Re:2d treadmills, motion sickness and Redirection
on
Walking In A VR Future
·
· Score: 1
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,
How is that less of a problem on a treadmill?
I'm not that kind of engineer, but it seems like a combination of fast accelerometers on the VR helmet for fine movements and ultrasonic locators for gross positioning in the enviroment would solve that problem pretty well.
I would be extremely surprised if there are not accelerometers available that can very easily outperform, both in resolution and speed, all the senses we use to identify the position of our heads. Accuracy over large distances might be difficult to keep accurate with such equipment, but GPS or ultrasonic locators would remove any error there.
I think that would be very disconcerting to walk on. When I turn while walking I press sideways against the floor. The faster the turn, the more force is applied. The force feedback I expect is based on the inertial resistance the mass of my body provides. If I feel less resistance than I have learned to expect while moving at that velocity and making that kind of turn, I know my feet are slipping (or my inertial mass has suddenly been reduced).
If the floor is made of ball bearings, I will always notice that there is none of the inertial resistance I've learned to use to judge how secure my footing is. I'd probably get used to it, particularly since the VR helmet would provide the visual feedback I expect, but it would probably feel like walking on wet ice at first.
You'd be able to do away with the treadmill completely. And if you put some motors on the balls you could better control the feedback provided ot the user, but that would require lots and lots of mechanics for all the bearings. Instead you could put the balls on the bottom of a little plate, and the user could step on top of the plate. Then the plate could move around after the user removes his foot...
I've been wondering why we haven't seen any VR warehouses using that idea yet. Or even augmented reality lasertag arenas.
In a large empty warehouse you could pretty easily simulate just about as large a space as you needed, just be reducing the visual feedback of turns when the user starts to get near a wall. Since our inertial navigation is pretty poor (try guessing how many degrees you turn though while riding in a car with your eyes closed), it would be easy to get the user to always turn more away from the wall than toward it without realizing it. It would be like walking in circles in the forest, you'd never notice it.
You could probably do some pretty cool augmented reality or virtual reality games in a big warehouse using such a system. With stratigicly placed stairs and ramps you could probably even play some pretty rich FPS maps.
When the amount of stuff goes up (through work done to transform cheap raw materials into expensive end products) the amount of money goes up too
But how do they know when more stuff appears? I can create 'stuff' (ie, valuable computer software) from nothing, but there is no way for any central entity to know that I've done this. It seems that as more stuff is created the amount of stuff you could get for a dollar would go up (ie, the value of the dollar would rise).
Presumably, at some point more dollars would be added to the system to compensate, to keep prices on items fairly stable. Where is this money injected into the system? Does the mint just deliver boxes of money to the bank for free? Leave it laying around on street corners?
Insurance, priced correctly, should neither make nor cost the insured party any money. It should simply "smooth out" the irregular cash requirements of whatever you're insuring against.
That only works with large groups (which is the whole point of insurance). Its pretty easy for a single individual to run up several hundered thousand dollars or more in medical bills if he is involved in an accident of some sort. Most people won't pay more than about $100,000 in their lifetime ($200 monthly for 40 years).
If there were only one insurance company, there would be only one rate, and it would go up or down depending on how much was being paid out. But thats too communist to work in the real world. In reality people will charge more services (prescription drugs for example) to such an insurance plan than they would to a plan that charges them more the more they use it.
Same here in Nebraska and in Texas. Doesn't matter if car is even functional according to the DMV guy I talked to. If its got a VIN and it belongs to you, its got to be insured.
Hmm... does congress have the [community's] backup for banning P2P? No.
The/. community? No.
The nationwide "community?" Sure they do.
On what data do you base that? Obviously there are a lot of corporate entities that make a lot of noise and donate lots of money against it, but most people I've asked about it either don't care or don't think that banning it is a good solution to the problem.
I'm not claiming that I've chosen a statisticly valid population for my sample, but the only people I see calling for a ban are the few companies that see p2p as a direct threat to their business model.
Better yet, who is making the copy? If I put bittorrent on my machine, then leave the interface where others can use it to copy the files, am I guilty of copyright violation?
No more so than the library that doesn't stop you from photocopying an entire book. After all, its the library that has made available the copying device and the material.
If someone comes to my house and makes duplicates of files that are legally on my computer, but that he does not have a right to copy, he is in violation of copyright laws, not me. If he does exactly the same thing, but doesn't physically come to my house, it seems that he would still be in violation, not me.
By making such an interface available I could of course be seen as aiding an infringer, but I'm not sure if that is currently a crime (I suspect it is, but I have no specific knowledge of that).
The market is not zero-sum. Wealth is not a fixed quantity - that's why we say someone MAKES money, because they create value through work
If banks could not lend more money than they had in deposits, would the markets be closer to zero-sum?
Not having studied economics much I'm still at a lost for how money enters the system. If there are 1,000 dollars today, and 1,001 tomorrow, where did that extra dollar come from?
I understand that since many dollars are stored only as numbers in a computer they could be created or distroyed as easily as a copy of a Metallica MP3, but in theory everything we do with those virtualized dollars could be done with real paper dollars too. So at some point the treasury (or whomever) has to send out more new paper dollars than they collect in old worn-out paper dollars.
Even if you could predict the patterns, and were so benevolent as to release this information publicly (after a suitable period of 'testing' it for yourself), it sure seems like it would have to be a real masterpiece of work to still predict the markets after everybody started using it to predict the markets.
I think this is why there are laws restricting the ways computers can be used to trade stocks. If many people start using similar algorithms to analyze the market to make optimal trades, the system starts to get into runaway or catastrophic conditions pretty quickly.
Perhaps when we have deeper knowledge about these things it will be possible, but I think we are probably centuries away from that.
There are many sophisticated solutions to recognising and predicting complex patterns but with the stock market there is an element of trying to predict the lottery.
Even if there is a predictable pattern in the stock market, if you publish it, the pattern of the stock market will change. All the investors will begin trying to use the pattern to invest at right time and place to make money, however, since the pattern was developed on a market in which investors use their current ideas about when to invest, the actual behaviour of the market will begin to shift, reducing the effectiveness of the method.
The best market is probably related to that Nash Equilibrium stuff, where the best, stable solution for multiple individuals is not the optimally efficent solution, but its fairly close. Unfortunaly though, I haven't had time to study that field.
It would be very interesting if there was a pattern that would continue to apply when none, few, many and all the investors were using the predictions of the pattern. Somehow I doubt that such a thing exists, but if it did, it would probably be a phenomenally good thing.
Hmm, its probably a good thing I'm not a rocket engineer. If the people with the money have planned on loosing at least one of these things in the course of development, I'm damn well gonna make the sucker blows up at the end of the test. I mean, how often do you get the chance to play with really serious fireworks?
Realistic simulation of multibody dynamics with contact is still subject to research[...]
It seems like a lot of that could be delt with simply by letting the robot make a bunch of shots under various conditions and build its own charactarization of the motion of the balls. For the reasons stated I agree that coming up with accurate calculations would probably be difficult, but people don't play that way, and I doubt a successful robot will either.
A successful pool-playing robot will learn to play the same way a person does, by practicing and generalizing a set of rules from observations. The ability to do much more complicated and accurate analysis and simulation may allow the computer to learn much faster, and adjust for different tables more quickly, but the basic process will probably be the same. Trying to go the other way, using a physics simulation to predict the motion of the balls could work too, but I don't think it would more accurate, and it would require the programmer to correctly identify all the real properties that effect the motion of the ball, and how and when they contribute to the outcome. This approach works fine for building bridges, but I don't think its going to be the best for competing with human players.
Besides all that, making the computer actually learn the game the same way a human does is much, much more interesting and potentially useful than using a simple physics simulator.
The physics simulations we humans do in such a situation are limited to the resolution of our senses and the 'feel' we develop for it. It would be interesting to see how good the results can be when human-style learning can be combined with the numerical and simulation ability of a computer.
They could just pay Katie.com a couple thousand bucks and a yearly fee ($100 or so?) to put up a page/link to whatever content they want to have there. Surely that would have nearly the same effect (getting people who put in the book title to a site about the book), and be vastly cheaper than a legal offense.
I'm curious if they could push the constant flow from the turbine into an elastic, valved chamber. If the valve worked like a pressure relief valve in an air tank, the pressure would build until the valve opened, releasing a rush of blood until the pressure dropped back down to a much lower level, at which point the valve would close again and the cycle would repeat.
flew high up in the atmosphere, and at Mach 3 it heated up so much it would actually expand a measurable amount
About a 9 inch increase in overall length. And the leading edges tended to sharpen as the material was worn away. They would eventually become knife-sharp (but were generally replaced first, evidently there are performance issues with very sharp leading edges).
We need a way to ensure that if a meteor the size of Texas slams into this blue marble tomorrow that we as a species will survive.
Don't forget about the Super Volcanos, a big erruption could bring the human population worldwide back down into the 10's of millions range pretty easily, and it doesn't require rocks from space, which many people just dismiss because it hasn't happened in recorded history, and its currenly very difficult to measure.
I find myself wondering how a Canadian says 'bout' as in a wrestling bout. Typical Americans pronounce it the same way as the second syllable in 'about'.
The phrases 'they had a bout' and 'they had about' usually come out sounding almost exactly the same (except for the few people who enunciate well, when the 'a' in the former will be more distinct or short).
Slashdot Mirror
Excellent, I've put it on my wish list :)
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,
How is that less of a problem on a treadmill?
I'm not that kind of engineer, but it seems like a combination of fast accelerometers on the VR helmet for fine movements and ultrasonic locators for gross positioning in the enviroment would solve that problem pretty well.
I would be extremely surprised if there are not accelerometers available that can very easily outperform, both in resolution and speed, all the senses we use to identify the position of our heads. Accuracy over large distances might be difficult to keep accurate with such equipment, but GPS or ultrasonic locators would remove any error there.
I think that would be very disconcerting to walk on. When I turn while walking I press sideways against the floor. The faster the turn, the more force is applied. The force feedback I expect is based on the inertial resistance the mass of my body provides. If I feel less resistance than I have learned to expect while moving at that velocity and making that kind of turn, I know my feet are slipping (or my inertial mass has suddenly been reduced).
If the floor is made of ball bearings, I will always notice that there is none of the inertial resistance I've learned to use to judge how secure my footing is. I'd probably get used to it, particularly since the VR helmet would provide the visual feedback I expect, but it would probably feel like walking on wet ice at first.
You'd be able to do away with the treadmill completely. And if you put some motors on the balls you could better control the feedback provided ot the user, but that would require lots and lots of mechanics for all the bearings. Instead you could put the balls on the bottom of a little plate, and the user could step on top of the plate. Then the plate could move around after the user removes his foot...
Hey, wait a sec..
I've been wondering why we haven't seen any VR warehouses using that idea yet. Or even augmented reality lasertag arenas.
In a large empty warehouse you could pretty easily simulate just about as large a space as you needed, just be reducing the visual feedback of turns when the user starts to get near a wall. Since our inertial navigation is pretty poor (try guessing how many degrees you turn though while riding in a car with your eyes closed), it would be easy to get the user to always turn more away from the wall than toward it without realizing it. It would be like walking in circles in the forest, you'd never notice it.
You could probably do some pretty cool augmented reality or virtual reality games in a big warehouse using such a system. With stratigicly placed stairs and ramps you could probably even play some pretty rich FPS maps.
Very interesting. That bit about the central bank having some power over other banks assets was what I was missing.
I still have questions, but this gives me some more search ideas. Thanks.
Ergo, they have the community's support.
Hey, isn't this a False Dichotomy?
Lack of opposition could be either indifference or ignorance as well as support.
When the amount of stuff goes up (through work done to transform cheap raw materials into expensive end products) the amount of money goes up too
But how do they know when more stuff appears? I can create 'stuff' (ie, valuable computer software) from nothing, but there is no way for any central entity to know that I've done this. It seems that as more stuff is created the amount of stuff you could get for a dollar would go up (ie, the value of the dollar would rise).
Presumably, at some point more dollars would be added to the system to compensate, to keep prices on items fairly stable. Where is this money injected into the system? Does the mint just deliver boxes of money to the bank for free? Leave it laying around on street corners?
Or is it really all just smoke and mirrors?
Insurance, priced correctly, should neither make nor cost the insured party any money. It should simply "smooth out" the irregular cash requirements of whatever you're insuring against.
That only works with large groups (which is the whole point of insurance). Its pretty easy for a single individual to run up several hundered thousand dollars or more in medical bills if he is involved in an accident of some sort. Most people won't pay more than about $100,000 in their lifetime ($200 monthly for 40 years).
If there were only one insurance company, there would be only one rate, and it would go up or down depending on how much was being paid out. But thats too communist to work in the real world. In reality people will charge more services (prescription drugs for example) to such an insurance plan than they would to a plan that charges them more the more they use it.
Same here in Nebraska and in Texas. Doesn't matter if car is even functional according to the DMV guy I talked to. If its got a VIN and it belongs to you, its got to be insured.
$200 a month? What do you drive?
I have 3 insured cars, 71 impala, 92 lumina and a 95 geo, and my total insurance for my wife and I is $72 a month.
Geico was one of the few companies that would even insure the impala because of its age. The also had the best rate for me.
You could always get a motorcycle, liability only is usually on the order of $100 a year. Be sure to fill out your organ doner card though.
Hmm... does congress have the [community's] backup for banning P2P? No.
/. community? No.
The
The nationwide "community?" Sure they do.
On what data do you base that? Obviously there are a lot of corporate entities that make a lot of noise and donate lots of money against it, but most people I've asked about it either don't care or don't think that banning it is a good solution to the problem.
I'm not claiming that I've chosen a statisticly valid population for my sample, but the only people I see calling for a ban are the few companies that see p2p as a direct threat to their business model.
Better yet, who is making the copy? If I put bittorrent on my machine, then leave the interface where others can use it to copy the files, am I guilty of copyright violation?
No more so than the library that doesn't stop you from photocopying an entire book. After all, its the library that has made available the copying device and the material.
If someone comes to my house and makes duplicates of files that are legally on my computer, but that he does not have a right to copy, he is in violation of copyright laws, not me. If he does exactly the same thing, but doesn't physically come to my house, it seems that he would still be in violation, not me.
By making such an interface available I could of course be seen as aiding an infringer, but I'm not sure if that is currently a crime (I suspect it is, but I have no specific knowledge of that).
The market is not zero-sum. Wealth is not a fixed quantity - that's why we say someone MAKES money, because they create value through work
If banks could not lend more money than they had in deposits, would the markets be closer to zero-sum?
Not having studied economics much I'm still at a lost for how money enters the system. If there are 1,000 dollars today, and 1,001 tomorrow, where did that extra dollar come from?
I understand that since many dollars are stored only as numbers in a computer they could be created or distroyed as easily as a copy of a Metallica MP3, but in theory everything we do with those virtualized dollars could be done with real paper dollars too. So at some point the treasury (or whomever) has to send out more new paper dollars than they collect in old worn-out paper dollars.
Even if you could predict the patterns, and were so benevolent as to release this information publicly (after a suitable period of 'testing' it for yourself), it sure seems like it would have to be a real masterpiece of work to still predict the markets after everybody started using it to predict the markets.
I think this is why there are laws restricting the ways computers can be used to trade stocks. If many people start using similar algorithms to analyze the market to make optimal trades, the system starts to get into runaway or catastrophic conditions pretty quickly.
Perhaps when we have deeper knowledge about these things it will be possible, but I think we are probably centuries away from that.
There are many sophisticated solutions to recognising and predicting complex patterns but with the stock market there is an element of trying to predict the lottery.
Even if there is a predictable pattern in the stock market, if you publish it, the pattern of the stock market will change. All the investors will begin trying to use the pattern to invest at right time and place to make money, however, since the pattern was developed on a market in which investors use their current ideas about when to invest, the actual behaviour of the market will begin to shift, reducing the effectiveness of the method.
The best market is probably related to that Nash Equilibrium stuff, where the best, stable solution for multiple individuals is not the optimally efficent solution, but its fairly close. Unfortunaly though, I haven't had time to study that field.
It would be very interesting if there was a pattern that would continue to apply when none, few, many and all the investors were using the predictions of the pattern. Somehow I doubt that such a thing exists, but if it did, it would probably be a phenomenally good thing.
Why run endless simulations when you can launch the damn rocket and see what happens and get REAL data?
Especially with rockets. Because you all know you want to see at least one unmanned rocket detonate.
I'd like to see a prize for a vehicle that can snatch a dead satellite from orbit and bring it safely back to earth
:)
I'd like to see that competition occur right after one with the goal of putting a small satellite into orbit
Hmm, its probably a good thing I'm not a rocket engineer. If the people with the money have planned on loosing at least one of these things in the course of development, I'm damn well gonna make the sucker blows up at the end of the test. I mean, how often do you get the chance to play with really serious fireworks?
Realistic simulation of multibody dynamics with contact is still subject to research[...]
It seems like a lot of that could be delt with simply by letting the robot make a bunch of shots under various conditions and build its own charactarization of the motion of the balls. For the reasons stated I agree that coming up with accurate calculations would probably be difficult, but people don't play that way, and I doubt a successful robot will either.
A successful pool-playing robot will learn to play the same way a person does, by practicing and generalizing a set of rules from observations. The ability to do much more complicated and accurate analysis and simulation may allow the computer to learn much faster, and adjust for different tables more quickly, but the basic process will probably be the same. Trying to go the other way, using a physics simulation to predict the motion of the balls could work too, but I don't think it would more accurate, and it would require the programmer to correctly identify all the real properties that effect the motion of the ball, and how and when they contribute to the outcome. This approach works fine for building bridges, but I don't think its going to be the best for competing with human players.
Besides all that, making the computer actually learn the game the same way a human does is much, much more interesting and potentially useful than using a simple physics simulator.
The physics simulations we humans do in such a situation are limited to the resolution of our senses and the 'feel' we develop for it. It would be interesting to see how good the results can be when human-style learning can be combined with the numerical and simulation ability of a computer.
They could just pay Katie.com a couple thousand bucks and a yearly fee ($100 or so?) to put up a page/link to whatever content they want to have there. Surely that would have nearly the same effect (getting people who put in the book title to a site about the book), and be vastly cheaper than a legal offense.
capilliary flow, where most oxygen exchange takes place, is pretty much constant flow anyway.
I'm curious if they could push the constant flow from the turbine into an elastic, valved chamber. If the valve worked like a pressure relief valve in an air tank, the pressure would build until the valve opened, releasing a rush of blood until the pressure dropped back down to a much lower level, at which point the valve would close again and the cycle would repeat.
The SR-71 Blackhawk
Ugh, can we revoke your geek license for that?
flew high up in the atmosphere, and at Mach 3 it heated up so much it would actually expand a measurable amount
About a 9 inch increase in overall length. And the leading edges tended to sharpen as the material was worn away. They would eventually become knife-sharp (but were generally replaced first, evidently there are performance issues with very sharp leading edges).
We need a way to ensure that if a meteor the size of Texas slams into this blue marble tomorrow that we as a species will survive.
Don't forget about the Super Volcanos, a big erruption could bring the human population worldwide back down into the 10's of millions range pretty easily, and it doesn't require rocks from space, which many people just dismiss because it hasn't happened in recorded history, and its currenly very difficult to measure.
I find myself wondering how a Canadian says 'bout' as in a wrestling bout. Typical Americans pronounce it the same way as the second syllable in 'about'.
The phrases 'they had a bout' and 'they had about' usually come out sounding almost exactly the same (except for the few people who enunciate well, when the 'a' in the former will be more distinct or short).