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Ready for a CyberWalk?
Roland Piquepaille writes "Even with recent improvements in virtual reality technology, it's still almost impossible to physically walk through virtual environments. Now, European researchers have started a project named CyberWalk and they'll demonstrate next week their omni-directional treadmill, named CyberCarpet. According to ICT Results, the researchers 'had to address five key issues: providing a surface to walk on, controlling the surface in a way that minimized forces on the user, developing a non-intrusive tracking system, displaying a high-quality visualization, and ensuring a natural human perception of the virtual environment.' The researchers think that their new virtual environments would be used by architects and the gaming industry." Additional details are also available via the project website.
and then he'll never need to go outside. He'll get some good exercise too if I can simulate some cats running away.
Yay, now we finally have the final key to making a holodeck! Oh wait, we need holographic projects too, darn! *puts down his actual +2 claymore* Actually I'm pretty sure there's no way for this to convince someone it's real. You know that the ground is moving under you when you take a step so you'll always know you're not really going anywhere. Plus, people can sense acceleration. If this thing was to work at a full run plus jumping and quick corners like virtual basketball or something, it would simply trip the user as soon as it rapidly changed directions.
Oh yeah and Roland is a douchebag
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
Is the spoon image really for Input Devices, or is it symbolizing a step towards a real-world Matrix?
No one has yelled HOLODECK!!! yet. I'm sadly disappointed.
I'm interested in their omni-directional treadmill, CyberCarpet. I've tried to design something like this, but I inevitably wind up with a ten-foot (three meter, for our foreign friends) sphere that the user walks upon/within.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
While this is definitely cool, I prefer the simple and elegant solution of walking inside a sphere.
\u262D = \u5350
We have a CAVE at our work, and the company that does the maintenance told me about and showed pictures of a 6 meter omnidirectional rolling carpet with VR display they built for the U.S. military. They were even trying to get wind and dust in the environment, but it would gunk up the works. It was probably a one-off though, whereas this new stuff seems to be going towards "commodity" vr.
Actually I'm pretty sure there's no way for this to convince someone it's real. You know that the ground is moving under you when you take a step so you'll always know you're not really going anywhere. Plus, people can sense acceleration.
... gettin' there ...
Which is mostly done in the inner ear: Three "rate gyros" per ear (the semicircular canals) plus three linear accelleration sensors ditto (nerve cells with calcified masses on the ends).
But it turns out these can be fooled by elecrtostimulus from varying magnetic fields generated by coils mounted on a headpiece near them.
There has been at least one slashdot article on these - including adding them to a headpiece to mimic the head acceleration that would match a moving screen image to reduce "barfogenisis" and improve simulation game experience. Adding them to a 3-D VR simulation would be the next logical step.
With wall screens and projection onto the moving floor you could create the necessary visual illusion.
Gettin' there
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Somehow I didn't expect a link to a treadmill to be so quickly slashdotted. O.o
The minds at Nintendo will quickly pick this up and expand on their Wii. People thought that the Wii was far away and would cost thousands of dollars. I'm sure we're on a pathway to playing ruining our fancy new plasma televisions by running into them! How will we create a safety strap for this one?
Please visit http://www.mederbil.com/ i7, GTX 275, 4 1TB Caviar Green in RAID 0+1 array, EVGA X58 3X SLI Board, Silver
Oh man this would be sweet for first person shooters. Want to spend the entire level running? Better be in shape.
Next we need to add heavy custom controllers: the "rocket launcher" accessory should be made of real metal (or cheap plastic with lead weights built in). For rocket ammo, they will sell little "ammo packs" that each weigh almost as much as the rocket launcher.
Of course, some people will not play fair.
"He's using the wall-shelf hack!" (putting the ammo on a shelf instead of carrying it)
P.S. For a while I was looking for a good first-person tank combat game. Then I realized that your typical first-person shooter game is effectively a tank game. You are armored like a tank, and you can often carry a rocket launcher plus 99 rounds of ammo, plus some kind of heavy machine gun, plus railgun, particle beam, sack full of grenades, etc. etc.
Which is one reason why I like CounterStrike so much. One rifle, one handgun, a couple grenades, and you are fully loaded. You can still run full-tilt all over the map without ever getting tired or even out of breath, but what the heck.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Since the video is "Coming Soon", does anyone know if this is a carpet of small spheres then?
That also works, and would explain why the hard part was keeping track of which way you were walking.
A12A.713 is the root of ASC('evil')
WoW Compatible ?
The article seems to have undergone the /. effect, so I can't tell if this treadmill will do things for elevation change. Steps might be too much at this point, but what about hills?
Anyway, while going through a virtual world as if I were really there sounds cool, especially in the realm of video games, I think virtualization technology better fits the office, though it might see harder adoption.
How many people need to be in an office building for a meeting? (Nevermind how useful the meeting actually is.) How many people travel thousands of miles to give one presentation, then fly back?
Why not move phone conferencing to the virtual age? Obviously, having everyone represented by an avatar would make the meeting a bit ludicrous for those not used to it. So, why not take a page from the movie industry and go blue screen?
The way I see it is that at various locations around the globe, there is a building full of meeting rooms. Large tables, nice chairs, but no decoration and it's all one color (say, blue). When people enter, they don a set of VR goggles. Cameras in both their goggles and around the room record people and project that real world scenario into this virtual world, then seen through the VR goggles. Then, whoever is "hosting" the meeting can set up or choose from various themes to decorate the virtual rooms. Various tools allow people to project into this virtual world, to get up and walk around, hell even virtual notes.
Obviously, something would need to be done about the goggles such that either they were more like sunglasses or they were somehow removed in the digital projection. And it would take some serious hardware to do a good projection as well as including real-time video. But I believe that this kind of thing would be a big boon for international visits- now you only have to worry about time zones, not planes, hotels, and car rides. Fuel savings, cost savings (once the tech gets there), time savings. If done well enough, there would be no difference than if you were in person. Handshake aside, do you often make physical contact with the people you meet with? No dinner afterwards, unfortunately.
You could have a meeting with potential clients in Japan and be home in an hour.
I've been waiting for one with full human field of view (or as near as possible) with good resolution for the last 20 years. I still can't go to the shops and buy one. Even the ones that cost $20,000 are not that great in terms of Field of view. We have the computer power for some very impressive virtual environments yet the visual hardware is completely lacking. I only hope the popularity of mobile video spurs the development of better video glasses technology. Immersive (at least visually) virtual reality is long overdue now.
There are videos of prototypes in youtube:
Omni-Directional Treadmill, June 28, 2007 (not sure if it is from the same project)
Cyberwalk Project, December 20, 2007
This is similar to the premise of David Brin's short story "Natulife (R)" in the collection "Otherness".
It looked pretty flat in the one vague picture it showed when I finally got through.
From what I've heard of some of these VR systems and their typical uses, it would seem like they couldn't get away without emulating, at minimum, the one or two foot elevation shift onto a soft platform (say, a bed) and then the arbitrarily varied directions one might find oneself rolling from there... The picture gave the impression the technology was a ways off from that.
For just the reason you allude to, is it obvious this needs to be done by VR? I mean, I'd think a mere camera would be fine for that. How often do you need to see the people you're meeting (or have them see you) other than from some particular angle? People use this information in meetings mostly to judge attention, focus, and interest. Most of that will come across in flat display. Indeed, if you're seeing someone focused at you in VR, you can't be sure they're seeing you. You might think they're looking at their notes, but it might be a virtual crossword puzzle so reading excess information into what you see is of marginal value, and might even deceive you. I think it's a mistake to think the business world needs this per se; the telephone is still adequate for many things, and where it's not, a realtime video display, even flat and in black&white, would cover most of the rest of the need.
I'm not saying there aren't reasons to want to move in and out of data and other presentation material you see in meetings. I'm just saying the membership of the meetings having to move with you in a VR way attaches an additional constraint that will work against that. Either the person can or can't move freely among the data; if they can, then if they take others with them, then those people are moving not of their own will but at the will of someone else (which is not VR). If the others move of their own will, then they are not synchronized as to what they're looking at and have no common frame of reference in a meeting. The situation is easily overconstrained and not to any good end by focusing on the people rather than the data in a meeting, at least without a very definite (and in this forum unarticulated) theory of why you'd be worrying about VR.
Nor am I saying there aren't gaming reasons for wanting to be able to peruse and physically engage people you're with. I'm just saying I'm not sure they generalize to business, except as a luxury. Among other things, it will be additional years before the general populace can have this, so the only businesses who can use this are those that don't mind losing the business of anyone who can't afford this...
That's the one actual reason for VR--to engage in a social venues, where the rules of interaction might be more complicated. And still the one actual reason to travel. The meeting could take place in email or online most of the time. Personal relationships are hard to build up in meetings, but not because of the technology--because of the rules of engagement. Building trust has to involve risking trust and testing it. Conventional meeting protocol is designed to avoid that issue to the best degree possible.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
Anyone remember that Jamiroquai music video? :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJmX1z1NY2c
soon we'll see people addicted to VR, wasting away in front of their new reality. People insisting they've been to Paris but forgetting they've only been there in VR...Or at least thats what sci fi tells us XD. I guess if they try and accomodate things like walking rather than trying to simulate them psychosomnatically, we'll all at least get some excersize
It's a Roland the Plogger story, so you know there has to be something wrong with it.
There have been a few previous attempts at 2D treadmills. They're usually just a big endless chain of belt-type treadmills, like this one. The problem is that the things are big, heavy, expensive, and may have pinch points.
Here's a paper which lists most of the previous omnidirectional treadmills. The Darken Omnidirectional Treadmill (1997) was a belt made of rollers. The Torus Treadmill was an array of 12 small treadmills on an endless chain. This new treadmill looks like a bigger version of the Torus Treadmill.
The Sarcos Treadport is a more aggressive approach to the problem. It's only a 1D treadmill, but it's on a tilt base, so it can simulate hills. The user is in a suspended harness which can yank the user around to simulate collision with an obstacle. (Now there's force feedback.)
So this isn't that novel; it's just a bit bigger. Typical Roland the Plogger; press release goes in, blogspam comes out.
You are walking along at a uniform speed and you stop dead.
In the real world - you feel an accelleration on your body - which you have to cancel by pushing backwards a bit harder on your last step.
In the virtual world, you were never really moving - so when you stop moving you don't need to do anything to counteract the accelleration.
But because we have a bazillion years of evolution and a few decades of practice - we'll do it anyway - and (in all likelyhood) either fall over or feel ill. In any event, it'll be EASILY distinguishable from reality.
i can't believe the best method anyone's found of creating a "cyberwalk" is a dozen small treadmills wrapped around another giant treadmill.
Guess I won't be seeing one of these hooked to my Wii anytime soon.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
http://www.cyberwalk-project.org/img/Media/CyberCarpet.mpg
Only 14 years from movie concept to reality. Here is a picture of the 'device' used in the movie to walk through virtual file rooms. http://film.virtual-history.com/photo/05/large/05397.jpg
How can three people walk on it in different directions, as in the first image of TFA?
That's exactly like the Holodeck! Well, minus the force fields... memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Holodeck
Phased plasma rifle in the 40-watt range.