Last week as part as the Collaboration Unit I went to visit Otherworld Hackney, a VR video game arcade. The place contained over 10 pods containing a headsets and space to experience VR, it also had a cafe/bar for people to relax before or after playing in the pods. When we went there, we got an over an hour slot using the pods. The VR game had the form of a virtual island, a digital designed land that could be explored by the players. Also the visiting groups could meet inside of the VR realm, communicating to each other and playing games together. When we got there and we where assigned a pod, an individual one for each member of our group , we where placed in the island and we where given headphones and microphones to communicate with each other. The island had different sceneries with different themes, when we started playing we where situated in the middle grounds and we where allowed to explore the different worlds. I paired with a couple of friends and decided to go play a couple of games together. We played first a shooting game, where we battled collectively with zombies, then we switched to an animated game where we swinged ourselves from tree’s to complete the missions of the game.

In reflection I thought the experience in VR was very interesting but not very pleasantly. We played for over an hour that is more than the recommended play time (they didn’t tell us that it was no idea to play for that long), and when I got out of the pod I felt extremely dizzy and in a great corporal discomfort. I think that one of the biggest factors that caused me that discomfort was that there was no visual break from the game, in contrast with screen based video games VR doesn’t allow you any sensorial break. There was always something to see and something to hear, I found this extremely overwhelming. I felt that body uneasiness the whole afternoon, it was quite weird that it didn’t go away until very late.

To be honest I did not pay a lot of attention to the sound while playing, I thought that visual was so vast that I never thought on analysing or focus in the sound. I guess this is something effective from the sound design of the games I played, as they helped a deeper immersion with the game and didn’t drag the players attention away from the story line. What I did found very distracting was the constant audio of the other sound art colleagues that where playing, it was very unorganised and I could hear everyones voice at the same time. My experience in Otherworld re-assured me the importance of not making the sound for The Phone Box too present or intense. It should function more in a Musak way that only accompanies the visual. Also I reflected the great importance of ambisonic sound in VR, because of the 360 visual content, every sound object should also be position in the correct spatial position.