Augmented Thrill Ride Project - Pioneering Oculus Rift VR rides on real roller coasters! [video]

Now this is pretty cool. Take a look at this Oculus Rift project that combines the innovative gaming tech with high speed roller coasters. Users strap in to a real roller coaster while wearing the Oculus Rift and the images they are shown correlate with the movements of the roller coaster to give the user a brand new experience.

"In February 2014, I approached the german roller coaster manufacturer Mack Rides with the idea of extending a real roller coaster by wearing an Oculus Rift headset during the ride. I was wondering if it would be possible to replace the real environment by a synchronized virtual ride. 

At Mack Rides, they also saw the potential and entered this ground-breaking cooperation project with me and my students, providing us two roller coasters for research and testing (I'm working as a professor at the University of Applied Sciences Kaiserslautern). 

Then, on April 7th, we performed our first Oculus Rift VR-ride on a real roller coaster, synchronized to the real track. And it was just unbelievable!  

Over the following weeks and months, we have been performing more than a hundred test rides and have been making some amazing discoveries. 

While working out technical solutions and patent matters, we weren't able to go public any earlier. 

Of course, we had a hard time watching the first videos of people riding coasters with an Oculus Rift surfacing on the web - while we had already been performing dozens and dozens of such rides.But, knowing that with Mack Rides we're having a major industry partner on our side, we were always confident that their amazing support would still make for a great and successful publication of this project, even if it would take some time. 

And now we're happy that it's finally time to disclose our adventure to the rest of the world!
Visit http://www.vr-coaster.com to find out more about the project and our discoveries!"

Enjoy!



Source: YouTube - gamesmold