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Adventure group defeat zombies

On a cold sunny, final day of January, seven members of the adventure group met to experience the wonders of 3D virtual reality at VRVE centre Exeter. The nondescript building, rapidly being engulfed by new build housing gave no clues to the secrets within.

On entry it was shoes off (best Christmas socks, well remembered from last visit) and straight into brief explanation about how to fit and work the headsets and controls and then wow off into a virtual world of our own. The initial games were exercises to demonstrate how the controls worked and how to use them, such as picking up building bricks and stacking them, before petulantly knocking them over, only to have them immediately replaced at your workstation.

Finally, we then progressed into the real games, a variety to suit most tastes was available, and by the sounds vaguely intruding into my own world everybody else was also totally engrossed. Having started with a shooting game and becoming frustrated at my inability to reload ammunition, I then progressed into Ninja Fruit, fortunately not using a proprietary cooking machine, but using a massive samurai sword to frantically hack oncoming varieties of fruit to pieces.

We all joined up into a virtual shared world for our final game, defending a castle from invading monsters using bows and arrows (good job we have had previous archery training) to stop them.

In what seemed like a very short time we were informed that our time was up and we had to return to reality.

Headsets off, shoes on and stumbling out into the sunshine for the journey home, as one person remarked “I can see why this keeps the kids locked in their bedrooms”.

George Mansfield