I’ve been spending more time in VR lately since I got a new VR rig.  This technology is fascinating to me, even though I am fully aware that with one bad eye I can’t quite fully experience things exactly as intended, but I think, with the gear I have, I get about as close as I ever will.

On that note, last night Kevin and I were playing Beat Saber – a game where you hold two light sabers, one in each hand, play an awesome some song, and try to keep up with the beat by slicing “beat blocks” in the correct orientation that are flying at you while also avoiding huge slab walls also flying directly at you.  Well, my VR play space isn’t exactly huge and the room has furniture against the walls.  On one of those pieces of furniture was a really neat “Plasma Ball” on a stand that Kevin had gotten for Christmas one year when he was little.  This is one of those balls that displays lightnng bolts shooting out from the center, and you can touch the ball anywhere and your touch attracts the lightning to your hand as it strikes.  Very cool.  It was pretty old, and we had found it again when we cleaned out the garage.  That means it was tucked away in its box for about 7 years, unused.  When we dug it out, we were shocked it even worked.  So I cleaned it up and displayed it in our game room.

You can already pretty much see exactly where I’m going with this, right?  Yup, Kevin was getting pretty heavy into an intense section of a Linkin Park song, slamming through his beats in VR as I watched his progress on the computer monitor.  He was intent on breaking my score, which wasn’t very high anyway–I hadn’t even managed to finish the entire song–when I heard a loud BOOM and a crash of shattering glass.  For a second I thought it was just another effect in the game before realizing the sound didn’t come from the VR headset like the music was, it came from a different part of the room.  Kevin, still in VR and finishing the song, yelled “What was THAT?”  I turned to see the Plasma ball, completely shattered and large glass chunks along with tiny shards of glass, all over the furniture and carpet.  I only wish I had a video camera rolling or was at least looking in that direction to see the explosion (or implosion) to know just how far in radius I need to be looking for shards of glass… and just to be able to say I saw it.  No one actually saw the impact or the explosion, except maybe the puppies who may have been lounging on the couch in the game room, as they often do.  I have no doubt that if they were there at the time, the explosion would have instantly scared them into leaving in a big hurry anyway.  They weren’t in the room afterward, so who knows.  The power to the ball was off, completely disconnected from power by a smart switch I had setup, so when it exploded, at least there was no electricity to further exacerbate the situation.

I was pretty shocked afterward, since I could poke this ball a little and it would indent, so I had assumed all along that it was some type of plastic.  Nope, it was actually extremely thin glass, apparently, and since I had shined it up really good to make iut look nice, hundreds of invisible, tiny shards of it were all over the place.  And Kevin had been playing in bare feet.  

I spent the next couple of hours cleaning up chunks of glass from the floor and furniture and vacuuming up every piece too small to pick up by hand.  Every time I thought I was done, I’d move around while looking at the floor or a piece of furniture and see a sparkle–another tiny piece of glass–just waiting to cut someone.  It took quite awhile to even risk walking around a little in the game room before I didn’t think I’d slice my foot open if I were barefoot.  I always wear socks though, unlike Kevin, but that just means I’d probably track glass shards throughout the rest of the house, and we definitely don’t want the puppies to injure their feet at all, so I went over and over it again and again.  I think I went through the Dyson handvac’s full battery charge three times last night before I was done.  That’s not saying much, as the battery only lasts about 15 minutes at most, going from fully charged to fully empty.  That might seem to indicate a battery issue, but it’s completely normal, given the power it has for a hand vac.  I mean it REALLY SUCKS. Literally.  Dyson vacuums are awesome, and whenever possible, I always use them at maximum power.  I figure if you’re gonna vacuum, VACUUM.

Since I’m currently obsessed with VR, Next time I’ll post some more on my experiences in it.  And right on time too, as I’m finishing up the book Ready Player Two this week–another book about the future and VR’s possible disturbing role in it.  Stay tuned.