Atlas looks like the most insane home video-gaming experience
As video games have become more and more realistic over the past few decades, we are quickly approaching the dream of the movie Tron: to be able to actually physically exist within our games, to bring a new level of immediacy to the act of playing.
Improvements in graphics have made this partly possible; innovative systems like the Oculus Rift gaming headset, which you wear over your eyes to plunge yourself into those graphics, have inched us even closer. But with the Oculus Rift, you still have to be sitting down as your character moves, so you don't get the full out-of-body experience you might want with virtual reality.
A wild new concept from developer Aaron Rasmussen appears to take this idea to the next level. It's called Atlas, and it uses Oculus Rift, an iPhone and motion tracking sensors to allow you to insert yourself into the game you are playing, mapping the environment of a video game into the physical space you are inhabiting.
So, for example, you can turn a basketball court into a war zone, or your living room into Super Mario World. Wherever you walk in the real world, your character walks in the game; and looking through the lens of Rift, you sense that you really are the character moving about in the level.
The potential shortcomings are fairly obvious: Not everyone has a large enough open space to lay down 20 markers, nor access to a private basketball or tennis court on which to run around freely within a video game. And, too, it would take a pretty intense gamer to lay these markers down in public, slap a headset on their face and run around with a toy gun for all to see. You already look pretty goofy just sitting down while operating an Oculus Rift; imagine traipsing around a public park wearing one.
And if you're not comfortable with the outdoors experience, and you happen to own a home with a large indoor space, there is another obstacle: walls. But Rasmussen rejects that concern. First, he says, game developers will be able to warn players when they are getting close to the walls within the game itself; the room mapping allows for that. And second, "What we found amazing when letting friends try the system is they are very resistant to the idea of walking through even virtual walls. Your brain has spent many years learning that walking through walls is a bad idea, which is why this sort of system can be so much fun."
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