Room-Scale VR Turns Your Whole Body Into a Game Controller

Raw Data is a first-person shooter that makes you a jumping, shooting, crouching, katana-slicing action hero. Your living room may never be the same.

When virtual reality first crawled back onto the scene, many people cautioned that it would be wonderful for gaming---but not for first-person shooters. After all, playing with a traditional gamepad, with thumbsticks controlling your point of view, leads pretty quickly to simulator sickness. That hasn't changed. What has changed is our input devices; the arrival of dedicated VR controllers, like those shipping with the HTC Vive, allows us to use our bodies as controllers, and controllers as our tools.

And in the case of Raw Data, an upcoming co-op title from Survios, those tools happen to be your last line of defense against a horde of robots and drones. Put it all together in the room-sized playspace that the Vive enables, and you're talking about being the hero of your own action movie—shooting, ducking, spinning, and katana-slicing your way through waves of enemies. Survios calls it "active VR," and they're right; a round can take less than 10 minutes to play, but you'll feel as though you did a lot more than just play a videogame.