Here’s how Hong Kong start-up Sandbox VR built hyperrealistic virtual reality games
- A social media post of the VR game went viral and was shared over 10,000 times and seen by over 1.7 million people
A swarm of monster bugs are running toward towards me and I’m frantically shooting at them, all while trying to ignore the fact that I’m standing right at the edge of a skyscraper. As someone with acrophobia, this is the stuff of nightmares.
Except I wasn’t just having a bad dream – I was in the middle of a Sandbox VR game called Amber Sky 2088, perched on top of a tall building, shooting at hostile creatures trying to take over the earth. Lucky for me, my game partner Steve Zhao had already been through this hundreds of times – he instructed me to hold up my shield as he calmly obliterated the enemy one by one.
Zhao is the founder and chief executive of Hong Kong-based Sandbox VR, which specialises in creating immersive, hyperrealistic virtual reality games. But instead of creating consumer VR games like those for a Playstation VR console, for example, Sandbox is one of a few companies in the world that specialises in creating location-based VR games – which means players go to a bricks-and-mortar location to experience a game instead of playing it at home.
Walk into any of Sandbox VR’s seven locations around Asia and North America, and you’ll find the same set-up: a room painted entirely green, with haptic vests, backpack computers and sensors that gamers strap onto their wrists so that motion trackers can capture each player’s movements in the game.
Unlike typical consumer VR games which are hooked up to a computer or similar processing unit, Sandbox’s powerful backpack computers mean that graphics are much higher definition and this minimises the possibility of its players getting motion sickness.