Playing VR games is a great way to stay active, both mentally and physically. But when all is said and done, you’re still only traversing around a pretty small footprint—even smaller if you’re stuck in an apartment. Greg Madison, a UX designer at Unity and fellow indoorsman, opened up his playspace a bit by turning his apartment into a VR game platform, something he hopes to share soon with others.
Madison is an interaction designer at Unity Labs’ Mixed Reality research team and an actual magician; when it comes to imaging the future of VR/AR interactions, he’s the guy working full time on making the world a little more magical.
And although AR headsets such as Magic Leap 1 are certainly in his development arsenal, with the help of an Oculus Quest and some imagination, Madison shows you can have a perfectly useful ‘virtual’ AR headset too. Enter his ‘Gamefied Real Estate’ project.
Madison says his Oculus Quest app will soon be available via the SideQuest distribution platform.
It’s unlikely to be a full-featured game—more of an experiment for other devs to poke around in, which is due to the purpose-built nature of the app itself.
The room was custom-built (very likely in Unity) and then imported and lined-up properly with the actual environment, i.e. there’s no technology in the Oculus Quest that can create a room like this on the fly, only the ‘basic’ room-scale tracking that allows Madison to move around the environment itself.
That said, it’s still an awesome peek into what a wide field of view AR experience can look like, and may very well be a fixture of the future when AR headsets not only become more pervasive, but drastically cheaper and more capable of delivering not only these sorts of room-centric experiences, but being truly able to map the world around us in real-time.
In the meantime, you can check out more of Greg Madison’s work for inspiration.
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