Zero Latency is the new name for Inversion Project, a free-roaming wireless virtual reality experience that utilises motion capture and an Oculus Rift powered by a PC on your back.
Physically Flee from Virtual Zombies
Ben Lang covered an interesting venture back in September 2013 which promised a pop-up VR environment that was portable and could be played anywhere you like. Fast forward a few months and the Inversion Project has been re-christened and re-imagined as ‘Zero Latency’.
Zero Latency is being billed as a visceral, free-roaming VR experience that couples a custom optical positional system (borrowing some ideas from the Sony Playstation move and now Morpheus) with IMU equipped weapon replicas and, of course, an Oculus Rift. The system is rendered and orchestrated from a custom made backtop. Zero Latency Media, the Melbourne, Australia based team seem to be making real progress with both their technology and their ideas for how to sell it.
In a nice twist to the standard crowd funding campaigns we’re now so familiar with, the team are promising tickets to a unique event where the technology will installed and demonstrated to backers. The Pozible (an Aussie Kickstarter-style website) campaign kicked off today and is already showing signs of promise. With an enthusiastic campaign video (above) featuring some interesting reactions from early testers.
The team claim that their system is now capable of covering an area of 50 square metres (up from 30x30M just last year), which offers a pretty sizeable play area for users. The campaign blurb also promises zero motion sickness, apparently eliminated with their spatial / positional tracking system, a claim that frankly seems a little over confident given the subtleties and range of issues that cause such reactions. Still, I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt as the experience looks like a blast.
So, if you’re based in Oz and you fancy fighting off hordes of virtual zombies in what certainly looks to be a contender to the likes of VRCade and of course, the legendary Project Holodeck – head over to their Pozible page now and grab yourself a ticket.
We’ll keep track of the campaign and keep you up to date. We’ll also try to get some more technical details from the Zero Latency team no how the systems hang together.
