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Walking In A VR Future
neol'schmoe writes "There's a new solution to the age old problem of physical movement within a virtual world. Researchers in Japan have come up with tiles that move in concert with a user's pace and motion to allow free range of motion while literally walking in a virtual environment and never leaving a very small area in the real world."
Looks cool, but i can't wait to try it out. Todays VR gets you disoriented because your mind sees movement but knows that your body isn't moving. This at least lets your body move, even if you're not actually traveling...
Who do I have to blackmail to get some representation around here!?!?!?!?
These guys are out at Siggraph Emerging Technologies, and I'm trying it for myself even as I type.
Your pace has be be quite a bit slower than the article suggests, and the compensational backwards movement of the platform throws you off. I'm laughing at the picture in the article where the guy wears the blindfold, because just now, the vendor won't let me wear one. I'm going to show STFA to them in protest in just a few seconds here...
Solomon
"Twice half-assed makes an ass whole." --Solomon K. Chang
But there's no proper horizontal acceleration. That would be the problem.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Not sure if anyone else pointed this out, but the actual website is here and includes a demonstration video.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
If what your eyes tell you (you're moving) is out of sync with what your inner ear tells you (you're not moving) a lot of people get nauseous and toss their cookies. That's why folks who get car sick are okay if they keep looking out the window; their eyes tell them that they're moving, so it's in sync with their inner ear.
That is complete and utter baloney. Ask anyone who suffers regularly from motion sickness to ride a Tilt-A-Whirl but keep their eyes closed. They will *still* end up dizzy and sick. A common "remedy" that non-motion-sickness-sufferers like to advise is to keep your eyes on something that's moving with you (like the floor of said Tilt-A-Whirl), or alternately, keep your eyes *away* from the floor and on the outside world. Doesn't matter where you keep your eyes, you're still gonna get dizzy and that dizziness doesn't just go away when the ride stops. In severe cases, it can take several days.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
http://intron.kz.tsukuba.ac.jp/vrlab_web/CirculaFl oor/circulafloor.mpg/
Here's a PDF paper about the omni-directional treadmill with neat pictures and good description of how it works, what it's like to use it, and limitations (turning in place, crouching, sidestepping and a few other movements often cause stumbles)
To echo your sentiment, I too would like to see videos of all these in action, both with experienced users and users who have never been on it before.
-Adam
For those who haven't seen. The video is very impressive. somewhat unreal. An interesting thing to note though is that the guy is taking extremely small steps (less than 3 inches), and the blocks are getting there in front of him in the nick of time.
Check out http://virtusphere.com/
Your ear detects ACCELERATION, not velocity... so if you're walking on the tiles, it will (roughly speaking) still experience the same up-down and swaying that you'd experience while walking on real ground, won't it?
Basically, aside from the initial acceleration of starting to walk, won't this feel the same as "really" walking?
On the other hand, I could certainly see how frequent changes in direction or velocity would confuse your ear, in which case I see your point.
DiscDividers tabbed plastic CD dividers: divider cards f
Actually in Moscow. It was not just for a while, it was for almost a decade. They also have developed a good motion tracking suit that doesn't require cameras (sensors are woven in). Unfortunately, they didn't manage to get any finding so far, despite a plethora of awards at various exhibitions. They also had Quake II and Unreal Tournament (and perhaps other games) working on their system.
There are fundamental problems with all of these types of devices-- they 1) don't let the body handle momentum naturally and 2) don't stimulate the vestibular system in a way that is consistent with the visual or proprioceptive (the body's sense of where its limbs are) cues.
1) Momentum: On a 2-D treadmill, the omni-directional treadmill is supposedly fast enough that it allows for running. But when you are running and then change direction quickly, your body will lean into the turn to counter its momentum. Doing this on the treadmill will make you fall over. Someone once described it as "running on a slippery ice cube".
2) Vestibular cues: Our body can sense motion even without visuals or body movements. This is why some flight simulators have motion platforms [://www.simlabs.arc.nasa.gov/vms/motionb.html]. One post above said that the treadmill should reduce motion sickness because it provides body motions as well as visuals. But a treadmill doesn't cue the vestibular system. One theory of motion sickness is that it results from a mismatch of visual and vestibular cues. In the back seat of a car, your visual cues say you are still (relative to the inside of the car) but the vestibular system says you are moving. Similarly in a IMAX theater or while playing an FPS on a big screen, your visuals say you are moving but your vestibular system says you are still. Knowing how you are moving is critical for maintain balance and even surviving. The mismatch in visual and vestibular cues interferes with your ability to balance, and that's why dizziness results.
Luckily, one can fool the vestibular system, much as we can fool the visual system. Techniques include "wash-out" on motion platforms, electrical stimulation, and Redirection. Wash-out is where the motion platform moves the user to simulate the virtual motion, but then sneaks her back to the center of the room at an acceleration that is below what her vestibular system can detect. The shifting tiles look like a fabulous idea, and I wonder if one could implement a form of wash-out on those tiles.
Links
Sphere http://www.vr-systems.ndtilda.co.uk/sphere1.htm2-D treadmills
Omni directional treadmill http://www.movesinstitute.org/darken/publications/ ODT-UIST97.pdf
Torus treadmill (great video) http://intron.kz.tsukuba.ac.jp/vrlab_web/torustrea dmill/torustreadmill_e.html
Redirection http://www.cs.unc.edu/~eve/rdw/
One more thing, the problem with, as one post suggested, implementing VR in a huge wide open space (like a desert) is tracking. The computer needs to know where your head is and in which direction you are looking, very accurately and quickly, so it can draw the virtual scene from your perspective. By accurately, I mean with millimeter precision, and by quickly I mean it must update the images within tens of milliseconds of your head moving. If you focus your eyes on your figure at arms length, then rotate your head right and left, the reflex that moves your eyes to keep them locked on your finger is called the VOR (vestibular ocular reflex). It can react to head movements in 10 milliseconds.
For me, I recently pulled out my old Doom WADs when the Doomsday (aka jDoom) engine was ported to Linux. And after about 20 minutes of insane play, I had to go outside and recover from severe nausea.
Now, the original Wolfenstein used to give me major problems but Doom wasn't an issue. So I poked around the options and discovered a setting to change the field-of-view from 95 degrees down to 90 degrees. And lo and behold, no more chunder rumbles.
Now it might just be that the frame rate changed because the amount of geometry being rendered was slightly reduced, but my money would be that because I sit far back from the screen with the keyboard out in front of me, my view onto the virtual world beyond the screen needs a narrower field of view than someone who is sitting with their eyeballs an inch from the monitor. The perceived world through the screen should reasonably match the expectations given the viewers position if it is to be believable and I wonder whether that nausea is caused by a mismatch between the perceived world when rotating the camera.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
It's not your velocity that causes motion sickness, it's the acceleration. The floor only "cancels" your relative velocity, as your frame of reference is moving with you; but not the acceleration, which you sense relative to a inertial frame of reference, which is essentially stationary.
Damn, nice obscure Bradbury reference, too bad I can't mod you up.
THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal...
This was tried around 15 years ago by Virtuality. But back then, the helmets were absolutely massive, with a mini CRT monitors for each eye. At the companies peak, there were Virtuality booths close to every Underground station in central London. You could pay around 7 pounds for 20 minutes play. Although the games were simple, they were fun. One game was a first-person shooter, where you tried to shoot flying pterodactyls while trying to avoid being snatched or shooting other players.
Atari and the other console makers also jumped onto the VR bandwagon, even though the headsets were much lighter (later versions of the Virtuality helmet.
Obviously, you could do the same thing today, with consumer VR hardware, but the problem is cost. Consumers are more aware of the cost of playing in an arcade vs. playing at home. If the average game plays for one unit of currency for three minutes, and one person wants to play for three hours, thats 120 units of currency. For three months play, that amount of money would allow you to buy buy a PC + VR headset + broadband. Plus with headsets being as small and light as they are, they would very easily be stolen/broken. And that's not taking into account having to pay for parking, expensive drinks/snacks, worry about your belongings being stolen, your car being broken into, being mugged on the way home, or spend time finding a parking space.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
The video is available on this page:
l oor/CirculaFloor_e.htm
http://intron.kz.tsukuba.ac.jp/vrlab_web/CirculaF
This has been done - I believe it was called the "CyberSphere" or something equally passe - anyhow, it was created by a guy in the UK, he actually got a lot of press for it. Something he had to invent was a manner of casting the plastic panels that made up the sphere - it was quite large, and the panels had to be a special shape to hold up to the weight of the sphere, as well as a person stepping around on the inside. It was supported by an air bearing - though I think a mechanical friction link (like an old mouseball) was used for movement detection (although, today one could sense it optically). One of the big problems, which I think killed it - was the fact that in order to make the ball rigid enough, the weight increased to such a point that you could walk inside it, but when you stopped or changed directions, the momentum of the ball continued in the direction you were going, causing awkward moments at best, falls at worst...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon