Pegasus: Challenge of Apollo

Welcome to Mount Olympus! Fly your very own Pegasus through Ancient Greece - explore the ruins, chase your competition and collect rings before time runs out. 

In Pegasus: Challenge of Apollo, guests done an HTC VivePRO VR headset and climb aboard a SoReal Omnidirectional VR chair. Functioning as motion bases, these chairs are capable of tilting along all axes, completing full spins, bouncing up and down, and providing haptic feedback. Pegasus' flight path is entirely driven by guest body-control: lean left to go left, right to go right, back to go up, and forward to go down.

We (a group of 5 graduate students) were tasked with developing an interactive VR experience unique to these chairs over the course of 16 weeks. We did this in prototyping phases, taking what we learned from development and playtesting results of one phases and incorporating those learnings into the next round of prototypes. The clip above shows some Phase 1 demos that hint at different elements (namely horse-riding and flight) that persist all the way through to the finished product. 

More than just concepts, we also prototyped and improved upon the technology we used as well. We ran weeks of VR motion sickness testing that included observations, guest feedback and two different industry-standard surveys. By using vignettes, altering turning radii and adjusting vertical mobility handling, we were able to cut motion sickness nearly in half for all guests.

Our final product was a highly-polished 3 minute flying experience ready for guests - complete with live scoreboard, line queue with safety video and live stream of current fliers and the likely wait time (over an hour when we had a school-wide festival), and safety warnings and measures. We designed our experience to function within the flow of a VR theme park and all of these additions helped add to the immersion.