Simulating Skydiving Experience in Virtual Reality

As an exciting extreme activity, skydiving is gaining popularity in recent years, especially, among the younger group. However, due to the danger raised by skydiving, most first-time players are afraid to try. Therefore, indoor VR-enhanced skydiving activities tend to become potential substitutes. In response to this trend, we propose a stand-alone, easy-to-setup, and physics-based approach to simulate the skydiving experience in virtual reality. With our approach, when users stand in an arbitrary room with two VR controllers held in their hands, their virtual skydiving experiences, such as jumping down from a helicopter, tracking forward, backward, or rotating, deploying the parachute, landing on an island, etc., can be simulated in their VR headsets realistically through aerodynamics laws. Through the numerical experiment results and user study feedback, we validate that simulating virtual skydiving experiences with our approach is realistic compared to real skydiving experiences