A little while back I encountered a museum that featured holodeck-like rooms that made you feel like you were inside the real thing. I experienced this same effect when I landed inside the Virtual Reality Room, where they demonstrate (and sell) rooms and scenes you can have for your own.
While I’m not advocating that you purchase one of these (because that’s not what I do here) it’s worth a trip to play around with the variety of indoor and outdoor scenes.
They also have a selection of rendered space scenes so you can feel like you’re floating in space. Better hold your breath, there’s no oxygen up there
The scenes aren’t quite as skillfully done as those in the museum, which gave you a real sense of moving through the room. I think this has to do with sizing the room appropriately with the scene. They sell these rooms in a variety of sizes, and the demo room is on the large end of the selections.
Unless you really know what you’re doing, a room like this can end up being more like fancy photography backdrop than virtual reality. I spent a lot of time moving my camera just so in order to scale and position myself properly. I couldn’t really move through the room and get a sense of being someplace. The center part of the room is occupied by a platform for selecting and selling scenes. I had to move myself in order to keep that out of the frame, so that may have been part of it.
The photographers seem to be limited to places to which they have access, so some of the potential of a room like this is unrealized. Instead of scenes of London or Paris or the pyramids, you’ve got a decidedly unexciting selection of city and suburban scenes. Faced with choices like that, Captain Picard might have closed the Holodeck in favor of a Christian Science Reading Room.
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Solariam/212/166/431
