I am standing in a room. Before me, a three-paneled flat screen TV displays a list of games. To my left, floor-to-ceiling windows peer out onto a stone patio, beyond which loom ancient cedars and blue-hued mountains that I do not recognize. A crow flies past the glass and perches on a nearby branch.
I reach up and touch my goggles – a reminder that none of this is real.
“Virtual reality is like going to another planet. It’s a whole new world,” says Matt Cole, founder of NoogaSystems VR Center, Chattanooga’s first virtual reality gaming arcade.
Virtual reality gaming is where a player can experience and interact with a three-dimensional world by way of virtual reality goggles, a high-end computer, two hand controllers, and infrared sensors which detect the precise movements of the player.
The difference between a video game and a VR game, Cole says, is “the difference between watching a movie and being in the movie.”