Holovis, world leaders in creating the next-generation of fully immersive and interactive ride attractions and virtual reality solutions, have announced that they have extended their RideView™ simulation application for Oculus Rift to create a cost effective, portable design and simulation solution.
RideView™ is included in all a Holovis theme park ride projects. The first fully designed and built attraction using RideView™ will open in early 2015.
The solution, previously only available in the company’s VR CAVE, allows designers and engineers to accurately simulate and test complete operational virtual prototypes reducing resources spent on creating physical models with added benefits for focus-group assessments.
The Holovis VR CAVE, available to hire with the Holovis Demonstration Suite, is a structure with four or five rear-projected sides that show 3D volumetric, real-time data and fully immerses users into their virtual world and lets them interact naturally with true perspective.
RideView™ enables designs to be explored in virtual reality incorporating factors such as sight lines, eye points, ingress and egress around the ride envelope and load/unload issues. Additional layers can be added or subtracted including structures, utility services, HVAC systems, theming, media and lighting effects.
Access to the realistic simulation ensures that stakeholders better understand the design and the design process itself is improved.
The development of RideView™ for Oculus Rift means that individuals can now “walk through” a design simulation thereby reducing costs and making the cutting edge technology more accessible.
Oculus Rift presents a stereoscopic 3D view with 360° head tracking in real time and a 100° field of view. Unique and parallel images for each eye mimic the way the brain processes visual data in real life, making the experience feel more natural than watching a 3D movie. RideView™ takes the CAD, design and media/game data and repurposes it through a fast, seamless set of processes for the volumetric 3D viewing medium.
Commenting on the announcement, Stuart Hetherington, CEO of Holovis said, “This is an approach that we are proud to be bringing to the entertainment sector, informed by our 15 years expertise of applying similar solutions to the automotive, manufacturing and military industries. Utilising VR CAVE technology for design has proved to be a successful model in other industries, accelerating the design process, reducing the number of physical prototypes and enhancing the decision making process. We see this technology becoming a core part of the design, engineering, simulation, testing and training process in the future.
“RideView™ offers designers and ride engineers a completely new suite of powerful, highly functional software tools to bring their visions to life in a whole new way, limited only by imagination! Originally designed for use in our fully immersive 3D volumetric CAVE VR systems, our latest version for Oculus allows cost effective accessibility to this technology at the desktop level.”
