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Week 7 - Ready Player One

The scene in Ready Player One, where Wade explains the 27 sectors of the OASIS is pretty essential, as it provides a lot of background and worldbuilding, context for the rest of the book. It would be a pretty good segment to produce in actual virtual reality too. As it’s just explanation, a lot of liberties could be taken with how it’s presented to the player. The creator could shuttle the viewer through each sector on a kind of conveyor belt. This would bypass one of the current limitations of VR, which is motion sickness, and the challenge of figuring out how to navigate a virtual space while staying relatively stationary in reality. Each sector could be presented as a single environment, surrounding the viewer, or extend in real scale. To enter the next sector, a floating doorway could separate the experiences. Because the world is supposed to be virtual, these liberties would be accepted more readily by the player. Because this scene is all about presenting the aspects of these separate “worlds,” it’s perfect to thrust a VR viewer into. Little interaction is required, all that is needed is to create a convincing feeling of space, and visual distinction between each environment. It’s an introduction, unfocused, to a world, which is exactly VR’s strength at the moment. It would allow the viewer to sit back, swivel their head, and just take it all in.

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