If you have played VR and bumped into your couch while in the middle of a zombie wasteland, you know how weird that feels. It breaks your brain and momentarily shatters the illusion. But what if every object in VR matched a real-world object and you could basically “feel” the game you were playing? That’s what someone has created and it looks wild.
Greg Madison is a former magician and currently works as a designer at Spatial Computing. He recently uploaded a video of him exploring a virtual apartment on YouTube. But this VR level is based on his actual living space, down to every corner, couch, and counter.
It took Madison over 22 hours to model his apartment using the modeling program SketchUp. The model he created is highly accurate, which took a lot of work. “The most time-consuming part within these 22 hours has been to take the measurements, in order to have a 2mm accuracy,” said Madison. After modeling his pad, he then moved it into Unity and was able to explore it in VR.
The end result of all this hard work and time is something that Madison said is hard to explain to those who haven’t experienced it. He described the feeling of walking around a VR space that perfectly matches your real-world environment as “amazing.”
“It is like living a wake-up dream in a hallucination…where everything becomes possible.”
It seems to have impressed a lot of people. The video was shared to Reddit where it currently has over 80k upvotes.
The real purpose of this VR apartment isn’t just to have fun with, but he plans on using this space in the future to test out more ideas he has for how to use real-world space in VR apps. You can see some of this on display in his video. At one point he taps his couch in the VR world and that corresponds to his real-world couch. Tapping this virtual button placed on a real physical object creates a floating TV screen in VR, letting him watch YouTube.
“I want to inspire developers and designers, to think out of the box and push boundaries in terms of usage; reachable boundaries,” explained Madison. He sees this type of VR tech and usage as just one part of a bigger and better future. He also wants VR companies to better support these types of creations, make it easier for folks to build stuff like this automatically.
“There are many creators out there, who are waiting on this, to push these platforms to the next level.”