Strap the future to your face - a Virtual Reality experience

"We're going to need a bigger tripod"

I'm holding a cup of tea in one hand and a 5cm black plastic cube in the other while my host goes and gets a much bigger tripod. Of course he has several around the flat. I'm struggling to understand what's going on. The simple presence of Vinay Gupta, (for it is he!) partially explains my confusion, but there's more - he's brought me over to his place to show me the VR rig that he's just acquired: an HTC Vive and I'm expecting to have a go. "It's something about these windows..." he mutters as he offers me a much bigger tripod plate.

One of the downsides of having a Bond-villain rooftop lair with line of sight to the bank skyscrapers of Canary Wharf in the distance is that the huge windows, tonnes of chrome and wall-sized mirrors play havoc with the infra-red beacons of the HTC Vive (that's what I'm holding in the non-tea hand). So the beacons currently need to be placed in such a way as to minimize their exposure to big reflective surfaces. I put my tea down and focus on attaching the beacon to the tripod plate. I do briefly consider suggesting that perhaps the bedroom has fewer reflective surfaces, but manage to bite my tongue in time - I really don't want my first modern hifi VR experience to take place in Gupta's boudoir.

I have in the last year or so tried out the Google Cardboard, Samsung VR approach where you embed your mobile phone in some plastic or cardboard rig that then sits in front of your eyes as comfortably as those goggles you had to wear in Chemistry. I found having Bjork stand in front of me and sing to me quite an uncomfortable experience, I watched some horse-racing simulation that was so glitchy I felt too sick to even contemplate doing the thing sponsored by Red Bull, well you can imagine, can't you?

Back at Gupta's, after some more set up, involving repeatedly pacing the floor between the sofa and the armchair to successfully mark out the playing area and calibrate to the floor by dropping the controllers (gently) onto the rug, Vinay asks, "so do you want the slow, gentle intro or do you want the 'holy fucking shit' experience?"

Naturally, I'm an HFS kind of guy, so I went for the latter.

I was lulled into a false sense of security by the gentle ILM logo and then laughed with recognition as the words appeared before me "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away" followed by the familiar scrolling intro. And then. Then I'm on Tatooine. And oh the Millenium Falcon is flying above me and oh oh oh oh oh oh nerdgasm! Next thing I know, the Falcon has landed almost on top of me and Han Solo is talking to me telling me to pull a platform down and press buttons by reaching out with my controller. I am helping Han Solo! R2D2 has joined me and then suddenly I'm being shot at, R2 is ejecting a light saber from one of his orifices and it's battle time with some storm troopers. I want to run, but whichever way I go I can't go beyond the turquoise cage that shows the edge of the game area.

No spoilers, but of course I see them off without too much damage to my virtual self. We fade to black and credits and I gently pull off the headset and put down the controllers. It's only now that I really feel what was going on. My heart is going like a steam hammer and I'm shaking. I've actually had stormtroopers in the room shooting at me and I deflected their blasters quite a lot. And Han Solo talked to me. But I'm in Tottenham not Tattoooine. Words just can't. I just can't even.

I have another cup of tea, while Vinay cues up the next, well it's not a game is it? It's an experience, I mean this nothing like sitting in front of a telly with an Xbox controller in my hand - I thought I'd done "immersive" but this is more like immersive theatre than any console I've used.

"OK I'm just getting you into The Lab", Vinay says as he's doing some weird movement with the controllers that means nothing out here but clearly is very important in there.

He hands me the headset - "ok there's a bit of an instructional demo that I've seen a million times, here you go..."

Now I'm in a big white space with one of those floating drones that looks like a giant mechanical eye-ball. And it's talking to me, taking me through the functions of the controls I'm holding, there's a couple of side buttons I hadn't noticed before and now I also know that the big round clicker on top is a trackpad. He leaves me blowing up baloon animals for a while.

Then I go into The Lab. It looks like a lab on science fair day. There are exhibits all around and each has a slightly glowing sphere next to it. I find that I can teleport around by squeezing the trigger and pointing in the direction I want to go, this means I can walk around without, y'know having to walk around, but I think I'd like to be able to walk around somehow. I'm being told that I need to pick up a sphere and put it on my face in order to go into a section, but it takes me a few tries to learn how to do both actions. And then suddenly I'm on the edge of a cliff overlooking a huge range of mountains and valleys. I can teleport around here too! And there's a little robot doggy who runs around after me when I move. I can't quite get him to jump off the cliff though. Next I go up to a massive catapult that launches little talking cannon ball drones at a big room full of cardboard boxes and gas tanks. I have some fun launching the drones at the boxes and making the gas tanks explode. It's again, a really visceral experience, it feels like I'm pulling something back with lots of resistance. Similarly, I get to defend a castle armed only with a longbow and arrows. Once I've got the hang of gettin the arrow on the string and pulling it back in line with my eye, I start enjoying making the little enemies explode or burn in boiling oil. It does get a bit glitchy in there though. There's obviously a lot going on. I haven't asked Vinay about the full spec of the PC this is running on, but everything has its limits. Out on the sofa, Vinay has ice-cream and is encouraging me to go to the Iceland world. Ah. This is perfect. I'm on a grassy plain with gentle hills behind me and in the distance. My doggy friend is here - there are sticks on the ground for me to pick up and throw for him, but I don't master getting him to run after them in this session. Anyway it's just nice to be in something that approximates nature, the grass looks like grass as long as you don't look too closely. I sit down at last on a little grassy lump, I want to pick bits of grass but it's not really there. I want to lie down, but I don't trust that I can do that without getting tangled in cables. Next time. OK it's time for a break.

Gupta is grinning on the edge of the game area. We talk (in between me going "Oh wow!") about where this is going. The market has got to be at least that of all other media combined. This competes with everything. I can imagine, in a small way, just taking this stuff out to people at work to have the mind-blowing experience I've just had. I have a strong feeling that this is still just the beginning and what happens when these things are networked!?!

With another cup of tea, I go and look out of the window. A buddha is seated on the deck, just watching all this nonsense. I look down at "reality" on the ground. A group of Africans have some sort of camp next to the self-storage place by the canal. There are lots of white goods, washing machines and freezers, some sort of trade is going on, but who knows what? I realise that I'm now sensitised to everything that's going on having spent time in a place where any movement or change in the environment could be significant.

A deep breath then and into the last world. This is Tilt Brush and once I'm in there, I realise that I could have and should have been screenshotting my experience. Tilt Brush feels a bit like an early PC paint program but there is no simple 2D canvas, you paint in the air around you. One of the controllers is a pen/brush which paints when you squeeze the trigger and move your hand around. The other has a variety of pallettes for you to choose colour and texture but also tools for erasing, undo-ing actions and taking screenshots. So yeah, this is what mine looked like inside.

I do lots of swirly things around my head. Again, I want to have more space to move in and to step back from the work, but it's amazing, you can create a structure and then walk around and through it. So many possibilities, this was the place I could easily have stayed all day.

But out in the real world the sun was starting to go down. I'd been playing for three hours and I was really really tired, I guess just from having been to so many places and done so many different things, my brain and body were just zonked. I said my goodbyes and thank you and took the lift downstairs. I had a weird sort of feeling like I was intoxicated but knowing that I wasn't (unless that wasn't really Tetley tea...) or that I'd just woken up from a deep sleep and my body hadn't quite caught up with me. Highly sensitive and aware of my whole body moving through space and very tired but also super eager to get back in there another day.