Last Friday, we went to the VR park in Dubai for a class trip. Since we had been talking about the rides in the VR park and the behind-the-scene tour, I thought that it would be like an amusement park, which has a lot of roller coasters and trains which you could ride on, and the behind-the-scene experience will allow us to understand their efforts to sustain and regulate such a massive place. Unlike what I expected, the PVRK in Dubai was way smaller and looked just like an arcade. It was dark and noise, and we could barely hear other people talking. The only roller coaster they have looked so small that I don’t even think we would be able to have a ride on it. I got a bit disappointed at that point.
However, as we put the headsets on, the whole situation changed: you see a new world in the headset, and the sound effect was so real and you can hear it so clearly from the headset. I realized how wrong I was: the point of VR was to create an equally engaging experience even if the equipments (like the rollercoaster) did not seem to be legit. My favorite experience was the shooting game, where you get to drive a spaceship and fight with the enemy troops. When I first sit on the machine and put on the VR headset, I didn’t really feel immersed in the game. To me, it didn’t seem to be different from those fancy arcade games where you get to drive a car and shoot zombies. Then, when the spaceship I was driving got sucked in by a tunnel and started to climb up the tunnel, the seat changed the orientation so that I really felt that I was part of the spaceship. It was that moment when I started to feel immersed in the experience.
When shooting the enemy troops, I actually felt the backlash of the machine gun, and thus it was so hard to control the spaceship: it was shaking a lot. The visual effects were so real: I could actually tell by the lighting of the explosion how big the exploded spaceship was. The sound effect was also 3D: when I turn around, I could hear the explosion and shooting coming from behind. Overall, it was such an immersive experience where I felt blended in with the spaceship I was driving, and really felt like part of the game. And I think I was doing well in the game. Got 29,000 points XD