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Interactive Lab bring something you never knew you wanted to try to this year’s VRLA Summer Expo, virtual reality room-scale and untethered trike racing.

You know when you see something completely new and unexpected and want to try it immediately? Interactive Lab is a Russian studio who’s made the pilgrimage to the US west coast to join in VRLA’s 2016 Summer Expo – running August 5-6 at the LA Convention Center – and they’ve brought something altogether unique along to show.

Interactive Lab brought their first untethered VR experience to the SVVR Expo in May, which utilised Optitrack motion capture systems and a Samsung Gear VR headset to give a user freedom to explore virtual, room-scale environments captured through photogrammetry. At VRLA’s 2016 Summer Expo, the team return with a new motion captured experience with a twist – room-scale, untethered Trike racing.

The experience Interactive Lab are calling ‘VReal’, features a futuristic VR environment into which the player is placed whilst they’re sat atop, and asked to control, a motorised trike. Once again, optical motion capture is being employed with not only the player’s Oculus Rift head-strap sporting markers, but the trike’s handlebars too – bringing your vehicle’s physical orientation into the virtual realm.

As you can see by the image above, the company have gone to town with the production design for the VR environment itself, which features a small figure-8 track for the player to tear around that wouldn’t look out of place in the last Tron movie. My first thought while watching the test footage above was just how well VR presence could potentially be reinforced when real world locomotion and forces are acting upon the player. This could be quite the ride.

Interactive Lab say that, although the test footage video above featured cables trailing somewhat incongruously from the trike, the final experience at VRLA this week will be entirely untethered. So yes, VR trike racing, a thing I never knew I wanted to try, and now cannot wait to. If you’re also interested too, head to the Interactive Lab stand at the VRLA Summer Expo. Road to VR readers using this link will receive a 15% discount off the two-day pro pass.

Road to VR are Media Sponsors of the 2016 VRLA Summer Expo