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This is neat and all, but it seems to be yet another attempt to solve the (to me less-interesting) problem of how to have people use their feet as input for nav
by derefr 3y ago
This is neat and all, but it seems to be yet another attempt to solve the (to me less-interesting) problem of how to have people use their feet as input for navigation in VR, while keeping them stationary; rather than an attempt at actually creating any high-fidelity sensation of moving through space in VR, according to your own human "internal accelerometer". (I.e. the sense you have that combines inputs from your inner ear, wind against your skin, interoception as g-forces smush your organs around, etc.)
I presume that doing the latter would necessarily involve allowing you to actually move away from center within a bounded space — and then subtly re-centering you whenever you're not moving.
Has any company ever put effort into developing a VR floor technology that works more like that? One that allows you to actually feel like you're moving?
I bring this up, because it seems like the technology on display here could actually be made to do something akin to this, with a few more tweaks:
1. build a large room covered in this surface;
2. configure the surface to not actively slide you around while you're moving, but instead, to only begin "re-centering" you when you stay still (or when you are walking slowly enough that your "internal accelerometer" isn't receiving much input anyway);
3a. design the VR experiences consumed through such a platform, so that you'd mostly only have reason to walk, with "free-roam" areas where running would make sense only lasting a few seconds at a time, broken up with dialogue / interactions / etc. to give the floor time to re-center you.
3b. Or, if these are VR games, then as another option, use a stamina system in the game that depletes as you run in real life (bonus if your character's stamina drains exponentially the further you get from the center of the floor); and have the player wear a force-feedback resistance system (i.e. a TENS unit on their legs) that effectively cripples you physically from doing any more running, for as long as your character is out of stamina. (Verisimilitude!)
4. Either way, you probably still need a fallback if you manage to get near the edge of the room somehow. Like if you're completely ignoring what's happening on-screen and just running in a scene where your character is supposed to be stationary + talking to someone. So have the floor actively re-center you, like is shown here, only when you get near the edge — and hyperbolically, with more force as you get closer to the edge.
5. Some impetuous people will run full-tilt just to see if they can overcome the floor. So make sure to pad the walls. :)
That being said, while I think that kind of set-up might work... the real trouble with it is that a passive system doesn't prevent people from bumping into one-another. Which is fine if players' real-world positions are meant to correlate 1:1 with their in-game positions (or if, like in the demo video, there's no true per-individual "VR", just a shared wraparound screen in the room.) But it probably means that for true "immersive VR worlds" (i.e. a hypothetical VRMMO), you'd need one huge room per player. And that's a bit impractical, price- and space-wise!