Over the past year, this klatch of game designers, software developers, artists, and the curious have gathered to sample the latest innovations in virtual reality.

Inside Hack/Reduce, a community hackerspace, they are dragging tables into place and powering up PCs. A few presenters are already donning Oculus Rift headsets, clunky mask-like gadgets often worn to survey the virtual worlds inside.

CAMBRIDGE — On a weeknight in Kendall Square, members of Boston Virtual Reality are doing last-minute prep for their monthly meet-up.

The group’s co-organizer, Jeffrey Jacobson, 53, of EnterpriseVR, has watched VR technology migrate over the past two decades from applications in aviation, architecture, and engineering to its current position: poised, finally, to go mainstream with the introduction of affordable VR head mounted displays. In December, Samsung released its Gear VR headset at the holiday-friendly price of $199; Google leapt into the spotlight last June, releasing a cardboard VR headset kit. (As with the Samsung, a smartphone is necessary to complete the VR experience.)

Many in Boston’s thriving community of game developers have embraced VR, and the creative explorations are well underway. At monthly events like this, local creators can meet each other, show off and share their work, and nudge the frontier of a technology that, after decades of development, seems to be reaching its moment.


“It’s a little like the invention of film,” says Jacobson. “When film was first invented, the movies weren’t even movies, they were just film clips, like the train coming at the audience. Then it turned into little vignettes. Then as people got really comfortable with the medium, you got full-length features. That’s happening from the ground up.”

Jacobson, whose recent work in VR has focused on the construction industry, was demonstrating a “WorldViz” VR system at his table. Using an Oculus Rift headset — which resembles something like massive, opaque ski goggles tethered to a PC tower by a thick cable — users can survey immersive 3-D models of interior spaces, swiftly arranging virtual furniture and bulky medical equipment with a simple hand controller. Jacobson envisions more construction and architecture firms adopting similar technology to prevent mishaps and oversights, long before any ground is broken.


Across the room, Jeff Bail, 40, a senior software engineer at simulation technology firm VT MÄK in Cambridge, adpated two of his company’s simulation products to display through an Oculus headset. A resulting flight simulator made this user feel airborne, trailing virtual fighter jets over the Himalayas (or the flatlands of Texas, depending on selection). My inner ear struggled with my brain to make sense of this illusory movement through space. The “flight” left me slightly dizzy as I “came out” of the experience.

A few tables down, Jim Susinno’s demonstration offers a selection of immersive electronic landscapes. Using a game controller to navigate, one can go from gliding through a sea of crimson neon lasers, to floating above the buildings of a glimmering city, to drifting around the endless corridors of an ancient temple. The fantastic expanse extends in every direction, and it feels like you’re there.

A search on Meetup.com, where Boston Virtual Reality posts notice of its gatherings (the next one will take place Feb. 25 at the Cambridge Innovation Center) reveals no less than 130 homegrown VR communities around the world. These small groups are helping to identify the technological and conceptual challenges presented by VR in these early stages.


John Ryding samples some of the technology. Michele McDonald for The Boston Globe/Globe Freelance

“There’s a lot that has to be learned — what works, and what doesn’t work,” says Arthur Van Hoff, CTO of Jaunt, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based company focused on the live-action potential of VR. “We’re trying narratives, we’re trying music, we’re trying documentary. How do you direct the attention of the user? How do you light the scene? Where do you put the cameraman? How do you act? It’s all new.”

Among Jaunt’s innovations is a camera that records 3-D stereoscopic video and couples it with immersive sound. (Hearing your environment in VR is crucial to achieving a sense of “presence.”)

In one Jaunt demonstration, you can sit close enough to a string quartet that you’ll worry about getting poked by a bow. Another scene puts you near a superstar DJ and a crowd of thousands. In another you’re frantically scanning the corridors of a spacecraft under siege by aliens and watching helplessly as colleagues are dragged off, screaming for help.

“You can see a lot of those analogies with early film,” says Van Hoff. “At first they used stage actors. They acted like they were on stage and it didn’t work. And here we have the same thing. We’re using movie acting as a proxy for VR, and we don’t know if that’s going to work.”

VR creators are faced with figuring out how to tell a story without all kinds of traditional cinematic elements we’ve come to rely on. Even the frame is gone when the images completely surround you.


As content creators explore this new medium, the marketplace is scrambling to prepare as well.

The Irvine, Calif.-based Oculus VR — acquired by Facebook for $2 billion earlier this year — plans to release a public version of its Rift headset this summer. The Rift, which is currently only available to developers, has already evolved through three prototypes since launching in 2012 with a $2.4 million Kickstarter campaign.

Jeff Bail (left) shows Chad Elliott a program at a Boston Virtual Reality event. Michele McDonald for the Boston

Meanwhile, Samsung’s Gear VR — a collaboration with Oculus that employs a Galaxy Note 4 phablet as a display that can be mounted within a wireless headset — has released an “Innovator Edition” with a $199 pricetag. And other competitors are lining up: Sony has been showing demos of its Morpheus headset, and a handful of low-tech options like the Dodocase and Google Cardboard (both of which pair easily assembled cardboard headsets with users’ mobile phones) and the $99 Zeiss VR One are sprouting up.

VR remains an imperfect technology — home systems would require a hefty amount of computing power, and wireless systems have a tendency to heat up the device and eat up its battery — but all it takes is one experience to get a sense of its power and potential.

Jeff Bail experienced his own moment of revelation when trying out the latest Rift prototype, dubbed “Crescent Bay,” at the Oculus Connect conference in Hollywood in September.

“It wasn’t so much the technological features,” he says. “It was the fact that about halfway through I realized, ‘I need to have this. I don’t know when, it may be six months, it may be a year, but eventually I gotta have this in my house.”


Michael Andor Brodeur can be reached at mbrodeur@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @MBrodeur.