This news comes after the team got to play with the ”latest Oculus Rift prototype.” Project Holodeck attempts to ”create a platform for virtual reality” gaming experiences that could be sold.
This isn’t just some USC research lab experiment where graduates just get to play with VR. The team sincerely aim to create a consumer grade product as an end result.
”Exciting info for the team of Project Holodeck, Razer is now an official sponsor,” reports RoadtoVR.com. ”The company, which was founded in 1998 and manufacturers PC peripherals for hardcore gamers, will supply the Holodeck team with hardware pertinent to the project and offer a direct line for technical inquiries.”
The official goal of the USC project is to ”bring 360-degree 6-DOF full-body virtual reality out of the research lab and into a fun, accessible consumer gaming platform.” Holodeck presently gives a 20x20 foot arena of play with 1:1 movement capture. Whilst within the space the player wears VR headgear.
Razer’s motion-sensing Hydra peripheral is ”most appealing” to the Project Holodeck team, reveals the official project website. It’s the accuracy the Hydra is afforded by Razer’s approach to its tech that the team appreciates.
”We’re absolutely enamored with the Razer Hydra,” says the team. ”It gives us the speed and precision needed for the depth of gameplay we’re trying to create. With Hydra, we have much higher precision magnetic tracking of two points with 6-degrees of freedom, allowing us to explore realistic avatar embodiment in virtual reality like never before.”
The project was originally going to enlist a ‘multi-Kinect’ system for tracking player movement but the Microsoft hardware is ”extremely lacking in fidelity. Every point the Kinect tracks is filled with unmanageable jitter, rendering the data useless for anything other than the most simple of interactions.”
”We tried very hard to get around this with several software algorithms we wrote, to get multiple Kinects to communicate with each other, however this did not really make anything more accurate unfortunately.”
The latest in-depth update on the very ambitious Project Holodeck is available on RoadtoVR.com.
