Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell partnered with Dutch video game company Spill Games earlier this year with the intent of developing and publishing at least three mobile titles in the near future. That endeavor appears to be moving forward as planned but in the interim, Bushnell has another project on his plate
Bushnell and partner Jason Crawford have launched a new virtual reality company called Modal VR that’s unlike anything we’ve seen to date.
Modal is a hardware and software company that more or less aims to create a VR play land of sorts.
Traditional arcades were popular decades ago as they allowed people to play games using hardware that was cost prohibitive to own. Why spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on hardware when you can spend the afternoon playing a variety of games with just a handful of quarters?
Chuck E. Cheese, which was founded by Bushnell, was just that – an arcade in which kids could play games without having to own a particular console.
That’s kind of what Modal is going after. As TechCrunch explains, its proprietary hardware – a wireless VR platform that utilizes a full-body tracking suit and an array of sensors – can support multiple users in an area as large as 900,000 square feet with less than 10ms of latency. Considering that a football field with its two end zones is only 57,000 square feet, that’s an absolutely massive amount of real estate in which to roam freely while in the virtual world.
The catch, however, is that neither Bushnell nor Crawford have plans to market Modal’s technology directly to consumers. Instead, the duo will be presenting the hardware to developers at which point they can use it for themselves or create apps for enterprise clients (like arcades or family fun centers) and sell them through Modal’s app store.
https://www.techspot.com/news/66651-modal-vr-atari-co-founder-industrial-grade-platform.html
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