Experiment: Man lives in virtual reality copy of his room for 30 days

The Italian VR developer Enea LeFons used photogrammetry to create a digital duplicate of his living space and has since spent more than thirty days, seven hours each, in it.

In the latest feature film Ready Player One, humanity spends the majority of its time in virtual reality. But what is it like to live in virtual reality? The experiment by Italian Enea LeFons gives us a real insight.

The experiment was sponsored and organised by HTC. The company provided the VR technology used, including the HTC Vive, Vive Focus and Vive Pro along with SteamVR 2.0 tracking-compatible accessories. The latter was necessary to fully track LeFont's large living space. The new base stations cover a tracking area of up to 100 square metres.

In an article on the website Skarredghost describes the organisation, procedure and objectives of the experiment and other tests in detail. LeFons wore VR glasses for an average of seven hours a day. He is currently still in virtual reality, as he decided to continue his experiment for another 15 to 30 days.

Provide the parlour with a magical portal

Before the experiment began, LeFons and his team completely digitised the living room so that artificial elements could be added later. The digital image of the room is now adorned with flowers growing out of the floor and a magical portal leads to a virtual dance club. In order to provide the content for the virtual disco, the somewhat crazy artist went into a real club with the VR headset and naturally attracted everyone's attention.

Real objects, including furniture, a record player and various furnishings, were fitted with Vive trackers so that LeFons could also bring them into virtual reality.

30-day VR hackathon

The self-experiment is designed as a 30-day VR hackathon. Among other things, the developer worked with the VR editor of the Unreal Engine within virtual reality on VR apps that will be made freely available to the VR community at the end of the experiment. During the experiment, interested parties can talk to him and co-develop.

Source: Vrodo / Skarredghost / Youtube