5 ms·
I'm sorry, but omnidirectional treadmills can't work and here's why
- 2024throwaway 3y agoI think this take is correct and lacking a “jacking in” to your neural cortex a la Neuromancer or The Matrix, true VR will remain a pipe dream.
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- metadat 3y agoAs stated in TFA, what if the holodeck space were larger, e.g. 5-20 meters? The centering adjustments can then take place gradually (unless you flat out sprint straight like Usaine Bolt). It kind of irks me this is a valid solution which is half glossed over to make room for a clickbait headline. This could ostensibly function as a thorough bypass to compensate for the sensitivity of the human vestibular system, at the cost of TAM (Total Addressable Market, due to size constraints). Personally I'd be up for going to a Lazr-Quest like place to experience a real-ish holodeck. Would make for a great destination for a venue in SF. -- Related submission from yesterday: Disney unveils the HoloTile floor https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39156444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39156444 (288 comments) And the direct link to the goods: https://youtu.be/68YMEmaF0rs?t=203 https://youtu.be/68YMEmaF0rs?t=203
- oatmeal1 3y agoThen you have to find someone to make/modify your favorite action game that's compatible with this, which is no easy task in and of itself. Ladders and clambering you experience in game will still be a matter of pushing a button on the controller in your hand.
- metadat 3y agoThis is a problem for once the thing is working ;) No doubt there'll be other constraints coming. This isn't The Ultimate Solution, rather a significant incremental improvement over the stated hurdles with existing designs optimized and marketed towards fitting into 3'x3' space in front of your television, bed, or desk.
- rowanG077 3y agoThis will be pretty trivial. There is very good support for common apis.
- NickM 3y agoThe article addresses this exact question.
- tempestn 3y agoThough the comments also address using boots instead of an external device, but then don't consider that in the context of the arguments against a larger space.
- thatsjusthard 3y agoMostly it says it’s hard and the machine would have to be big. So? Same for galvanic whatever. “It would be hard to make it so precise as to not make you sick”. Ok, try hard then.
- ffsm8 3y agoOkay, let's think this through. - a large area is necessary - the machinery is going to be extremely expensive - it's still going to be a subpar experience as the virtual area will never be fully represented unless you remove vegetation, cliffs etc - it needs to be supported by the software (which nobody will, because there is no market for it) If you now make a venn diagram that represents all people potentially interested in this, you end up at pretty much 0. Thus, it doesn't work.
- _nalply 3y agoMore points. - our equilibrium sense in the inner ear is very sensitive to velocity changes - the machinery only fools for steady velocities or small velocity changes - turns in walking imply strong velocity changes The effect is that we tend to counterbalance the velocity changes but because the machinery cannot simulate velocity changes, counterbalancing makes us fall. If that gadget manages to sell expect many hilarious videos of people falling on their noses or butts. Exactly like for the treadmill. Note how people always fall if they assume a velocity change (like starting to run by jumping on a running treadmill). I always laugh when the treadmill then sends people off. It's hilarious. Perhaps with some tilting platform the velocity changes can be emulated. Whenever the person changes the direction of the walk, the tilting platform tilts in the opposite direction of the velocity change. Let's say a person walks to the right and suddenly walks to the left. The velocity change vector points to the left. The platform will tilt to the right. This is difficult to get right. Probably latencies of more than five milliseconds will irritate our equilibrium organ I think. Software should be fast enough but the platform has to move swiftly. And even this is not enough. There will be rotation in the tilting. Some sensitive people will feel sick. And the quickly moving platform is dangerous. A bug (wrong sign of the vector) and the platform kicks people off it. Or some body part gets below the platform and the crush is strong enough to grievously hurt people.
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- heads 3y agoTilt it? That is to say, to some extent, could you repurpose gravity to give a sense of acceleration?
- crazygringo 3y ago[flagged]
- tempestn 3y agoThere are ways to tell (you can't have more than one G total acceleration via tilt, for one thing, and there's the rotational acceleration of the tilting itself), but that's still an intriguing idea. Maybe something like that could indeed get you closer.
- lisper 3y ago+1. This is definitely worth investigating. It sounds very plausible to me.
- rzzzt 3y agoI think you are talking about the Venturer simulators. It looks like it lives on as two-player cabins named Venturer S2 for the arcade; I can't find what the model number for the "bus sized" version (could hold 14 people) was. Both the small and the large model uses 3 pistons arranged in a triangle.
- rzzzt 3y agoFound it, it's the Thomson Venturer V-14: https://youtu.be/aBInXaJQdOo https://youtu.be/aBInXaJQdOo The video mentions that its motion system has been upgraded to Windows 10 - the original had an MS-DOS PC conducting the lifts and the tilts.
- eastbound 3y ago> And I don't think there's any way of actually telling whether you're accelerating or tilting The moment the machine moves the frame to make you feel like it’s accelerating, it generates a rotation. A gyro would prove it. The body would feel if the machine tried to generate fast transitions.
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- jackcosgrove 3y agoIs there a way to control the pitch and roll of the treadmill to simulate an acceleration change? If the vestibular system is expecting a deceleration, make the treadmill have a slight upward slope along the axis where we would expect to slow down?
- shiandow 3y agoEven that might be a bit overcomplicated, you could probably get quite far with a bowl shaped treadmill (I mean, anecdotally the simple wheel shaped ones do feel like running, their inertia notwithstanding). If you start pitching the treadmill the tricky part is that you'd probably need to rotate the person around their centre of mass, or somewhere close to it.
- khazhoux 3y agoI find it extremely disappointing, when a group is attempting to innovate on a problem that is very clearly difficult, and someone comes along to say "I'm sorry, but this can't work." The researchers are obviously aware of the challenges and working to overcome them. No one is confused to think that an omnidirectional-treadmill can capture the true physics of walking. The researchers are working to get it as close as possible. Naysaying, in cases like this, is not a virtuous skill.
- forrestthewoods 3y agoStrong agree. It’s boring, lazy, and wrong. The Apollo program is notorious for inventing all kinds of technologies as part of the effort. We should celebrate ambitious “moon shot” (or loon shot) efforts. It’s awesome when companies support ambitious and crazy efforts. These projects often pay all kinds of unexpected dividends. In both technological development and people development. Was landing on the moon useful? Not really, no. Was the effort to land on the moon useful? Hell yeah it was. Kudos to all the companies that fund bonafide research.
- jackcosgrove 3y agoI don't even think this is the biggest problem in VR, and it's mostly solved. I used a Quest 2 for the first time the other day. It was a very simple environment, a single room you could walk around in. There was a desk in the middle. I tried to lean my elbow on the desk and almost fell over :/ So kudos to the Disney team.
- mft_ 3y agoOne could construct a spectrum, from outright pessimism through 'naysaying' and 'reasonable skepticism', ending up somewhere in the region of constructive challenge and helpful pressure-testing discussion. Would all stations on this spectrum be disappointing to you, or is there a line to be drawn? And if so, how would you explain your reasoning? --- (I ask this not to be awkward, but because I've often mused over something similar myself, when frustrated by the knee-jerk challenge offered by some folks to new or positive ideas.)
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- jeffbee 3y agoI like how even in the advertisement in the video it is perfectly obvious that the act of walking on this thing must be quite unnatural. The person using it looks like he is half way though the first day of walking school.
- causality0 3y agoI find it very sad that someone thought about this long enough to write an article without considering "What if you just get used to it?" Like fuck me, people train to put their bodies in an enormous variety of physical circumstances. If a human being can learn to drive a car at a hundred miles per hour, can learn to fly a wingsuit, can learn to exist in zero-G, they can probably damn learn to walk on an omnidirectional treadmill without falling over or throwing up.
- crazygringo 3y agoYou make a good point -- basically, our brain could understand that our body is fixed in space, and that when we "walk" we're actually sliding the environment around with our feet. And just quickly get used to it. It's not clear that this would work, but it's not implausible either. Maybe it'll make us nauseous, or maybe it'll feel different but still work fine.
- masfuerte 3y agoThe penultimate paragraph addresses this point. > [...] Maybe we can still use them unnaturally. If you train yourself, maybe you can learn to do the strange movements that are required to change speed and direction on the treadmill. [...]
- SamBam 3y agoBut that doesn't address the neuroplasticity that's possible with this kind of learning. It's not just a matter of training yourself, is that, when you train yourself, the movements become natural, and feel like a reasonable way to move yourself through space.
- causality0 3y agoThis is the most doomer take on the problem. You could say the same thing about learning to write or do math.
- resolutebat 3y agoSure, but it's not a great simulation of reality (the R in VR) then now is it?
- crowcroft 3y agoProbably wouldn’t be the first that can’t happen that’s happened.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 3y agoWe even have a saying for it: There's a first time for everything.
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- seabass-labrax 3y agoI think there might be a problem with calling these new VR systems are 'holodecks', a term used both by journalists and sometimes the technologies' inventors themselves. Just because we haven't yet reached a USS Enterprise level of refinement, in which you can run, climb and interact with objects naturally, doesn't mean that omnidirectional treadmills don't have a huge amount of potential. After all, I for one don't feel any less impressed by ground-penetrating radar or X-ray scanners just because they won't fit in a pocket-sized Star Trek tricorder. All that will come in time, probably within my lifetime. That's already a century or two ahead of their fictional schedule :) We could use omnidirectional treadmills right here and now, the vestibular confusion issues notwithstanding, for all kind of entertainment and education purposes. Consider that a lot of popular video games don't actually involve as much complex movement as you might assume from the critiques of VR: the main activity in most tactical first-person-shooter games is crouching behind walls! Virtual reality museums and art galleries will be great with omnidirectional treadmills; here, walking is not the point, it's just a natural and intuitive way of navigating in a virtual environment without having to learn the controls beforehand.
- taneq 3y agoThose that say a thing is impossible should stop interrupting those who are doing it.
- raggi 3y agoIt might not ever work "like walking", but nor does a linear array of a bunch of miniature speakers in a pair of headphones work like spatial audio in the real world, but the brain figures this out fairly quickly. The question here is, and in some way the "art" or the creative side of the engineering puzzle, is when does this "feel good enough" for most users?
- eminence32 3y agoI get the point that omnidirection treadmills "can't work" in the sense that they can't be a perfect simulation of real walking, but I'm not sure they need to be perfect. Current generation VR systems are highly flawed and far some perfect, but they offer something very compelling and enjoyable. I don't know how good an omnidirectional treadmill needs to be before it crosses the "good enough" threshold, but I hope people continue to build and research these to find that threshold
- Gigachad 3y agoThe problem is that they basically all provide negative value. They cost a lot, they take up a lot of space, they get in the way while using VR, and they don’t do anything to solve motion sickness. The situation is not that they aren’t perfect yet, but that you would be better off not having it at all.
- shadowgovt 3y agoMeh. Author's not wrong but their their criticism may or may not apply to you individually. Different people experience different levels of vestibular decoherence. It may impact the marketability of such a device if only 50% of the population can use it without getting really sick, so that matters a lot. But whether an individual is susceptible varies from person to person.
- ruined 3y agoriding a horse doesnt feel exactly like walking so it's a doomed technology
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- ahmedfromtunis 3y agoThis reminds of the dude who wrote a multi-thousand-word analysis bashing the Apple Vision Pro and how such device shouldn't be able to work because Apple didn't get it right... without even holding said device in his own hands, let alone test it. Why?? Didn't smart people predict, time and time again, that some new tech would never work because it goes against all rules of common sense and "physics"; only for the people building it to defy all these "rules" and turn their crazy idea not only into a real object, but also into a product that can mass produced and used by millions? Can't we just learn??
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- rabf 3y agoIf you are interested in this you may also like the "Exit Suit" which is open sourcing their plans at the end of this month. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZiwrDfi9rw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZiwrDfi9rw
- ccvannorman 3y ago> blah blah .. Vestibular system .. blah blah Sorry, but the reason they don't work is much easier to describe using momentum. You can't stop on a dime, turn left quickly, or any "regular" human movement that alters your momentum, because you (~50-80kg) aren't moving*. Even if we HAD no Vestibular System, this would still not work as expected; we fall over the moment we try to "stop" while running at full pace.