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.

Comments

Can fool accelleration sensors.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

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.

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 ... gettin' there ...

Is this slashdot?

[eepok]

Somehow I didn't expect a link to a treadmill to be so quickly slashdotted. O.o