MVR Blog Post One Step Beyond – How MVR aim to revolutionise Virtual Reality Often, projects come to our studio that present interesting and genuinely innovative propositions from budding entrepreneurs with vision, enthusiasm and the drive to introduce breakthrough concepts into highly competitive industries. Having worked with MVR for over a year now developing an innovative virtual reality headset, it’s clear to me that MVR Global are a start-up with this vision.
The product, the Ascend virtual reality headset, is a project that challenges the notion that the emerging virtual reality gaming market can only ever be for new experiences. One great drawback of current generation VR hardware is that it forgets everything that came before it, instead focusing on upcoming titles and bespoke (and often forgettable) mini-games. Sachin, Sachin and Koonal, who form the MVR Global team, had a clear insight that resonated with my own opinions. The fact that, for many gamers, experiences on previously released games form the foundation of their favourite memories and that nostalgia is something the games industry has been capitalising upon for a few years now with HD remasters of games sometimes 10 – 15 years old and the likes of Sony and Microsoft implementing cloud streaming systems for their consoles that allow players to replay older games. By conceptualising the industry’s first backwards compatible VR product, the MVR team are aiming to go one step further. More than just replaying older games, they want players to completely re-experience the places and characters, the highs of victory and the lows of defeat in games they so fondly remember from a truly new perspective, in first person virtual reality. This ambitious vision has bought with it some great challenges that we’ve worked hard to overcome during the research and development period.
To ensure compatibility with games not specifically designed for VR head-movement control, we’ve needed to implement 2D and 3D lens solutions for smartphone screen mirroring technology as well as working closely with a UK based electronics development firm, CircuitWorx, to develop a totally unique system for translating gyroscopically measured head-movement into traditional control input that any game, past or present, can interpret. With working prototypes of the electronics, headset and controllers, MVR recently exhibited alongside industry giants at EGX, the UK’s largest video games Expo, and are now looking to the future with the aim of launching their crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter in the coming months. I’m excited for the future of the project, there is still a lot of work to be done, but with the product taking shape quickly and momentum building, watch this space!