't require much more than graphics to visualize the "laser beams" and maybe add some texture to walls and surfaces. No need to simulate movement or the tactile feel of platforms and such because they exist in real life.
Of course I had no concept of the processing power needed to do this or how it compared to a laptop/sff PC of the time. I also had no idea of just how tough it would be to achieve usable latency on such a system. But hey...it was 1994 and I was 16. I thought we'd all be playing VR DOOM laser tag within a few years as soon as someone got around to building it.
I guess my timeframe was off by 25 years or so, but maybe in another 5 it'll be commonplace.