This last week or so I’ve been building a parallel world. I measured all of the sizes in a section of our lab — walls, floors, tables, and so forth. Then I built a computer graphic copy of that world, matching the real thing down to the centimeter.
I can walk around in my parallel version of our lab while wearing my Oculus Quest. As I walk from place to place in the room, all of the walls and tables are in exactly the right place.
In order to do this, I needed to find out a way to “register” exactly where I am in the real world, so that the virtual world will just snap into place. But once that is done, everything lines up.
Right now my virtual lab is just a blank slate — an empty canvas waiting to be filled. Hopefully soon it will be filled with experiments, from animated characters to four dimensional puzzles.
The real fun will come when I invite other people in to share this alternate version of physical reality with me. I wonder how much time we will end up spending there, and how we will feel when it is time to come back from the other world.