Real-Virtual 3rd Person Skiing — Your Broken Bones Are The Video Game

Disappointed in the lack of proper VR games and the current technology, [Jonas Hjohlman] and some friends set out to make their own. They decided to go big or go home — and  built a device to let them ski in the third person.

We’ve seen this done as a proof of concept for walking around (and getting dizzy!) and even an attempt at third person driving which didn’t end well… We have to say, we’re pretty impressed at the Devil-may-care approach they take when trying to ski of all things — in the third person.

There’s not too much detail about the setup, but it looks like a standard pair of FPV goggles hooked up to their own wireless camera. A cameraman skier follows the player down the hill, and all the player sees is from behind.

Surprisingly, it goes a lot better than you think it would.

LakituSM64

We guess it’ll only be a matter of time before we all have personal Lakitu Brothers like in Super Mario 64.

Just replace the cloud with a quadrotor, and Lakitu with some robotic vision.

[via reddit]

11 thoughts on “Real-Virtual 3rd Person Skiing — Your Broken Bones Are The Video Game

  1. “Surprisingly, it goes a lot better than you think it would.”
    I think that was helped by them being competent skiers anyway.

    I can imagine that having a mismatch of visual and physical (balance, feel under-foot) could confuse things although as it’s only visual, you could close your eyes to ignore the visual stimulus and ski by feel alone.

    1. Awesome hype, at least. I’m not buying that what they show in their promos is autonomous flight and video capture. Looks to me more like, “here’s the concept we’re going for, and if you happen to think this is a finished (or almost finished) product, well, we never said that, did we.”

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