The individual components of the system are still a bit rough, but together they provide an amazing experience. Pistons provide realistic resistance, and a fan is calibrated to make the windspeed match your virtual velocity. To climb faster, you can vigorously pump both wings. By twisting your arm you control the pitch of the wing: Tip up to soar higher, and tip down to dive. To simulate the effortlessness of dream flight, Rheiner made the interface more metaphorical and intuitive. But it turns out to be hard for humans to fly like an actual bird, learning to flap their wings at the right angle and catch thermals to spiral up. At first the designers of Birdly took the dream a bit too literally and used a physics engine to model airflow around virtual wings. Humans dreamed of flying like a bird for centuries before hot air balloons finally took people into the skies. Now that there's a way to provide accurate head-tracking at low enough latency to prevent motion sickness, people who were raised on the promise of virtual reality are starting to experiment. The Rift is the first virtual reality headset with two key features: It's cheap, and it doesn't make you want to vomit. (Birdly flew here from its birthplace at the Zurich University of the Arts.) The reason that Rheiner could make this simulator now, and not 20 years ago when he first dreamed of helping humans feel like birds, is the arrival of the Oculus Rift. "Press the red buttons and pump your arms to start soaring again," said Max Rheiner, the Swiss artist responsible for my in-flight experience this week at Swissnex. I was strapped into Birdly, a full-body flight simulator designed to make you forget you're not a bird. I slipped under the Bay Bridge, banked hard and promptly slammed into a warehouse. I dove sharply, and the wind started whipping across my face. A heavy fog covered the bay, as usual, so I decided to head back into the city. I swooped past the Transamerica Pyramid, taking care not to get speared, and winged it out towards the water.
Yesterday, I flew over downtown San Francisco.
0 kommentar(er)
