[From Atomic]
Virtual Reality comes to Skyrim
Killing the chickens at Whiterun never felt so good, but man, you will look like an idiot in this homebrew VR gear!
By Vito Cassisi
March 19, 2012
The idea of virtual reality interaction has intrigued the minds of many generations, yet has struggled to get a foothold in mainstream acceptance. Potential users have core expectations for VR technology including reliability, convincing immersiveness, and the ability to play without throwing up all over company.
An entrepreneur by the name of Chris Zaharia has produced his own “immersive” VR solution for playing Skyrim on PC, and has posted the instructions on his website.
To build one of these newfangled contraptions requires approximately $1,500 of gear, including a Sony HMZ-T1 head mounted display, a Kinect, a TrickIR5, a TrackClip Pro, Shoot speech recognition software, FAAST Kinect gesture-to -keyboard mapper, a microphone, and an Nvidia GPU for stereoscopic 3D.
Watching the [4:10 minute] video of the kit in action reveals a few truths to many VR solutions. Firstly, you’re going to look silly using it. Walking on the spot is something that should be reserved for military training exercises and kindergarteners. The second, you’re adding another layer of buggy behaviour to a game that’s infamous for dragons that fly backwards into your nightmares (an isolated case, we assure you). Not to mention that the sensitive nature of the equipment means that bystanders will assist you through supplementary voice commands. Fighting a pack of dogs? Time to pull up the menu! A true test of sanity and friendship, we’re told.
At this stage of development, we can safely say that the sum of the parts has yet to produce a greater whole. But it’s still awesome, and you don’t have to spend a single cent to see it action! All we want to know is whether the next iteration responds to “FUS RO DAH!”
via TheNextWeb