Friday, March 30, 2018

Ready Player One Escape Game in NVIDIA Holodeck at GTC 2018

I just got back from NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in San Jose, California where I presented on virtual reality in the AEC space. I will offer a recap in my next post, but wanted to first share a surprise VR experience I had in the exhibit hall on Tuesday.


With the highly anticipated Steven Spielberg movie Ready Player One about to be unleashed to...
the public (which is now out), NVIDIA had a sweet surprise for attendees at their flagship conference in Silicon Valley. They worked with the production company to get rights and the actual movie assets for a significant scene in the movie and turned it into an escape room game!

  • If you follow this blog, you know my family has done a few escape games... one of which I mentioned in this post.


Three awesome things converging in one experience... a movie, an escape game and virtual reality.

And it gets better! The VR experience used the new HTC Vive Pro HMDs and was powered by NVIDIA's groundbreaking VR design and collaboration platform, called Holodeck. Before the escape game I was able to check out the automotive experience, which was very much like the demo shown in this YouTube video...




A view from the line (queue) for the escape game experience... three people get to do this at a time.


Greg Jones, NVIDIA's Global Business Development Manager for VR, gave us a brief overview before starting.


In my VR 'play space' I had a super helpful NVIDIA staffer there ready to me going in the game. What a fun job! She even posed for this photo with the Vive Pro and Holodeck logo:)


These were my teammates; Julien - a French VR reporter, and Sarah - from the Chinese equivalent of Silicon Valley. We had the opportunity to chat while waiting in line.


Once we got started, we could see floating avatars of each other (from the waist up); check out the link below for a cool photo of the avatars in the VR scene (I would probably get in trouble if I posted it here). In addition to seeing each other, we could talk using the HMD's built-in mic and headphones. Right away, I started waving my hand and saying "Hi Sarah" and then she waved back, saying "Hi Dan" so I then know which avatar she was.

One person would say "hey, I found something" and we would gather and look at the clue... we could even grab an object out of another persons hand.

It was a super fun experience and with a little help from the staff, we managed to solve the room in the allotted 12 minutes!


Thanks NVIDIA, that was so much fun.

For BIM Chapters updates, follow @DanStine_MN on Twitter