It Turns Out Virtual Reality Isn't So Good in a Theater

Vague visions of nightmare theaters exist in which everyone in the audience has some bulbous contraption about the head to 'enjoy the VR experience' but the science in this one says it's really not that enjoyable.  (Science Daily:  Virtual reality: Hybrid Virtual Environment 3D comes to the cinema)

Note:  this has nothing to do with an individual VR experience at home with Buffy the Naked Vampire Slayer or whatever.  Tip:  we don't want to know.


On May 19, Paris's first virtual reality (VR) theatre opened its doors.  It promises viewers an unparalleled experience using VR headsets and headphones that propel them into a virtual world for 40-minute shows.  Yet the designer Tomás Dorta, a professor at the University of Montreal, does not believe in it. "Viewers wearing individual headsets are isolated from others, which is contrary to the collective experience we are looking for when we go to the movies," he explained.

- Science Daily

It's a bit unusual to build something when you don't believe in it but so it went and that was the observation from it.  This continued into science to study the matter further.

With two doctoral students, Sana Boudhraâ and Davide Pierini, he wanted to measure the virtual reality experience and compared VR headsets with an immersive projection system using a concave-spherical screen, developed by his research team and called Hybrid Virtual Environment 3D (Hyve-3D).  He immersed 20 subjects of various ages in both types of virtual environments and noted their reactions and behaviour.  "Ultimately, the people much preferred the virtual reality without headsets, because they could interact with other viewers and share their impressions in real time. They appreciated the social aspect of the experience," said the researcher, who published his findings in the ACM Digital Library on October 28, the same day he presented his study at the 28e Conférence francophone sur l'interaction homme-machine, held in Fribourg, Switzerland.

- Science Daily

We see the people enjoyed the experience more without the headsets but we're concerned about a conflict of interests when they developed the system they're studying.

Dorta believes that fans of horror or action films would be much better served by a theatre equipped with a system such as Hyve-3D.  He himself worked on a prototype that can be seen at the Hybridlab design research laboratory in the J.-Armand-Bombardier Pavilion, near Polytechnique Montréal.  "It seems the market is going crazy for virtual reality," he said. "In my opinion, VR headsets are not the way to go."

- Science Daily

Dorta is clear on his objective so review the article to make whatever impression you like.  At a minimum, his technique is interesting and all the more because music is wonderful ... until I need headphones to listen.