On the other hand, Thorpe Park in the UK is planning a very mysterious ride, with celebrity Derren Brown. Alton Towers' ride takes you on a journey through space, whilst Six Flags has several rides, ranging from a Superman experience to the New Revolution space battle. Both Alton Towers' Galactica ride in the UK and Six Flags across the USA are using this tech to revamp older rollercoasters. There is functionally no difference between this set-up and the consumer version, which makes it rather effective. The main contender is the cheapest - Oculus's Gear VR headset with a Samsung mobile phone built in.

Each features a ride that takes account of the g-force and direction of travel to really immerse you in a strange virtual journey. All over the world, theme parks are designing or revamping rollercoasters to have virtual reality headsets attached to each seat. These are both virtual rollercoasters and not. (Which is going to be a huge problem with Playstation VR too, but we're guessing that they'll just focus on keeping poly counts low, taking its graphics back to the PS3 era…) Prev of 12 Next Prev of 12 Next Yet, from the early preview code we've seen, Planet Coaster is throwing a *lot* of polygons around - and the whispers at that it won't be able to stay that pretty and hit the 90fps that makes for comfortable VR viewing.

Obviously, the dream would be for Frontier's upcoming Planet Coaster to support VR, like their Elite Dangerous did. That throws up something like Operation Wolf - or a rollercoaster. Why do so many developers make VR Rollercoasters? Well, the easiest VR experience is one that has the player sitting down in one spot, with a fixed path going by that the player can look around and control their passage through.

It also has the added, uh, 'bonus' of sometimes inducing exactly the kind of sickness that you get from a really impressive rollercoaster (try 'Cyber Space' below for the full effect.) But VR's inherent sense of presence makes the managed terror of roller coasters all the more impressive. Rollercoasters have been part of gaming's heritage since the earliest days, back as far as 1983's 3D Crazy Coasters on the Vectrex.

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