Hands On: The Surreal 'Lucid Trips' VR Experience

Sara Lisa Vogl is a self-proclaimed virtual reality shaman who guides people into trance-similar worlds.

The Hamburg, Deutschland-based Vogl was in Los Angeles recently and provided PCMag with a demo of her skills. Her medium of choice is a Lucid Trips, a VR experience that "takes places in planetary dream worlds [where] you explore artistically designed planets with a completely new concept, defining and navigating your avatar in a distinctive fashion, using hand motion controllers."

Sara Lisa Vogl "Lucid Trips came out of a desire to do things you lot can't do in existent life inside a fantastical and trippy earth," Vogl told PCMag. "I think it'due south totally important to know how y'all experience your existent world and how, through being somewhere virtual for a while, yous tin can modify your everyday experience."

A designer by nature, Vogl said she taught herself to lawmaking "and became fascinated by how you lot type in numbers, concepts, and commands and so all of a sudden get to create a new reality."

For Lucid Trips, she operates the feel from a PC, and helps users movement through the virtualscape. For my demo, I slipped into asmall concealed-off surface area in the lobby of a Hollywood hotel, so I didn't wander off inside the game and hurt myself. I put on an HTC Vive headset, and Vogl went to the computer to load up the game and picket my progress on a monitor. I tin't really explain this, but I felt as if I were near to have radiation and she'd retreated to a prophylactic area while I was left alone with the machine, which was slightly alienating at first.

There was no reason to worry, though. She returned swiftly and touched my elbow lightly, telling me to hold out my arms in front of me. 2 controllers were placed in my mitt as the screen of a sudden burst into a brightly shimmering solar arrangement.

Lucid Trips

Elongated, ghostly white artillery appeared in front of me, spookily slim every bit if encased in elbow-length gloves with tapering fingers. I quickly worked out that these were my virtual appendages. They were created inside Unity using Inverse Kinematics, which is how game designers plot the trajectory of controllers and allow on-screen representation of artillery moving through virtual space.

It was beautiful but a bit eerie; vast and lonely. Vogl touched my wrist to prove me how to employ the controller to move forward. The globe shifted and morphed and suddenly I was flying, almost weightless in a depression-gravity atmosphere. The stresses of Los Angeles traffic and needing coffee cruel away.

Lucid Trips

In that location are many theories about what it takes to create the real sensation of "presence," but it's clear it takes non only a high-end, caput-mounted device and superior quality headphones, but a truly skillful visual and motion artistic squad. Lucid Trips is exactly the sort of dreamy planet yous'd similar to hang out on later on a stressful day in the real world. Unlike an RPG, at that place'south no set pattern of exploration. If you want to but drift and arctic, you tin. Or, fly into and through glowing orbs, temporarily filling your field of view with light, which is a pleasantly odd sensation.

Just and so I started to autumn.

I'll acknowledge: I panicked. I'd been tripping the light fantastic, just dozily enjoying the scenery. Merely I forgot where I was and ran out of ability, literally. It was all going dark. This is where it's useful to have a VR shaman on manus. Especially if you're an easily suggestible, highly imaginative sort of human (*coughs*).

Vogl sensed my confusion and checked my in-game vitals. She chop-chop pushed the controllers down onto the planet to refuel via embedded gems. On the screen I saw my battery power surge to 100 percentage. She showed me how to use the controllers to thrust up into the alien skies once more, and I was off. Flying effectually most happily, I dipped down simply to get more jewel-fuel earlier soaring off again.

Sadly, time was short so I couldn't explore all the worlds that lay beyond the initial dreamscape. Apparently at that place are other planets and artistic displays and a few fun Easter eggs I'd love to explore more fully.

I took off the Vive and tentatively re-entered the world. I was back inside Globe'southward gravity rules, a bit unsteady on my feet at first. But once I got my bearings, I did feel calmer, more expansive, and truly chilled out.

Vogl was smile. It's clear she enjoys watching people experience the earth she had a manus in creating.

Does she remember VR is a meliorate place to alive than reality? "At the moment you can't live at that place total-fourth dimension," she laughed. "Simply I am fascinated past the beingness of multiple breakthrough realities and believe that by engaging in VR y'all can change how you experience your waking life for the improve for the future. Yous can change your response to reality by experiencing what's possible in the virtual realm."

HTC Vive

A VR Shaman Is Built-in
Vogl's get-go encounter with VR was ii years ago via the original Oculus Rift Dev Kit. "My imagination was sparked instantly," Vogl told PCMag. "And I knew I wanted to have information technology further."

So why the shaman label? "I accept a potent awareness of how other people feel," Vogl explained.

Like an empath? "Yes, I believe I am," she said. "I watch people closely as they motion through our game Lucid Trips, and I go their mental state. I can see where to guide them adjacent, or if they accept a problem, be there for them.

"I'm also really into the computer likewise as the people—creating a symbiosis—a link—hence the shaman concept. I'm fascinated by the physical changes in people's hormonal and emotional country as they spend time in our virtual worlds and have that farthermost focus and concentration which improves the brain."

Vogl's starting time major experience as a VR shaman was final month at the Game Scientific discipline Center in Berlin. "It was called Dis/connected and it was more of an art performance than a game, per se," she said. "I accompanied and directed Thorsten S. Wiedemann every bit he stayed immersed within a VR world for 48 hours."

As the Dis/connected website explains, "no human being being has ever spent such a long time in computer generated virtual reality without slumber."

Vogl'south function was to load up activities to distract, appoint, soothe, and encourage Wiedemann equally he stayed out of the quotidian realm. VR developers from all over the earth sent links to Vogl, who programmed into the night during the project, which was ultimately successful.

Wiiihuuuu #disconnected WE Fabricated IT!! 48 HOURS!!! @ST0RN0 @GSC_Berlin @AMazeFest picture.twitter.com/xvAQdU2CDs
— Sara Lisa Vogl (@SaraLisaVogl) January 10, 2022

"I'k totally excited about the future of VR," Vogl said. "And I'yard looking forwards to the fourth dimension where y'all have a small device y'all tin pop in your pocket and but put it on whenever y'all want to focus and be somewhere else entirely."

Better living (without) chemistry but through code? "Perhaps," she smiled.