Video games

People have dreamed of entering their video game worlds for decades. By 1982, this concept was already popularized by the Disney movie Tron. Figure 1.6 shows several video game experiences in VR. Most gamers currently want to explore large, realistic worlds through an avatar. Figure 1.6(a) shows Valve's Portal 2 for the HTC Vive headset. Figure 1.6(b) shows an omnidirectional treadmill peripheral that gives users the sense of walking while they slide their feet in a dish on the floor. These two examples give the user a first-person perspective of their character. By contrast, Figure 1.6(c) shows Lucky's Tale, which instead yields a comfortable third-person perspective as the user seems to float above the character that she controls. Figure 1.6(d) shows a game that contrasts all the others in that it was designed to specifically exploit the power of VR.

Figure 1.6: (a) Valve's Portal 2 demo, which shipped with The Lab for the HTC Vive headset, is a puzzle-solving experience in a virtual world. (b) The Virtuix Omni treadmill for walking through first-person shooter games. (c) Lucky's Tale for the Oculus Rift maintains a third-person perspective as the player floats above his character. (d) In the Dumpy game from DePaul University, the player appears to have a large elephant trunk. The purpose of the game is to enjoy this unusual embodiment by knocking things down with a swinging trunk.