How The Matrix inspired a virtual experience that you can feel in real life
- Steve Zhao’s favourite film helped him develop virtual reality gaming experiences for his company, Sandbox VR
- He was inspired to create a simulation so immersive that if has an effect on how people really feel
Set in a parallel near future, science-fiction classic The Matrix (1999), by sibling directors Lana and Lilly Wachowski, stars Keanu Reeves as a man on a mission to free the human race from a computer simulation that uses humanity as an energy source for machines that control the world.
Steve Zhao, chief executive of Hong Kong-based Sandbox VR, which provides immersive group virtual-reality-gaming experiences, explains how it changed his life.
When I first saw The Matrix, I was in high school and studying computer science. The film took something I was learning about and put it into science fiction. It was a captivating experience.
I was impressed by the fact that if you die in the matrix, you die in real life. It’s a simulation that’s so real and so immersive that what you experience affects real life.
I would play games such as Super Mario, where you look into the screen and you’re far away from the game character. But The Matrix was the first time I felt it was possible to make yourself the main player. That was eye opening. There was so much more you could do. You could embody the character itself. It planted an idea in my mind – and in a lot of other people’s.
But this was all just science fiction for a long time. I tried the Oculus (VR headset) when it first came out and thought: “Wow.” But it was still just for hobbyists. Then Oculus got taken over by Facebook.
My company at the time was failing. It was called Blue Tea Games and we attracted a lot of female gamers with narrative-driven PC adventure games. But the iPhone was unveiled and all of a sudden, around 2009, there was a new platform for our audience to play games outside the PC. I saw how we had failed: we followed the market instead of leading it.
So we went back to the drawing board. The matrix was something we’d always wanted to replicate, and now it was time to create our own – to distil the technology and use it across different experiences. We wanted to create a full-body VR experience that was like the matrix – a world so real that people wanted to live there. Your experiences would impact you in a way that felt realistic. I always wanted to create games like that.
When we launched in Hong Kong, we blasted the air conditioning but people still got sweaty. Their hearts were beating fast and they were getting goosebumps. As a game developer, you want people reacting like that, viscerally and realistically.
It was like a sci-fi experience that we didn’t think would be available during our lifetime, and now it was something we were building ourselves. It’s been rewarding.
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