[HTC VIVE] How to play with the player's head?

Hi guys ! First, sorry for my english.

I'm working on a VR project with a small team of devs and graphists in my engineering school. We're making a horror attraction, that uses a 4x4 perimeter with the HTC VIVE, in which, through some spooky events, the room changes, getting more and more creepy with monsters and all...

I've got confidence in our project but as I test things out I realize that there is a real problem in the early development phase : we tried out to move inside a cube that covered the 4X4 perimeter and realised it felt really... small? We had the feeling that the way we saw it through the headset made the playground look smaller that it really was. Like it was... I don't know ... 3X3 or even less even though the 4x4 perimeter we calibrated through the steamVR app was perfectly fit to our cube.

Have you guys any tips to "play with the player's head" and makes him feel like, instead, the room he's in is bigger than the playground perimeter? I dunno, playing with the scaling or the field of view of the camera, using some light effects, playing with shapes... We're not really experienced in level design and we've never been through such a problem.

 

I'm pretty sure you are just imagining it. VR actually does (too good) of a job tricking the player that the space is real, even when it looks like a cartoon or etc. If it feels small when you play, it's because it is small. And small is relative of course. If you are trying to fit in a single ant then the room will feel big trying to find your one ant crawling around, but if you are hording whales then you will feel cramped. So I guess that means that what you want to do really emphasizes space and movement.

Without being a good source or having much facts to back it up; my first thought is that 'playing with someones head' will not be a good experience. If you shrink the player's perspective down, they will feel like an ant (standing next stool wide enough to fit a whole family on), or worse, you may make the player feel sick if they look around and it doesn't give them the same feeling as looking in real life (warping and etc). Also, even if you did give the illusion of more space, that would discord with taking a step. It won't be a good experience to feel like you have 10 steps to take until a wall but you are rushing towards it with only 3 regular steps taken. The whole idea of VR is to be in a 'real' virtual space, not a 100% illusion of space you can't really move your body in.

VR space is small, that's just how it is. There is always adding other forms of locomotion (other than literally walking) but they have some serious issues (like making the player throw up due to the discord between what their eyes are telling their body it's doing and what it's body feels it's doing).

 

That's just one idea of what VR is. It's a new medium and way too soon to be saying what the idea is. Smooth locomotion was a big no-no a year ago, it's now very common. Changing the distance between the players eye cameras gently might make them puke, but it might just add a really creepy, dreamy quality to the experience too. OP, experimwnt a lot! Have you thought about rendering different things to each eye? Maybe you can make some really weird hallucination stuff, like a single in-game object which looks slightly different to each eye. Rendering energy and particle effects this way can look awesome Players brain will struggle to unite the images. Maybe add or subtract the siluette of a person to the depth buffer. I bet there's tons of crazy stuff you can do in a horror game!