The virtual world of Oasis as seen in the blockbuster film Ready Player One is set in the year 2025 and many have wondered how long it will be until they can experience that level of immersion. For Enea Le Fons, an Italian developer, that day is now as he has spent the last 30 days living inside virtual reality (VR).
Enea Le Fons would spend many hours in VR but as part of his exceptional “30 Days in VR” journey, he spent all of his time in VR ready for the films release in theatres. Other than eating, sleeping and using the bathroom, Le Fons has spent every waking moment in VR for work, communication, exercise, and entertainment, making the distant future of Oasis a close reality.
To help complete this impressive challenge Le Fons “moved” his physical studio space to a VR environment by coping the same layout and size of each piece of furniture, including tables, chairs and even tableware. Thanks to the use of an SLR camera and some free developing tools, Le Fons was able to successfully copy and paste the studio into the virtual world, helping make the “30 Days in VR” challenge a little bit more comfortable. Of course, being in virtual space the limits of the VR studio are endless meaning Le Fons was free to expand beyond the bounds he was use to and enable various functions such as architectural design,exercises and leisure activities all directly within VR and the space he had available.
Inspired by the HTC Vive and the experiences they had created, Le Fons’ 30-day project was made possible thanks to the technology readily available to him. With products such as the HTC Vive Pro and Vive Focus, Le Fons was able to explore the universe for an afternoon walk, dance in a club and even try some mediation all within the virtual world. All of this was able to be created and designed as he wanted by using the tools available to him to build new experiences and locations to explore.
“Everything I developed will be shared to the entire developer community as an open source. Inspired by HTC Vive, my goal is to foster the VR ecosystem with the community together by creating content favoring everyone, making VR an essential part of our daily life: work, education, leisure,” said Le Fons, who has been fascinated by VR’s possibilities for over 20 years. “Thanks to Vive, I was able to precisely track all the objects in the VR environment; with Vive trackers, free movement was enabled even when I was wearing the headset, what’s more, with the advent of a comfortable device supporting long-term and intensive use like the Vive Pro, my productivity was also dramatically increased.”
From the 30-day challenge Le Fons captured a number of different points of data which provide some interesting insights. For example, his FitBit use to pick up around 700 steps a day on average when working as an Unreal Engine developer but since he started to use the HTC Vive for content development, he has walked over 10,000 steps a day. It is not a full work out but it does show that there are health benefits to long term VR usage thanks to technology such as room-scale.
“I am very pleased to see that our products were able to meet the needs of such an intensive project, and also excited to see that Enea finished the program healthier and happier than ever,” said Alvin W. Graylin, China Regional President of Vive, HTC. “I am getting more confident that VR can become an essential part of our daily life in the future. I welcome more VR enthusiasts and practitioners to challenge themselves for new breakthroughs in the industry.”
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