Editor’s Note: In this weekly column, David Robustelli will breakdown the latest rapid prototype he and his team at CapitolaVR have created for VR and/or AR. They are responsible for games like Duckpocalypse as well as prototype projects such as HoloLens Golf and Pokemon GO for HoloLens. Check back each weekend for new prototypes! You can see the previous entry here.

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When we received our new Vive trackers, we wanted to create something that adds value to a VR experience by enabling a second user to participate in the VR experience without the need to wear another headset.

In one of our previous posts we showed a VR mirror tool which allowed participants outside of VR to witness what the VR user was seeing. With the new trackers we wanted to bring this to the next level by enabling some form of interactivity between both users (headset and tablet), making it a multiplayer VR experience.

The idea behind this concept is to give a second player outside of VR a window into the virtual world. By tracking the position and rotation of the tablet it functions as an actual window or portal to the virtual environment. A second tracker is than attached on the user’s ‘tracker hat’ to define the distance and angle towards the tablet, allowing us to stretch the image into the desired perspective. The end result is similar to what HTC showed off at CES earlier this year.

The technique works very well with just a tiny bit of latency caused by our quick networking setup, but the idea is there. It is great to see how the trackers can be used to create a multiplayer experience with only one headset. This concept shows the possibilities of how a second user can see and interact with the virtual environment and how the user in VR is able to interact with the user holding the tablet. It is a technique with lots of possibilities that can only make VR experiences even more immersive and interesting from a multiplayer point of view in all kinds of possible settings. Next steps for us now are to see how we can actually create a game concept with this technique allowing one or more tablet users to step in the headset wearer’s VR world and join the experience.

This is a guest contribution by David Robustelli, Head of Digital at CapitolaVR.