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, out now
STANDING in front of a surface coated in Vantablack is terrifying. The nanotech material is the blackest black there is, reflecting so little light back that a room painted floor to ceiling with the stuff makes the world disappear. I feel I’m in a sensory deprivation tank as my eyes and ears strain to get a grip on something, anything.
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Suddenly, a screen explodes with colour, and the roar of Activision’s latest Call of Duty game, Black Ops 4, shatters the void. “This is VR 2.0,” says Ben Jensen, chief technology officer at UK-based Surrey NanoSystems, the company behind Vantablack.
To date, Vantablack’s main industrial use is in precision cameras for satellites or autonomous vehicles, where it prevents interference from stray light. Anish Kapoor, who is the only artist licensed to work with Vantablack, and marketing agencies are also busy dreaming up other uses.
This is the first time the large-scale version of the paint, VBx2, has been used to paint the inside of a structure. I am with other gamers in a warehouse set up by Activision to try out Black Ops 4, the biggest, most bombastic of the series. To play well takes skill and reflexes that are easier to develop in an environment that shuts out everything but the game. Could Vantablack offer a no-helmet immersion for virtual worlds? Jensen has played VR games for years, but cuts them short because he finds helmets exhausting. “But in the Vantablack room I feel like I could play all day.”
Don’t plan on redecorating your living room though – applying the material isn’t easy, says Jensen. The blackest version of Vantablack reflects just 0.0365 per cent of light. Photons hitting the material get trapped in a carbon nanotube structure, bouncing around until they are absorbed. Jensen’s team has developed sprayable versions of Vantablack, but they still need to be applied in a way that lets the nanostructure build up. “It takes significant training,” he says. “We use robots.”
Still, everyone leaving that blacker-than-black room had big grins on their faces.
This article appeared in print under the headline “VR without helmets”
