An afternoon at Ventus VR Arena:
A BVN exploration of warehouse scale VR
“Ventus VR Arena felt like a little taste of the near future”
Intro
Last Tuesday a crack team of BVN’s finest physical specimens shipped out to the far reaches of Sydney’s inner west. Our mission was to covertly explore the potential future opportunities of warehouse scale VR experiences and how they might apply to architecture and design. At least that was the mission of half of our division — the other half were just there to shoot each other in the head.
Ventus VR Arena is essentially a large warehouse in Rosebury that’s jam packed full of new technology, that allows 8 people to travel together into the future and shoot each other with fancy future guns. Kind of like laser tag but way less shit. The warehouse is kitted out with around 30 high precision cameras that are able to accurately track sensors attached to the VR headsets and the weapons. At BVN the VR team use the HTC Vive headset and tracking, which is an incredible kit, but the current maximum play area is 5m x 5m. The idea of getting to roam around a 20m x 20m space with 8 people seemed too good to be true and our expectations for the experience were not exactly high, but we went in with an open mind nonetheless.
The Experience
The overall experience begins in the lobby with a briefing session explaining the games objectives, mechanics, weapons, and rules. The game seemed pretty straight forward and the rules were simple; don’t run and don’t get up in other people’s personal space. Tristan of course proceeded to do both continually throughout the next 45 minutes, but in his defense the glimpses of the play area through the glass didn’t exactly make listening to the rules all that appealing.
From here we filtered into the play area, the teams were divided and enemy lines were established — right down the middle of the warehouse floor. The on-boarding process from here was very straight forward. Put on the backpack PC, pop on the headset, and grab your gun! While this initially seemed a bit slack compared to our own in-depth on-boarding methods, the fact that they didn’t have to teach us how to use strange controllers to teleport and interact with the world, meant it wasn’t really necessary. Turns out, most people know how to walk and pull a trigger — it’s pretty much that straight forward. The tracking was a bit loose at first with just the headset on but once you got the gun (which had over half of your trackers) the overall experience became very steady. I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of the tracking and actually became quite excited about getting going.
The Game
Once everyone was geared up it was straight into the action. I’ll admit that after almost three years of VRing in a small, enclosed and often obstacle ridden play areas, I felt less than confident striding off into the experience. After only a couple of minutes however I was fully immersed and I became way more concerned about getting shot in the head than walking into a warehouse wall. The backpack was light and cool and I barely noticed that it was there. A couple of the team experienced crashes but noted that the staff had them up and running again extremely quickly and it didn’t impact on their overall experience.
I don’t want to give too much away about the game itself except to say that this was a thoroughly surprising and enjoyable experience. The technology works way better than I had expected, the game itself makes great use of the physical space, the accuracy is incredible, and I was fully engaged and immersed throughout.
The Potential
So while the game was super fun, we were really there to assess the potential of larger scale VR experiences and the impact it could have on visualisation, architecture, and design. After such an immersive experience, the ideas were free flowing on the way back to the office. Unsurprisingly, off the plan real estate was the most obvious use case to pop up and for good reason. Based on some average BVN apartment sizes we worked out that we could squeeze 4 full virtual apartments into the space and have a couple per unit visiting their potential future homes at the same time.
As an architecture studio however, we were more concerned with the potential benefits of large scale user testing of spaces while they are still being designed. We had recently ran into difficulties with our VR experience for our own flexible desk system at BVN. It turns out that if you need to move a desk around in VR, 5m x 5m is not very much room and teleportation is particularly inconvenient when holding that desk with both hands. Basically anything that requires movement of large objects through a virtual space is very difficult to authentically prototype in VR right now. But with 20m x 20m, such tasks become as straight forward as doing them in the real world. For instance, you could easily wheel a hospital bed from an operating theater to a recovery room and test everything from timing to spacial fit within the designed space.
For the VR team, the biggest take away here was that this essentially removes two of the biggest issues with VR right now — tethered headsets and navigation onboarding. Ventus VR Arena felt like a little taste of the near future for our own VR development and for once the future looks user friendly and full of value.
