Once a week, a dozen or more people put on their virtual reality headsets, go online and do something that would normally require driving to a local multiplex: watch a movie with a bunch of strangers. Their avatars all sit in the seats of a virtual movie theater, staring at a screen playing a movie from Netflix.
The sound from the theater is so accurate that if participants munch potato chips into their microphones, it sounds as though it is emanated from their avatars. "When all of a sudden 10 avatars turn around and look at you, you know you should be quiet," said Eric Romo, the chief executive of AltspaceVR.
The ability of virtual reality to transport people to locales both exotic and ordinary, is well known. Yet how the medium will fit into people's online and offline lives is a new frontier. The best known of a new league of virtual reality headsets, HTC's Vive by Valve, will start going on sale by the end of the year, and the devices will be a hot topic this week at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3, one of the largest annual gatherings for the video game industry.
One question about virtual reality is what will happen to people in the real world when they are transfixed by virtual space. All of the screens in consumers' lives - whether on televisions, smartphones and computers - can be absorbing. They do not, however, completely occlude what's happening around a person the way virtual reality headsets do. People immersed in a virtual reality game can easily lose track of where the furniture is, the windows and where humans are around them.
At Valve, developers plan to minimize unwanted collisions with a feature that it calls a "chaperon" system. The technology maps the terrain of a room: furniture, walls and all. When someone wearing a headset gets close to an object, a wire-frame model of the room materializes in the virtual space in front of their eyes, fading as they move away.
