THE ENEMY
Making Of

The Enemy’s main technological challenge was to allow visitors  wearing VR headsets  to move freely around more than 200m². Walking around in the real world translates in the same movements inside the virtual world displayed in the headset. This is called free roaming. In 2014, there was no VR installation capable of providing such a free-roaming experience to the public, let alone in multi-user settings.

To achieve this illusion, I had the idea of combining a VR headset with a motion-capture system. Having previously worked on VR CAVEs, I had experience in motion capture adapted to VR. Indeed, in a CAVE, the user’s position is tracked and the images projected on the walls around them are calculated in real time according to their position. This is the very concept that had to be adapted to VR headsets and across a large room.

A CAVE is an immersive room in which you can experience virtual reality

I knew that these systems were very responsive and offered low latency. This means the time required to capture and calculate the user’s position and to send out an image is very short (less than 10 milliseconds). Too high a latency is prohibitive in VR, as it can lead to motion sickness. The user must see images that perfectly match the accelerations they experience when moving.

Another advantage of this system is that the capture area can be extended indefinitely by simply adding tracking cameras.

Among several motion-capture systems, I chose Optitrack for its simplicity and efficiency. They have become increasingly prevalent in virtual reality in recent years. Their teams were very helpful, especially François Asseman who did a lot for the project.

Each user’s VR headset is equipped with markers that reflect or send out infrared light. Optitrack cameras detect the infrared light from these markers. They are installed around the operating area so that any given point is covered by at least 3 of them. The data captured by the cameras are then transmitted to the Motive software, which determines the exact position – to the nearest millimetre – of all participants.

That is the system we managed to implement to achieve our first prototype of The Enemy.

Optitrack cameras detect “markers” placed on the VR headset

The exploitation of warehouse-scale projects (large spaces in which one can move freely in VR) generally requires the ability to adapt to the venue. We want to be able to walk in the largest area, with a VR headset, without bumping into the walls. Depending on the types of room, this area often differs architecturally: smaller, larger, longer or wider, completely maze-like or, as it is the case at the MIT Museum, dotted with pillars.

The MIT Museum room is dotted with pillars

Our ability to adapt to the location is not only important for the experience itself, but also for all the tests and presentations. The Enemy set-up has been installed around thirty times since 2014!

At that time, we designed a calibration system for the prototypes that automatically adapted virtual rooms to the real world. This allowed us to conduct presentations and tests very quickly in new locations.

The final version is more rigid because the lighting is partly pre-calculated. But of course, it is still possible to manually adapt the virtual environment to the real world.