Slashdot Mirror
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."
Holodeck jokes in 5...4...3...2...1...
Is it?
Those japanese are always inventing stuff like this. I guess they got no square footage.
My American answer is to put your VR goggles on in the middle of one of our spacious fields or parks, and just run around all you want.
Drop someone in the middle of the desert with his LCD goggles and mo-cap mittens and he can VR his brains out.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Could definitely be a downer if you're the next in line for that arcade game.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
I like to call it a "treadmill". Sounds much better than "shifty tiles" IMHO.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Finally, FPS games will require moving around physically... I can see the game contestants' average weight declining rapidly as this device picks up support for Doom 3, etc.
"I'm on the VR FPS diet! I just run around and pretend to shoot people for 8 hours a day."
stuff |
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.
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.
I can already think of improvements:
1. Scale up the 4-tile model for walking, and have a 12-tile model for running.
2. Force-feedback tiles for seismic or moving-walkway effectts.
3. cushiony lifting-tiles to simulate low-g walks/runs/jumps.
Of course, can you imagine the liability issues for a manufacturer of such a product?
Very neat. I can't wait to have one. When they have it work with Unreal Tournament, I'll be sold.
.. pa-ra-bo-la, pa-ra-bo-la, 2 pi R, 2 pi R, where's your latus rectum, where's your latus rectum, 2 pi R
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
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?
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
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)
or you could get a bunch of your friends to dress as zombies and imps, and head over to the nearest paintball venue...
have the management turn all the lights off, and the main rule is that you cant use both the paintball gun and the flashlight at the same time.
Umm... isn't that just called "sports"???
Football, hockey, soccer... that's all "exercise while gaming"
Nothing new
Live forever, or die trying.
Would be a parent's dream!
Just hope your kids like you and don't enjoy the company of ravenous lions! :D
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.
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