How vacuuming with VR becomes an experience

Finally, housework can be combined with fun: A developer has found a clean everyday scenario for Facebook's VR glasses Oculus Quest.

Thanks to wireless room tracking, the Oculus Quest is ideal for all kinds of experiments in which you can integrate real environments such as your own home as a 3D model in virtual reality and then navigate through them in real virtual reality.

There are no sample apps for this application scenario in the Oculus Store, as the 3D realisation of your own home is still too complex for non-experts. But developers are constantly demonstrating the potential of a mixed reality home. VR tinkerer VoxelGuy is now presenting his own version of a real augmented virtuality on Reddit. He chose a rather atypical topic: vacuuming.

For his experiment, he brings real, haptic elements into his VR app. The process is also known as mapped reality because the virtual environment is superimposed on the real world like a matching map.

The VR hoover gamifies housework

First, he created a 3D environment in the 3D engine Unity that corresponds to the dimensions of his flat. He then placed virtual pieces of furniture in it that matched the real world as closely as possible so that he could vacuum under the table, for example, instead of running into it. He learnt the know-how for the development on YouTube channels such as Valem or Blender Guru.

For the VR hoover, he attached an Oculus Touch controller to the real hoover wand. In VR, he then displays a virtual hoover wand that matches the real appliance instead of the controller model. The controller - and therefore the hoover - is tracked by the VR glasses.

The final step: gamification. To do this, he scattered coins on the floor, which disappear when he vacuums over them. For every coin sucked in, there are coins for the high score.

However, household gaming is unlikely to be suitable for the masses as the technology is a little too bulky and accident-prone. Gamified housework would be comparatively easy to realise with AR glasses, where reality is always in view and digital elements such as coins are simply projected directly onto the floor.

Source: Mixed / Youtube