Flap Your Arms And Fly Free With Birdly & Oculus Rift

Oculus Rift is no stranger to innovation, having inspired many crazy gaming mods and developments over the last two years, but the latest work to come from a team of students at Zurich University of the Arts may be the maddest one we’ve seen yet. Birdly is a special installation that combines the 3D virtual reality headset of the Oculus Rift with a custom-built “bird” interface.

The Birdly is equipped with a fan at the front that changes the speed as you flap your arms into the hydraulic assisted… erm, thing. The flappy table thing measures your movement and translates that into the 3D simulation, which is then fed back to you via the first and of course the fan at the front to give you a sensation of flying. Elevation and speeds can be controlled by leaning forwards and back, flapping your arms, gliding and leaning. If you look closely, the user not only has to flap the arms, but can also rotate the tips of the wings using his hands.

No only does this simulation give you the visual aspect via Oculus Rift, the physical workout via the flappy table device and the sense of speed from the fan, but it’ll also provide you with olfactory senses too, as you fly over different landscapes in the simulation you’re treated to different smells, awesome.

[vimeo width=”800″ height=”450″]http://vimeo.com/91069214[/vimeo]

This looks like a lot of fun, but it also looks like a seriously brutal workout on your arms. I suspect those hydraulics are quite easy to maneuver, but a couple of hours on this thing will no doubt be more fun that lifting weights.

Thank you Gizmodo for providing us with this information.

Image courtesy of Gizmodo.