Golden HarbourGames
ENRU

All experiments

VR Prototype

Greybeard: a storm you stand in

A three-masted ship under a breaking wave far taller than its masts

Five minutes on the deck of a ship off Cape Horn in April 1788, in a headset. A wave taller than the masts is coming, and you have two hands.

Sailors called the biggest Southern Ocean waves greybeards. We wanted to know whether VR could make a room full of ordinary people, kids and parents included, feel one arrive, without anyone feeling ill. The answer so far is a five-minute slice built in grey boxes, with the effort spent where the fear is made: the water, the lightning and the sound.

What your hands do

  • Take a lashing from the bosun and hold fast while five seas board the ship from the windward side. The third one takes the hen coop.
  • Haul a halyard and work the pump between seas.
  • Get hoisted up the mast in a bosun's chair, saw through a fouled rope one-handed with a knife, and grab the rigging on the swing back.
  • You cannot lose. Someone who lets go of everything and just stares still reaches the dawn.

What VR taught us

  • Cap the motion, do not scale it. The deck never moves more than 12 cm or 4 degrees under your feet. Without the cap, the big wave dragged the ropes sixty centimetres out of your hands.
  • A wave has to be short and tall to read as a wall. At 185 metres long it looked like a hill. At 120 metres long and nine and a half high, it is a wall.
  • A real pendulum on a rolling ship is chaos: in one test run in three the swing never came near the rigging. The first arc is physics; the rest are written by hand.
  • The sail has to tear the knife out of your hand, or that hand is never free to catch the rigging.
  • One fade in the whole show. Three comfort settings on the operator's keys, from calm to Cape Horn.

Where it is

It has had one short session in a headset, which covered the calm opening at a steady 72 frames a second and produced two notes: the hands pointed the wrong way, and it was a bit colourless. Both are fixed. The storm itself has not been measured in a headset yet, and the ship and crew are still grey boxes.

It is meant for a VR venue, with an operator beside you and an empty floor. If you run one, or have been seasick in one, tell us.

Pictures

Dusk, before it starts. Two of the crew at the foremast.
Dusk, before it starts. Two of the crew at the foremast.
The first sea comes over the windward rail. You hold on to a rope with both hands.
The first sea comes over the windward rail. You hold on to a rope with both hands.
What you see from the deck when the greybeard arrives.
What you see from the deck when the greybeard arrives.
Aloft in the bosun's chair, at the top of the swing, looking straight down the mast.
Aloft in the bosun's chair, at the top of the swing, looking straight down the mast.
Dawn. The sea is flat and an albatross goes past.
Dawn. The sea is flat and an albatross goes past.

Talk about this one

Questions, ideas, “you should try this instead”: the thread for this experiment is open to anyone.

Open the thread

The forum runs on GitHub Discussions. Reading is open to all; posting needs a free GitHub account.

More experiments

Robots · Tools Eva and Adam, taken apart Two humanoid robots live in our workshop. We write the software that makes one of them see, listen and pull faces, and we built a 3D guide that takes both of them apart screw by screw. In progress Art direction One wheel, four tables In Souls & Estates one mouse wheel now takes you from a single peasant yard to a table map of central Russia, through four dioramas of the same place. You can try it New platform A game inside a Reddit post What if you did not have to leave the feed to play? We put Gull Chorus, our seagull flock game, inside a Reddit post: one post is one beach, with a leaderboard under it. In progress