Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/06/10/grandpa-gets-a-little-too-carr.html
Man, 81, goes on rampage with HTC Vive VR headset
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My favorite in that genre:
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âOh no we didnât warn him!â
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Man, whatâs gonna be around when Iâm 81âŚ
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When youâre in VR, itâs REALLY easy to lose track of your surroundings. If you just had on a blindfold and moved around, youâd have a sense that there was a wall or other item near you. But in VR you just lose that and accept your new surroundings.
I have a fairly limited space for VR stuff at home, so bought a small 3â diameter round rug that I stand on. Itâs been excellent at keeping me âgroundedâ as it were.
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Havenât read PA in years, but I was just thinking about this yesterday: I got Beat Saber pretty recently and one of the things I really enjoy about it is the complete dissociation from your visible body. Any kind of physical activity is, for me, inevitably very bogged down by anxiety about how ugly and ridiculous my body looks. But in VR, all Iâve got is the controller indicators and the physical space sense awareness that my body existsâI canât get distracted by my reflection in the window or be struck by sudden worry about what a stranger sees when they glance my direction.
Do I look like an idiot in reality? Probably! (My partner, the only witness, is wisely keeping silent.) But the experience is SO much more enjoyable than moving my body around has been for years.
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We had a headset at work and we took turns running the demo. You could hear everyone about you but you were in a wood with dinosaurs. Then you took off the headset. I was still at work but because of the large monitors, I still could hear people but to see them, which left a very weird feeling of âItâs okay, I know I still hear them in VR. But didnât I take off the helmet? I remember taking it offâ.
This is why they didnât include melee combat in half life: alyx because youâre either going to end up breaking yourself, furniture, expensive vr kit or all three when thereâs no force feedback yet your brain is still fooled into thinking itâs holding a heavy object to bludgeon those head crab zombies.
Very easy to think objects in vr exist in the real worldâŚ
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Itâs all fun and games until you get knocked out by an 81 year old grandpa.
That guy seemed in really good shape for 81, good balance, fluid motions.
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I played the video, scrolled up to look at something, scrolled down, and then had to think of what I was looking at for a moment.
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Thank god it keeps the old boy off the streetsâŚhe could be a serious menace if he got loose
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VR still isnât to the point where I donât get motion sick using it, though I did briefly try playing Beat Saber on a friendâs rig and it was fun and a decent work out. I like to think my pets would edge away if the tech ever gets to the point I can use it for more than a few minutes at a time.
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Aw, that sucks. I was worried about motion sickness when I bought the system because Iâm very susceptible in real life (car trips, especially, a 45-minute car trip through fairly normal city traffic recently made me so sick I almost couldnât walk)⌠but Beat Saber has thankfully been fine for me, though Iâm not banking on any games that actually involve virtual motion of the camera not making me miserable.
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Perhaps in 20 years a common luxury-level home addition will be a VR room, like a full-blown âtheater roomâ is today. Padded, with multi-speaker sound, multi-directional air movers, and a way to keep you in the middle.
I think thatâs what Ready Player One is about, right?
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Provided we donât annihilate our technological civilization, I think weâll eventually invent a virtual reality capable, by some likely unforeseen means, of overcoming the inner-ear discombobulation from the visual context that I very strongly suspect causes my motion sickness. My lifelong favored athletic interests tend toward honing even my not particularly naturally talented proprioception (dance and a couple others), and I suspect thatâs a significant contributing factor.
In principle Iâm pretty confident itâs solvable. But for now Iâm at a disadvantage to the present state-of-the-art. And right now Iâm more concerned with us not immolating than whether I live to see the VR that I could enjoy sans headaches, not that it wouldnât be cool.
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My vive wands are covered in paint scrapes from where Iâve accidentally punched the wall. Say what you will about the build quality of the things (and their terrible, awful, no good, very bad trackpads) but theyâre sturdy.
One of my favorites still.
Is that a long way of saying âclumsy?â 
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Why say it with two syllables when ya can say it with seventeen? 
I embrace my tendency toward fun florid language. 
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