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VRFC is bringing football to virtual reality headsets

The first-person five-a-side title is the first of its kind for the VR arena.
The first-person five-a-side title is the first of its kind for the VR arena. The first-person five-a-side title is the first of its kind for the VR arena.

Every football fan has day-dreamed of setting the Premier League alight and being heralded as the next big thing – now a new VR game is aiming to capture a sense of that feeling.

VRFC or Virtual Reality Football Club is out on Tuesday for PlayStation VR, Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, and is the first VR attempt at a first person football game.

Of course, asking players to invest in full body sensors to fully track their movements is out of the question, so VRFC uses the two handheld motion controllers.

Players move the controllers in a running motion to move, with button presses on either controller to help with dribbling and actually kicking the ball.

(Cherry Pop)
(Cherry Pop) (Cherry Pop)

Developer Cherry Pop calls this control system Agile Locomotion, and hopes it can provide an answer to concerns over the difficulty of getting the mechanics of full body movement accurate in VR games.

This has been the key reason a major VR football game hasn’t launched previously, now VRFC is hoping to smash that particular glass ceiling.

The game will support a range of training activities to get players used to the novel way of controlling movement before playing a competitive game – which can be up to four-a-side with goalkeepers powered by artificial intelligence.

Virtual reality remains a popular but increasingly niche gaming market, but the introduction of a successful football game to the gaming catalogue could help turn more users on to the platform.