Adapting Real Life Pool To Virtual Pool

ForeVR Pool Development Insight

Creating ForeVR Pool was certainly a very fun and interesting challenge! Adapting a real world game into VR is something we have a lot of experience with. Each game we have adapted has had its own unique challenges, but pool might have been our biggest challenge! Our goal was, and is, to create a fun and immersive virtual pool experience that you would want to play with your friends and family. One of the biggest obstacles to contend with was creating that feeling that you are holding a cue. As most of our players know, the headset prefers controllers to be in front of you for accurate tracking purposes. When you play pool in real life most players hold their back hand pretty far back on the cue and away from the front of their face for an extended period of time, this is something we have found the headset really struggles with. Our approach to overcoming this was to move the back hand closer to the other hand, to ensure players would have optimal tracking at all times. We hope this gives context to players as to why the hands are a little closer than they would like in real life. 

The other major design challenge is the fact you don’t have a solid surface to plant your hand on to line up your shot. This means your hands are floating in the air making it hard to line up a stable shot. To solve this we introduced the ability to ‘lock’ the cue once you’re lined up so that it holds position. To help in lining up a shot the game introduces a slight lag to movement to smooth it out. This is similar to how cameras use auto stabilization so pictures and videos aren’t so shaky. Without these aids the game becomes exceedingly hard to play breaking immersion and causing it to not feel not much like pool.

We love hearing player feedback and if there are experiences you want to highlight and tell us about please let us know! If you have ideas on things you would like to see come to pool we are all ears! Send it to us here!