Roomscale tracking, in which VR users can move around a real world environment to walk inside VR, was a breakthrough for the technology, but also presents its own set of challenges. Blue Entropy Studios is trying to combat those issues.
While roomscale allows you to move around an environment similar to the size of your living room, the worlds developers create are usually much, much larger. Blue Entropy, however, is creating scaled environments with its series of escape room games, the latest of which is due to release this month. You can see the trailer for it below.
“For example, lets say you have a door on one end of the room,” the developer’s Christian Ledbetter tells me. “The player will physically walk to the door and grab the door handle. We then do a quick fade to black and flip the roomscale orientation so they are facing the opposite direction in-game, but are on the opposite side of the door. Therefore, the player naturally turns around as if they just closed a door in real life, and they still have their entire room space to play with. This method causes no motion sickness or any disorientation.”
While it still involves a fade and an artificial turn, this method does avoid the more commonly used, but less immersive methods like teleportation and walking using a trackpad/analogue stick. It even works with the Vive’s minimum roomscale requirements of 2.1m x 1.8m of space. It reminds us a little of the solution seen in A Chair in a Room: Greenwater, though that game asked you to stand in specific spots when transitioning between rooms.
The Ruins will be hitting Vive and Rift soon and, based on past entries in the series, you can expect a brief but solid puzzle adventure at a respectable price.
