As you can see from the above video, Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, or VHIL, has done some impressive things with virtual reality. Their multisensory room features state of the the art, multi-camera body tracking, a high definition, 3D head mounted display, and a speaker set-up that delivers both spatialized sound and haptic feedback.
While the VHIL is more interested the academic benifts of VR than the recreational ones — past projects have looked at virtual reality's effects on everything from social interactions to political positions — it's easy to see the lab's million dollar set-up as a portent of gaming's future.
Sure, it's unlikely that Sony and Microsoft's next gen offerings be anywhere near this complex, given the expense and design difficulties that are involved, but a holodeck-style gaming experience might be far closer than you'd think. In fact, the core technologies used at the VHIL already have consumer-ready gaming analogs.
The Wii's hardware has been capable of accurate head tracking for years, and Microsoft's Kinect can detect full body movement in real time. While neither option may be quite as accurate as high end solutions, they're both pretty damn impressive for their budget pricetags. With the Wii U unveiled and rumors swirling that the next Xbox will feature a greatly improved Kinect, it's easy to see that Microsoft and Nintendo intend, at least to some degree, to head down the VR path.
Sony, for their part, has already released a head-mounted 3D display, though it's certainly a bit too costly to make it into a standard console setup, at least for the time being.
It's conceivable that a handy homebrewer could throw together a competitive VR gaming set-up for well under $3,000, and with Moore's law and subsized hardware on our hands, we're really just a few years and a corporate push away from making these sort of gaming experiences just as accessible and affordable as motion control is today.
