Reading up on VR Spheres

2010-12-08

No US road trip would be complete without a visit to Las Vegas, and so it was this summer we found ourselves in the deliciously unsalubrious Excalibur Hotel. Serene, sophisticated, refined, the Excalibur was none of these, a mish mash of worn-carpet kitsch and tired tourists negotiating wheely-bin sized suitcases around the garish ranks of slot machines.

Standing innocuously near the entrance were two black nylon spheres, a small braided rope separating them from the public. "Back later" said the sign, and we did indeed come back ten days later, following a round trip of the Grand Canyon. With a couple of hours to kill before our flight we found ourselves inexorably drawn back to the spheres and the virtual reality game they controlled.

As Ben played, I got chatting to the cashier-cum-founder of VirtuSphere. Turns out the principle has been around for a while, but technology is only just catching up, what with bandwidth requrements for 3D wireless headsets and all. Put simply, each sphere operates like a giant mouse ball, only in this case a human is being the mouse, encaged within the ball. To paraphrase Morpheus, the future is not without a sense of irony.

A bit of research tells me that VirtuSphere is not the only kid on the block. Here in the UK, the University of Warwick has also been developing a 'cybersphere' for the past decade. No idea who patented it first (I'm sure we'll find out) but it does beg the question about whether the virtu-cyber-sphere thing could have more mainstream uses, once the cost of entry drops beyond a certain point. I'm sure I'm not the first to consider how a transparent sphere might be used alongside an Xbox Kinect, for example.

And of course, the Inter Orbis connection with the two spheres did not go unnoticed...