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Omnidirectional Treadmill: The Ultimate FPS Input Device?
MojoKid writes "The concept of gaming accessories may have just been taken to a whole new level. A company called Virtuix is developing the Omni, which is essentially a multidirectional treadmill that its creators call 'a natural motion interface for virtual reality applications.' The company posted a video showing someone playing Team Fortress 2 and using the Omni along with the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset. You can see in the video how much running and movement this fellow performs. With something like the Omni in your living room, you'd likely get into pretty good shape in no time. Instead of Doritos and Mountain Dew, folks might have to start slamming back Power Bars and Gatorade for all night gaming sessions."
The whole point of gaming is to sit on your ass and avoid the elements drink caffeine till you shake and eat a dehydrated cow. If I wanted exercise and shooting I'd go play paintball.
Mountain Dew and Doritos are not substantially different, health-wise, from Gatorade and PowerBars.
Didnt they have this in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ready_Player_One ?
You almost had me, but this looks like it could be dangerously close to exercise. Pass.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
This, if any of you remember, is one of the key items of the Star Trek holodeck. The Technical manual showed users on an omnidirectional treadmill (probably using forcefields rather than an actual treadmill), which the holodeck routed to wherever there was space if there were more than one user and they were in different locations of the program.
Very cool but I would imagine this is much easier to use in games like Battlefield, ARMA, and Day Z where you aren't going to be doing too much close quarters fighting (TF2, Counter Strike, etc.). I can move my mouse faster than I can turn my head. Not to mention, the large maps on those games will definitely give you a nice workout.
Whenever I try to walk on a step that isn't there, or if I misjudge the slope of the ground, I stumble. So should the simulation become to engrossing and you get distracted, you'll end up on your face the first time you try to navigate some uneven virtual terrain and the floor is still level.
If you've read the book.... you'd know what I mean.
anchored inplace while climbing a slippery slope, sounds like most gamers. I hope it works, but the price will doom it to niche markets.
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Very cool, but your inner ear is going to break the illusion - just as your retinal muscles are going to remind you that it isn't quite depth you're seeing with that stereoscopic headset.
Progress of technology - new ways of getting motion sickness!
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
There was a report done on Science, that were have discovered so much that its hard to discover new things, same with IT and stuff... i think its reached entropy where there just isnt that much to report on.
if you want more to report on, stop complaining and do something about it. its easy to complain, harder to do!
It's not a typo if you understood the meaning!
"falling down on the treadmill" -- you obviously didn't even bother to click the link to the article and watch the pictures.
Just a slippery surface while wearing slippery shoes. The idea has been around since at least the 1990s.
Real omnidirectional treadmills exist, first started as a DoD project. You can walk naturally on them, as demonstrated here and here.
It's still debatable which method is superior or more practical.
The problem is that the guy is carrying a 'gun' but you're still aiming with your head (i.e. the Oculus).
This has been done better before: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQR49JGySTM
"Timmy, stop slouching off and come play some video games! You need some exercise!"
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
The difference in salt is relatively unimportant.
Unless you really are dehydrated, which is why Gatorade marketing is aimed at "re-hydrating" people who don't know when it's time to sit down and drink some tap water. Doctors were using similar "salt" drinks (in powdered form) to prevent/treat dehydration long before someone put it in a fancy bottle.
For those who may not know. The first sign of dehydration is muscle aches (usually the legs), people who are running around expect muscle aches in the legs so may miss the warning signs. Sick kids are at a much higher risk of serious dehydration from prolonged bouts of vomiting, if your vomiting child complains about sore legs/arms, give them a "sports drink" with high potassium (or a banana), and take them to a real doctor immediately.
Disclaimer: IANA real doctor, not even an internet doctor, just a run of the mill grandad who's dealt with his fair share of vomiting children.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Perhaps one day we'll have Star Trek style holodecks. And that will be great. Until the point - roughly 10 minutes after the first trial - when people realise that if they're really bad at running around doing atheletic stuff in real life, they're also going to be really bad at it on a holodeck like that.
I think controllers which try to make games more immersive by having them mimic real life activities are (with a few exceptions I'll touch on later) missing the point.
That isn't to say that games shouldn't try to be immersive and that controllers don't have a role to play in immersion. However, given that in most games, the player is doing things he wouldn't be able to do in real life, simply trying to translate real-life controls into the game isn't going to work. In most genres, the best thing the controls can do is let the player forget that they are there at all. They need to be the most efficient means possible of translating the player's will into the behaviour of his on-screen avatar.
Every time a player dies (or otherwise fails, depending on genre) in game due to control issues, the immersion is broken. I can think of some really awful examples here, going back decades. Remember Ultima VIII, as it was at launch? Those jumps across the moving platforms, where a mis-step meant death? Remember how you could see precisely what you needed to do to get across, but how the atrocious point and click control inputs made each and every jump an exercise in trial, error and sheer luck? And remember how much it broke the immersion every time you failed - reminded you that you weren't the Avatar exploring a strange land, but a player wrestling with a cumbersome interface and control system? That one was bad enough that they eventually patched it (turning it from "atrocious" to "just about tolerable").
Or more recently, take the Super Mario Galaxy games. I enjoyed both of these immensely - until the point at which it became necessary to use the spin-jump to make certain jumps. See, "spin jump" was mapped to "waggle the Wii-mote". And "waggle" is not, on a Wii-mote, a precise input. There's actually a good bit of variation in just how much and how hard you need to waggle before the game will accept that, yes, you have waggled (and I can't believe I've just typed that sentence). So all of a sudden you have a precision platformer which is dependant upon a non-precision input. And even though it's only for one single input, each time you rack up an unnecessary death due to that input going wrong, the immersion is broken.
Or sometimes a game uses a "normal" input device, but because the game adapts itself to that device badly, it still ends up feeling broken. Resident Evil 6 is a case in point here. I've played this on the 360 and the PC and found the 360 version effectively unplayable, due to control issues. I don't normally object to playing shooters on a console controller (though I'd prefer mouse and keyboard), but the shooters in question need to make concessions to the fact that they're being played on a device less suited to precise aim. Actually, many console shooters these days do that well; snap-to aim, relatively generous hitboxes and slow-moving enemies may not always make for the most exciting game mechanics, but they do take a lot of the pain out of playing a shooter on a console controller. Resident Evil 6 makes no such concessions; in a game where only headshots do appreciable damage to enemies, aiming at these tiny, fast bobbing targets on a console controller is nigh impossible and the abiding impression I took away from my 360 version was that my in-game character actually had worse accuracy with a gun than I myself would in real life (which is saying something). After that, playing with mouse and keyboard on the PC was a complete revelation - while the game itself still has flaws, it was an order of magnitude better than the console version. By contrast, the recent Tomb Raider reboot makes such good concessions to aiming on a controller that I played it on PC using a 360 control
If they eat "Power Bars and Gatorade" while gaming on the treadmill they're still going to be fat... Try water and the occasional banana... or, you know. REAL food
There were units very much like this in arcades in the 90s.
But the headsets were big and heady. The graphics were blocky and laggy. So the craze died back for a while, until the technology caught up.
Oculus Rift seems to have the graphics more or less cracked. This input device is at least a step in the right direction.
In the 90s we'd pay £5 for a few minutes playing something like this. I'd pay £20 today for half an hour playing TF2 in this thing.
It's not the quantity that bothers me. It's the quality. Everyone's talking programmer cliches (unfit, no real life friends) and no one's asking how the 2 dimensional treadmill works.
So, anyone knows how it works?
As are kneeling, crawling, zooming, jumping. backpedaling, activating stuff (opening doors etc.) and other functions. I would also venture a guess that rotation gets done a lot quicker on the PC than on a treadmill as I didn't notice the kid moving much more than 40-60 degrees in any direction in a hurry. I'm guessing because the system is slow or inaccurate in response to this type of movement.
And I'm sure I can "easily" win using these techniques, when fighting someone who hasn't got those options.
While it may just be a matter of integrating these functions into the controller (possibly in the gun), these are lacking, and often used functions. I also see some limitations in that it would probably be difficult to integrate this into tank/airplane/helo movement, for vehicles, and chutes, ropes, ladders and ziplines in other games. But for a customized game this would be nice. Unfortunately I have seen too many controllers that only support a few games die because they lack the option to be used in other games. Light guns, VR goggles, the 360 orb, the gaming glove and a few others spring to mind (Yes, I have spent far too much cash on gaming, I know)
I'd love to back the development though, and will definitely sign up for the kickstarter when it goes public. I'd also love to buy one of these eventually.... But I doubt my GF would let me keep it....
--- To err is human... Am I more human than most ?
I'll just leave this here: Ultimate Battlefield 3 Simulator - Build & Test (Full Video) - The Gadget Show
Camping during a FPS should become much more popular.
"if devices like kinect can measure leg [movement]... why need treadmill for input?"
So you don't run forward 4 feet and crash into the screen?
At least, until you try to play Portal while using it.
Talk about mixed vestibular cues!
Paintball and laser tag for the non-lethal.
An omni-directional treadmill with a good VR headset with decent resolution is probably more expensive than the equipment for either paintball or laser tag, both of which have the best resolution and "simulation of reality" of all.
War is the ultimate FPS. But that's the most expensive version of all.
--
BMO
A comparison follows. Power Bar vs a Banana.
240 kcal (30 from fat) --- A banana has 200. 6.2 calories from fat.
3g fat (1g saturated fat) --- A banana has 1gram of total fat, Negligible saturated fat.
200mg sodium --- A banana has 2mg
45g carbs (3g from fiber, 25g from sugar) --- A banana has 51, 28 from sugars, 6 from fiber, 12 from starch
8g protein --- A banana has 2.5g
70%dv Vitamin C --- A banana has 33
25%dv Calcium Iron and B6 --- A banana has 1% Calcium, 3%Iron, and 41% B6
15%dv Thiamin --- A banana has 5%
10%dv Riboflavin. --- A banana has 10%
A banana is lower cal, lower sodium, nearly equivalent amount of sugars, twice the fiber, a third the fat (and no bad fat), much more B6, same amount of Riboflavin, and a bunch of extras that are good for you, like a quarter of your daily Potassium requirements. While it doesn't have the same amount of Vitamin C, Calcium, and Iron, you can get that from the rest of your diet.
And the banana is cheaper, by a lot.
Moar banana stats:
Amounts Per Selected Serving%DV
Calories200 (837 kJ)10%
From Carbohydrate186 (779 kJ)
From Fat6.2 (26.0 kJ)
From Protein8.2 (34.3 kJ)
Carbohydrates
Amounts Per Selected Serving%DV
Total Carbohydrate 51.4g 17%
Dietary Fiber 5.9g23%
Starch 12.1g
Sugars 27.5g
Vitamins
Amounts Per Selected Serving%DV
Vitamin A 144IU 3%
Vitamin C 19.6mg 33%
Vitamin D~ ~
Vitamin E (Alpha Tocopherol) 0.2mg 1%
Vitamin K 1.1 mcg 1%
Thiamin 0.1mg 5%
Riboflavin 0.2mg 10%
Niacin 1.5mg 7%
Vitamin B 60.8mg 41%
Folate 45.0mcg 11%
Vitamin B 120.0mcg 0%
Pantothenic Acid 0.8mg 8%
Choline 22.0mg
Betaine 0.2mg
Minerals
Amounts Per Selected Serving%DV
Calcium 11.3mg 1%
Iron 0.6mg 3%
Magnesium 60.8mg 15%
Phosphorus 49.5mg 5%
Potassium 806mg 23%
Sodium 2.3mg 0%
Zinc 0.3mg 2%
Copper 0.2mg 9%
Manganese 0.6mg 30%
Selenium 2.3mcg 3%
--
BMO
P.S. A banana and a large black coffee is what gets me through cardio.