Who will be that hero who brings Barack Obama and an HTC Vive together?
After watching the above footage of U.S. President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel seeing through hand-held AR/VR, I want nothing more than to drown out the non-stop 2016 election coverage with videos of world leaders in the Vive. Holding a VR headset to your face and being fully immersed in walk-around VR are two completely different experiences.
Obama punching blue and red orbs flying at him to the tune of Bohemian Rhapsody is the video you didn’t know you wanted until you read this sentence. But now you want to see this and so do I. With a replacement taking office less than a year from now, here’s hoping that, as a lame duck, Obama will have some opportunities to use hand-controlled or room-scale VR before he leaves office and that there are cameras in the room to film the reaction.
It’s not new for the world’s rich, famous and powerful to experience VR, but there are precious few videos of these firsts in public view. The Vive’s walk-around hand-controlled VR experiences make for entertaining viewing but I would be very interested to watch how famous people interact with something like Job Simulator or Tilt Brush. Capturing that kind of footage requires a lot of foresight and planning, however, and the HTC Vive only started shipping to consumers this month. As high quality wired VR continues shipping throughout 2016 there will be a lot more of these kinds of videos on the way.
