VirtuSphere – First Steps To a Real Holodeck

Okay, we’ll admit it is not quite up to illustrious Star Trek standards just yet, and yes it is just a giant plastic ball on wheels, but what you see above is apparently the first steps to creating something that all watchers of Star Trek are quite familiar with, and most could have wished was possible.

The VirtuSphere in conjunction with a motion-tracking headset that the user must wear, and rollers to allow the ball to rotate in place supposedly lets people inside somewhat realistic experience real life actions in a virtual world. They can they hypothetically run, jump, roll, or crawl all over the place as they react to information displayed on their headset – we are not sure of the last two though, we might need a bigger ball for that.

Currently the apparatus is out of most of our price range, as it retails at more than £15,000. However, the military, and many other large companies are apparently very interested in the technology, with it already been used by the Russian Tourism Authorities to let people walk through the Red Square and the Kremlin. Maybe the tech could be applied to games in the future, but probably not for a decade or two.