The idea of being able to play virtual sports that feel just as realistic as the real thing is one that’s innately appealing. If you could play golf or hockey from the comfort of your home, it would give you a way to stay in shape and to train that would be a lot of fun and that would improve your sporting prowess, but that wouldn’t require you to head outside in the cold or organise getting a team together.
At the moment, virtual games are a long way off of the real thing and anyone who has played Wii Sports will know that the Wii is hardly a replacement for an actual tennis racket or cricket bat. But will virtual reality ever be able to recreate the experience of playing sports from home? And if it does, what would the implications be? Read on to find out…
Exciting Technologies That Show Promise
The Wii and the Kinect, although imperfect, marked big steps forward for motion sensor gaming and virtual reality in general. The good news, is that they were also commercial successes which is why Microsoft at least seems poised to take further advantage of the technology in future consoles.
Did you know for example, that the Kinect software and camera are actually powerful enough to pick up the positions of your fingers? It was only the cost of installing a processor powerful enough that ended up inhibiting the power of the original Kinect, but it suggests that the Kinect 2 may well possess that kind of ability (particularly seeing as phones like the Samsung Galaxy S4 are already featuring advanced motion-sensor features).
This could very well help to make the translation of movement to simulation much more realistic, but there would still be the innate limitation of staring at a small TV screen to contend with. Fortunately Microsoft has something up their sleeve for that one too – with the very awkward name ‘IllumiRoom’. The IllumiRoom is basically a projector that includes video analysis to adapt to the physical shape of the room it’s in. This means it can project onto a Sofa just as well as it can project onto a flat wall, and it means that it knows where your TV screen is in the room. Microsoft are currently encouraging games developers to use this technology to extend the gaming experience out of the TV screen and into our rooms. This way, we should truly feel immersed in the games we play – especially as the lighting changes and motion blur effects the whole room around us.
If that doesn’t excite you, then perhaps the Occulus Rift will. This is basically a virtual reality headset that can sense motion and allows you to completely immerse yourself in a 3D world. There are a number of challenges for developers surrounding this technology (such as motion sickness), but hopefully when the technology is complete it should be able to bring us one step closer to true virtual reality.
Of course there will still be limitations – and until we can physically feel the weight of a club or bat in our hands this will never feel quite like the real deal. Still though, the future is an exciting place for digital sports and we may not be far from a time when indoor driving ranges are completely obsolete.
