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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."
Ok, how do they plan on simulating momentum? Try running at full gallop and then stopping dead. Its pretty hard to do in reality. It would be easy on a treadmill that responds in the same way as the tiles above. The act of walking without the feedback that we feel from our momentum might be a little disorienting.
Guru Meditation #6d416769.21610a21
This really seems like the sort of technology you'd want to show video of. Is the motion smooth, if you make a quick step forward then back will you fall as it keeps trying to move forward? These are the things I'd like to know. This is an awesome technology (if it works) and could be of great use to us where I work. We're currently working with omni-directional treadmills... which leave a lot to be desires as well as make noise that sounds like a jet engine.
I think this is a great step forward in the VR developments (no pun intended). What I think is going to be really interesting to see is, in say 10 years or so, what newer VR technology does to the relative fitness of your average hardcore computer gamer. Think about it - instead of sitting in a chair, you'd actually be exercising, which would burn those pizza and Dew calories.
If that becomes the case, what would happen to the labeling of games? All games could have "calorie burn factors" printed on them, so the more intense ones would have higher "calorie burn" ratings.
Does anyone know if there are any statstics out there for what the physical impact of today's games is that are a little like this - like "Dance Dance Revolution"?
I was in the park the other day wondering why frisbees get bigger and bigger the closer they get - and then it hit me.
These tiles are neat but it seems to be making the problem more difficult than necessary. Yes a sphere wouldn't allow doing a duck and roll but most applications would probably be walking/running anyway.
Do people get motion sick on treadmills? Because this would solve the motion sickness problem. Youre eyes tell you youre moving (thats the VR job) and your feet are moving, your balance is shifting, your inner ear should be happy. As long as the VR accurately models what you're actually doing, it should work.
Moo.
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.
But you *are* moving. It just happens that your movement is cancelled out by the floor. So things like head bob will still happen, but it's because your head is really bobbing as you walk.
What might be interesting for uneven terrain would be something like those old "pin art" toys you could get at Headlines or Yarmo Zone. You know, the ones with 1000 pins on a rack in square formation, and you would reset them by dumping them all to the back, and then pushing something--your face or a fist or something uneven--into them, and on the other side you'd get a pin sculpture of your hand or whatever.
It wouldn't work for everything (i.e. simulated overhangs in a climbing situation), but if you had something like that on a huge scale, maybe covered with some sort of flexible surface, you could simulate some pretty interesting terrains if you had the computer determining the pin positions.
The CB App. What's your 20?
Moving tiles means there are gaps. Gaps means things can be wedged into those gaps. Now what happens when you're running in VR land and wedge your foot into the fast-moving tiles? Suddenly, not being able to see your real-world foot doesn't sound so good ...
Anonymous Kev
Proudly posting as AC since 1997
(Finally got a dang account in 2004)
That's because Slashdotters are smarter than the average gym user and won't pay $75 a month to walk on a moving belt when they can just go out the front door.
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Umm... isn't that just called "sports"???
Football, hockey, soccer... that's all "exercise while gaming"
Nothing new
Live forever, or die trying.
Why are all of you so negative? Nowhere in the online community is there such a group of negative people as in Slashdot.
HELLO!! Its a new, proprietary technology! All of you naysayers that nitpick at it seriously need to get a new hobby.
Those that are asking why don't they just make a treadmill: have you ever seen a treadmill that can simulate moving sideways as well as forwards? I sure haven't, and I can imagine it'd be incredibly hard to engineer.
Its so easy to sit in your throne in the comfort of your mom's basement and nitpick on other's creations, isn't it?
Personally, I think this is very cool.
...but it was rather half-baked. It was a passive system that involved a fixed array of spheres on some kind of (possibly low-friction) surface that a person would walk on. Fill up a shallow pan with a layer of marbles and you'll have an idea of what it would look like.
:)
I hadn't solved the problem of how to create the proper amount of resistance, so if it were implemented as designed, it probably would have been something like walking on ice. Also, I hadn't entirely worked out how to get data from the grid for feedback to the imaging components of the system.
Just one of those things you come up with when you're not paying attention in class.
It would be very interesting to see if accelerations are dealt with properly with these things. In walking, not only do we have the "push-off" force which gets us going in some direction (push back -- with one's foot/leg -- to move forward, push left to go right, etc.) but we also have "stopping" forces (put one's foot down in front to decelerate the body's forward movement, etc.).
Presumably, with some sort of feedback algorithms, it'll be relatively easy to hold these things in place when one wants to move forward, etc. However, how are the tiles to know that you want to _stop_ "moving" (or seem like you want to)? Normally, if you stop walking, you definitely get a tactile feeling to it -- your body decelerates, your feet want to slip forward, etc. But on tiles, where your body may not have actually moved in the first place, simulating this stopping would require accelerating you in the direction opposite to the original (presumed by the tiles) movement. Might one simply get used to this sort of "movement without consequences"?
While this is an interesting excercise in engineering/software development/physics application, is it really needed? Virtual reality is a visual representation of data, but nothing says that all your physical activites need to be directly mapped in a literal fashion.
3D shoote-em-up games are virtual reality environments, and you certainly don't see people in quake3 having problems moving around in the worlds.
Moreover, by mapping movement to walking, aren't you limiting the input to the speed that someone can actually walk? Sure you could include a speed scaling factor control, but why not map movement to something else entirely?
This may solve the problem of vertigo that some people experience, but wouldn't it be better to figure out why only some people are affected? In addition, people with phyisical disabilies might not really appreciate this 'development' very much.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I can't quite imagine this will become a mature product. When people can walk in a VR world, they will expect to be able to use other forms of movement as well. Running alone is a major problem: anything beyond a slow walk will require tiles that can move as quick as a running person and, while doing so, are also able to stop and change directions within fractions of a second. Then people (once suspension of disbelief is good) occasionally will jump, which I guess is another hard problem. Any single mistake in the system, when used with a helmet, is likely to result in injury to the user. I'm sooooo not designing this.
What - beyond the wow factor - is a technology that only allows for slow VR movement actually useful for?
blow your mind already
Oh wait they should hold this advancement back until all those things are working perfectly just like the real world and then they should release it all at once. Wait, thats not how progress works you fucking whiney bastard.
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WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
[javac] 100 errors
This would work for straightline-movement only, though. For things like spinning you would need to either control the balls individually, or at least in groups significantly smaller than the whole surface. (Or spin the whole base.)
The feedback for the motors then can be maintained by optical tracking of the movements of the person, or by torsion sensors in the axes.
Some of us live in one of the zillions of places around the world that have something called "weather".
That reminds me of the fellow the other day who referred to a new method being different from "traditional cloning".
I remember when creating traditional cloning was an ages old problem.