Why is Virtual Reality popular?
So what happened with the pandemic and the lockdown? We’ve all been stuck working from home for the last year! If you’re tired of seeing the inside of your home office, we have a solution for you.
When we started designing our virtual team building games, the first thing we knew we wanted to do was include virtual and augmented reality. If you’re going to do a virtual escape room, you want to see the rooms that you’re locked inside right? And if you’re going to do a virtual amazing race or treasure hunt, you’re going to want to walk through the places around the world that you’re going to visit. Would you like to see the inside of a temple in Bangkok? Explore Copacabana beach in Rio? How about a visit to the Norwegian fjords? It may not be quite the same as actual travel, but it is the next best thing! Using virtual reality, we can put you and your team literally anywhere in the world, including places that don’t even actually exist! For example, in our Indiana Jones treasure hunt, we put you in an Aztec temple, an Indian Palace and a Shanghai nightclub to name a few.
Give it a try!
Use the block below. You can open this on your phone, and click the VR (Headset) icon to try it.
Virtual reality technology
You’ve almost certainly seen this option available in web apps, for example it’s used in Google Street View to enable you to enter a 3D World from a Google map. It’s also used now extensively in Facebook pages and some 3D YouTube videos. All modern web browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Safari will play virtual reality images as standard. And if you use a smartphone, most modern ones have the option to view virtual reality images in stereoscopic vision and use the inbuilt gyroscope. This means that as you move your body and your head the view your point of view will change.
To extend the experience further it is easy to get a Google Cardboard headset for your phone to wear it in the same manner as a virtual reality headset. Google Cardboard headsets to fit all models of smartphones are cheaply available online and usually cost less than $10.
In technical terms 3D images of the kind used in Google Street View are called equirectangular images. They allow you to have a point of view in the center of the scene and look around in all directions, up and down and to use hotspots for navigating from scene to scene.
The upshot of all this is we can put you in either a real or a fictional place, allow you to move around either with the use of a headset and your phone or using your web browser on your PC or laptop, and explore the place as if you were really there. We can add characters for people to speak to, sound files, movies and interactive puzzles directly in the virtual reality scene.
Virtual reality options in our games
Of course you don’t need to use your phone and a Google Cardboard headset to play our games, that’s just a great add on option. Most people play our activities with VR simply using the browser and our web app on their computer. It will open directly in the browser in our web app with no installation or effort from your end, just click on our link, play our web app and you’ll be transported to that place.
If you would like to use Google Cardboard to get the full virtual reality experience, in our gold package we will order the correct headsets for you and send them directly to you prior to the event. This is not necessary to play the game but it’s a great add on! Headsets cost around between $5 and $20 depending on the model.
