Demo Hour

DEMO HOUR: VR Playground

Devised by artist Brendan Walker, VR Playground is an interactive artwork that has toured globally, reaching over 15,000 participants to date. Riders get to experience four different virtual worlds that are overlaid on a playground swing. The physical sensation of swinging is visually amplified and distorted to deliver various thrilling sensations. From a research perspective, VR Playground provides an example of a visual-kinaesthetic experience. From an impact point of view, it shows how to overlay swing rides—and maybe other forms of movement—with virtual experiences.

Tennent, P., Marshall, J., Brundell, P., Walker, B., and Benford, S. Abstract machines: Overlaying virtual worlds on physical rides. Proc. of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, New York, 2019, Article 4; https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300811

Tennent, P., Marshall, J., Walker, B., Brundell, P., and Benford, S. The challenges of visual-kinaesthetic experience. Proc. of the 2017 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems. ACM, New York, 2017, 1265–1276.

https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/mixedrealitylab/

http://thrilllaboratory.com/vrplayground-background/

Paul Tennent, Joe Marshall, Patrick Brundell, Brendan Walker, and Steve Benford, The University of Nottingham
[email protected]

The wheelchair-accessible version of VR Playground.

High Roller, one of VR Playground's four virtual worlds.