 virtual reality makes a lot of people sick roller coasters make a lot of people sick today I'm gonna put those two things together and hopefully not get sick I'm at Six Flags in Maryland to ride the new Superman virtual reality roller coaster it's a roller coaster plus a Samsung Galaxy Gear put over your face the whole thing has been synced up so that the roller coaster ride becomes a virtual experience if you have a virtual reality simulation where you are going very quickly through a simulated world you tend to get nausea because you don't feel the movement and the rotation and everything but if you have this motion in the real world and a virtual reality simulation that is precisely synced to this real notion then it's still a roller coaster but you don't get any nausea, you don't get dizzy so the key is to precisely synchronize the virtual reality ride to the real ride how do you make sure it's precisely synchronized? Well we have a special we call it the black box that's traveling with the train, it's equipped with sensors these sensors are tracking the rotation of the coaster wheel, of one wheel of the roller coaster so we know exactly where we are in the track with our train and this information gets transmitted to the headsets, to the VR headsets 30 times a second and they make out of that a fluent virtual reality ride Up to the man! The greatest saving policewoman fell out of the sky after being grabbed by a police man Oh God! Oh God! Oh God! So I just got off the Superman VR coaster and it was terrifying in the best way possible. With virtual reality you can exaggerate everything about the coaster you can turn a 45 degree climb into a 90 degree drop plus you can't see when a drop or turn is going to come so it really catches you by surprise the technology really changes the experience I think it's something you have to try to really understand it's not a virtual reality experience, it's not a roller coaster experience it's something different, it's something new. So we're already capable of doing this with just an ordinary Samsung smartphone, what do you feel is going to happen in the next few years as this technology gets more advanced? There's a lot coming. Actually I think we will have things like augmented reality so you're not encapsulated in virtual reality which is cool and immersive but we can copy things into the real world so we might have see-through, so stereoscopic vision through the hardware or maybe things like the Microsoft HoloLens that would allow to project some things into the real world that you're actually watching, you don't even have a display I think this will be the next step. So you think I'll be able to ride a coaster and have augmented reality all at the same time? You see actually the normal coaster as it is but you have a monster attacking the rails or whatever that would be possible. But I think these are two different approaches and two different kinds of attractions and what we have here is already a totally new attraction Hey it's Ben Pak with The Verge Okay