U.S.—An exciting, innovative new game for the HTC Vive, PlayStation VR, and Oculus Rift systems will trick your children into doing household chores for you.
The game, developed by ImmersionVR Sims Ltd, will make your kids think they’re building elaborate structures in Minecraft, pushing shelves up against doors to hold a horde of zombies at bay, and interacting with virtual Pokemon, when they’re really performing a variety of household tasks they’d otherwise eschew. One minigame, developed in conjunction with Nintendo, gets your kids to vacuum the entire house while they think they’re just vacuuming virtual ghosts in Luigi’s Mansion.
“Quick! You’ve got to stack up these blocks to build a fort or that horde of creepers is going to get you!” a virtual NPC yells at the player in one scene, prompting the player to frantically begin picking up clothes from the floor of their room and put them in the laundry basket in the real world. “Better hurry up! We’ve got a few other forts to build once this one is done!”
Playtests have shown kids happily build virtual forts and fend off digital enemies without having a single clue they’re actually doing something productive. “It was key for our game to succeed that the kids exerting themselves in our virtual world didn’t know they were actually being useful,” said one developer. “We found that they’ll happily play VR games for hours as long as they think they’re doing something solely in the virtual world.”
Software engineers made several major breakthroughs in VR tech during the game’s development, like using advanced room scanning and augmented reality to allow the game to see what chores need doing in your house and assign them to your kid in real time. Parents will need to install scanners in their house, yard, and car to get the most out of the system, should they want their kids to do advanced tasks like cleaning out their van or mowing the lawn.
The game quickly hit the bestseller lists on Steam, Amazon, and the PlayStation Store.
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