AWE EU Conference 2022
We were lucky enough to attend the 2022 AWE EU conference in Lisbon and tried out a few virtual reality demos.
The overall winner of the Best in Show was Vitruvian VR. Sadly it was booked out by the time we stumbled across it so we didn’t get to test it out ourselves. As impressive as the set up seems we are highly sceptical that it could ever result in a useable experience. Having built a virtual reality flying experience ourselves we have a pretty deep insight into this space. Speaking to people who were lucky enough to try out Vitruvian VR we had our suspicions confirmed regarding a distinct and obvious lack of neck comfort at best and genuine threat of neck injury at worse. As you can clearly see in the footage below, the human body is not designed to be held from behind in a horizontal plane with a headset strapped to the head. This is why our experience Be A Bird VR had users lying safely flat on their backs looking up at the ceiling thereby protecting their neck from damage.
While birds evolved over millions of years to have special muscles that make this flying position natural and comfortable we are not so well endowed in the neck muscle department. As a bipedal creature our neck muscles are designed to keep our head perched on top of the neck looking forward not down. So there is no way this project would ever see the light of day because if it did they would get sued by the large numbers of people who found that using this for more than 5 minutes at a time would lead to great discomfort and quite possibly a chronic pain condition. What is also clear in this short piece of footage is that the joystick controls of body position are extremely jerky in stark contrast to the smooth changes in trajectory of movements visible in the game. The truth is, this is a terrible VR experience and the only reason it won Best in Show, is because it created a grand spectacle for the onlooker and was extremely busy from beginning to end. This leads us to believe that the criteria by which Auggies are awarded is focused entirely on style and is utterly lacking in substance.
