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Participant
May 15, 2016
Question

Galactica VR ride at Alton Towers theme park

Rode the new adapted Air ride @ Alton towers yesterday and to say it was underwhelming would be too kind. There is no sense of presense you get from the Oculus Rift/HTC Vive or the Gear VR I've tried which is odd as the ride supposedly uses the Gear VR?!? Juddery visuals/low fps with what looked like a complete lack of ATW left me feeling like I did when I originally tried VR in the 1990's - Interesting but certainly not compelling in any meaningful way.... so disappointing.

I did start to worry before getting on the ride as the people coming off before me looked bored not wow'ed. If people come away judging VR as a gimmick as a result of experiences like this it will be a real shame. It's like they strapped a DK1 onto a rollercoaster and said 'that'll do, we're done...'. If anything it took away from the rollercoaster experience and left little to no lasting impression...

7 replies

Up and Coming
May 15, 2016
Ok... I give up. What is ATW? I've seen it in posts a few times and could never work it out.

And my google-fu has failed me. Apparently, the abbreviation can mean "all the way" or "all things warcraft" or "approximate total weight" or "average tax wedge". Or a bunch of other stuff. None of which seems to fit, though.
PiranhaUKAuthor
Participant
May 15, 2016
Sorry ATW is A-sync timewarp which reprojects the previous frame a 2nd time to your new head position if it's about to drop below 90 FPS. It was added when the final 1.3 Driver version came out with the launch of the CV1 and massively improves the sense of presence and reduces motion sickness. 
Up and Coming
May 15, 2016
Hey, no need to apologise. My comment was directed to the community/forum as a whole - and it was a just a question due to my lack of knowledge - not intended as a criticism. (It was me that needed to get up to speed and not you that needed to alter your use of the term).

And thanks for the really good explanation. :smile: 
Shadowmask72
Honored Contributor
May 15, 2016
This is bad for VR. Period. 
System Specs: MSI NVIDIA RTX 4090 , i5 13700K CPU, 32GB DDR 4 RAM, Win 11 64 Bit OS.
PiranhaUKAuthor
Participant
May 15, 2016


This is bad for VR. Period. 


Couldn't agree more. I'm surprised at Alton Towers for rushing to get a ride using VR for the sake of it rather than waiting until the experience was something worthy of the term VR...


New Participant
July 13, 2016
I too was not impressed with this ride. VERY poor.
Inspiring
July 13, 2016
How disappointing! I was looking forward to that this summer! bah humbug ... oh well I shall continue my crusade with my Rift tour .... 30 people used it and counting and all loved it, a few are thinking of purchasing.

Hmmmm maybe I can get commission.
Core i7-7700k @ 4.9 Ghz | 32 GB DDR4 Corsair Vengeance @ 3000Mhz | 2x 1TB Samsung Evo | 2x 4GB WD Black ASUS MAXIMUS IX HERO | MSI AERO GTX 1080 OC @ 2000Mhz | Corsair Carbide Series 400C White (RGB FTW!) Be kind to one another :)