I'm standing in a small office in Seattle's Belltown neighborhood, just blocks from the gorgeous Olympic Sculpture Garden, where solid walls block the nearby environs. I've been invited to the darkest, most insulated room at the relatively new Reactor Accelerator, a tech-incubation office space. That’s because, for what I'm about to see, I need to be in a completely controlled environment.

Local engineer and designer Mark Haverstock hands me a headset and asks me to put it on. It looks a lot like the Oculus Rift, a virtual-reality headset that has exploded in the past year thanks to a millions-strong Kickstarter and tons of public appearances. This headset is black and lightweight, too, and it fits nice and snug on my head.

But the Oculus Rift is a standalone headset tethered to a computer, used mainly for sitting or standing in one place. The team behind Seattle's VRCade, who made their system from scratch, wants to free that experience and make it all-encompassing.

To that point, Haverstock hands me a pair of headphones and a plastic gun, while co-founder and CEO Jamie Kelly queues something up on a nearby PC. Once my headset screen flickers on, I'm standing in a virtual room that recalls the Doom series: a dark, neon-coated space base. I move my head around, and sure enough, my worldview moves along with it as if I'm really on a Mars outpost.

When I ask where the joystick is for moving around, though, Haverstock and Kelly laugh. No, dude. To walk around in the VRCade, you really walk around in the VRCade.

I answer that I'm terrified of running into something in the real world while my vision is obscured, but they insist I'll be fine. It turns out the game space's virtual walls correspond to the real ones in the admittedly small office I occupy in meatspace. I walk a few feet and raise the plastic gun to shoot at targets from various distances. It just plain works; my virtual gun never flickers or warps around in my vision. Even the audio follows me thanks to virtual surround sound.

After that, Kelly generates a stack of crates in the virtual world and asks me to kneel behind them and blind-fire my gun overhead without looking. I do as I’m told, and I can see the red flashes of my laser gun light up the floor in front of me as I do, even though I can't see what I'm shooting at. I'm completely protected down here on the floor. And I'm kind of freaking out. I've felt no 3D motion sickness (something I can't say for the Oculus Rift), and I've felt totally in control of this virtual space. It feels kind of badass to boot.

To really drive home what makes the full-room VRCade experience different, Haverstock takes my gun away while I'm still in headset mode. He walks a little ways away, holds it high in the air, and says, “Come get it.” I only have a floating, virtual version of the gun to guide me, and yet I can still walk to the appropriate point in the room, reach out, and grab the real-life gun where I think it should be.

That was the moment I became VRCade's latest slack-jawed convert.

From Wii remotes to full VR

The Seattle trio of Kelly, Haverstock, and software lead Dave Ruddell has been cooking VRCade in earnest since 2010, but the project started with some virtual-reality, laser-tag dreams Kelly had back when the Wii launched in 2006. “We were promised this natural controller, something that was very precise,” he says. “But the Wii only has a nunchuk and d-pad. You can't turn and aim independently. That was a nightmare for me.” It was a hacked version of Wii launch game Elebits, modified to let you tie one Wiimote to your head for aiming purposes, that made Kelly hopeful that he could one day pull off his fully immersive, first-person shooting dreams.

Since then, Kelly has bounced between odd jobs, including secretarial work and retail, as well as stints at Nintendo as a software tester and a street team member. Eventually, all three VRCade team members ended up at Seattle's F5 Networks—Kelly as a video producer, Ruddell as a software engineer, and Haverstock as a contracted building engineer.

While Haverstock and Ruddell have specific super-nerdy skills with college degrees to match, Kelly is the company's dreamer, the guy who has tried and failed a few times with wild ideas about how to make virtual-reality gaming work. His first idea, a twist on laser tag, was flat-out nuts: “What if you had a floor that was made up of 1'x1' squares that were pillars on pistons, and you could raise them up, so you could essentially create any level you wanted if you had a couple thousand of them?”

A year after the others shot that idea down, the team tried and failed to come up with an augmented-reality system that could paint real walls with virtual imagery (“we couldn't keep track of things like items and bullets”). After that, they gathered up $2,500 of inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensors to track joints and body movement, “but we quickly realized they were garbage” Kelly says.

By late 2012, word of the Oculus Rift’s take on virtual worlds had grown, but Kelly's dream always revolved more around an arena—“about eight players running and jumping in a game.” His eureka moment came in late 2012 when he started looking into something no other commercial-grade option had considered: motion-capture cameras.

“With those, we could get absolute position and great fidelity, but the capture volume would be limited and the cost would be insane,” Kelly says. Or so he thought. A new system from mo-cap company Optitrack caught his eye because it promised capture spaces as large as 11,000 square feet at a reasonable cost. The VRCade team purchased 12 of Optitrack’s lower-end cameras, thanks in part to a $20,000 investment from Haverstock’s dad. The lower-end cameras meant a more limited room size, but they still deliver the no-lag experience they wanted to test out. From there, they’d add trackable white dots to a headset and a prop (sword, gun, etc), then send that mo-cap data to be simulated live in-game.

Setting it all up

F5 Networks allowed the trio to set their cameras and computers up in a barren floor of the company's Seattle headquarters. From that point, the team only needed half a year to create its current prototype, a working demo arena coded in the semi-open Unity game engine. The ability to actually move around the space makes all the difference in bypassing the motion-sickness issues that plague many Oculus Rift users. (Those issues stem from "when you press up on a joystick and your eyes think you're moving forward, but your body thinks otherwise," Kelly clarifies.)

The backpack that VRCade users wear has little to do with tracking. Instead, it’s the team's first-pass way to house the system's battery and wireless video device. Once Haverstock's new 3D printer arrives, he plans to move those parts to the headset in a shrunken form that doesn’t impact performance. Even at a smaller size, the battery, which will also be swappable, should last long enough for hour-plus sessions. That more than fits the team's arena-arcade vision.

The headset itself houses a 1280x800 video panel “just like the Oculus Rift prototype," Kelly notes (update: the original version of this story mis-stated the resolution as dual 720p panels. Ars regrets the error), adding that the Rift's original dream video panels aren't even produced anymore. "We can order a few of them off eBay, while [Rift creator Palmer Lucky] can't just order thousands of them." Since VRCade's video screens also receive wireless signals from a PC, the resulting visuals—lag-free, mind you—aren’t dependent on being tethered to a high-powered machine that can produce convincing 3D visuals.

All these selling points go down on VRCade's "pro" list, but they’re countered by a giant con: that $20,000 entry cost, which would only grow with the team's dream of an 11,000-square-foot arena space. As such, they're not aiming their virtual crosshairs at anything like a Kickstarter campaign. Instead, Kelly dreams of VRCade beginning as a dual-use space: serious business space in the daytime; arcade-style, pay-as-you-go play center at night.

Kelly and his team are already well on their way to proving VRCade’s worth for more than just virtual play spaces. For one thing, they've loaded Google Sketchup 3D modeling files into the VRCade, then invited architects and clients to put the set on and walk through their potential new homes. The full-walking experience means builders and designers can enjoy an immediate sense of scale while considering, say, the size and placement of windows. After those demos, Kelly is always keen to ask the architects, "How much is this worth to you?" The answers have been pretty high.

Other recent VRCade converts include current and former US military personnel, who have remarked on how the new system compares to the most common training simulators. "A few people who've been in the military used this and said, 'Your system right here kicks the pants off of ours.' What if you could have [VRCade] in a truck that folds out and then drive up and have people train?" VRCade could do that, the team insists, and they could simulate everything from wind to weapon jams—and provide instant replays and performance analysis to boot.

VRCade’s presence at Seattle's Reactor Activator means the team is also meeting a lot of small-fry game makers who are working with engines like Unity. "It can take us as little as 10 minutes to get Unity apps running in VRCade," Kelly brags. A game made with VRCade in mind doesn't need animations coded for things like head bob, reloads, and the like; the motion tracking handles all of that. Smaller-scale proofs of concept aren't too far off from these developers, and the team already has a "VRDK" (virtual reality developer's kit) in the works to smooth the transition process for working first-person games.

Looking to the future

All of this talk is getting a bit ahead of the current state of things, though. The VRCade-specific apps—and the heavy-duty investors who could pump in the money needed to build VRCade's first dream center, are still in the future. A good VRCade game is going to need enough space to allow a lot of running around, after all. That's a serious chicken-or-egg hiccup; who's going to make a game that is logistically untestable? And who’s going to fund such a huge space for games that don’t exist yet?

In the meantime, the team members at least have nearly a full year of free office space and support at Reactor Activator, where they will get to sit elbow-to-elbow with other tech-obsessed dreamers. After successful demos at small Seattle events, they're gearing up for a public blitz at shows like GDC, perhaps even E3 2014.

That is long enough, Kelly believes, for his next-level VR system to hit that sweet spot between high concept and sellable potential. He's happy to point any doubters toward his VR peers at Oculus Rift.

"Head-mounted displays have been around for 30 years, but they've either really sucked or were outlandishly expensive," Kelly says. "There was no real reason for that industry to push forward. When [Oculus Rift creator] Palmer Lucky said, 'I can build one that's better and cheaper than anything out there,' the entire industry showed up. That's the same thing we're doing here.

"Right now, tracking yourself in VR space is a very elite, proprietary system," he continues. "There is nothing for the consumer market at all. Because it's not for consumers, it suffers from issues like sitting in a chair, using a mouse and keyboard to walk, dealing with a wire hanging from a boom on the ceiling, not tracking props... [They're] very finite. Our system is extremely open because it's designed from a gamer's perspective to take on all sorts of flexibility. Tons of people, tons of props, tons of movement, 60 frames-per-second, surround-sound, constant signals—standards that most industries don't need."