The bit that's funny about this is I remember an HCI researcher back in the 90's who argued in the opposite direction: the wheelchair is the perfect way to inte

The bit that's funny about this is I remember an HCI researcher back in the 90's who argued in the opposite direction: the wheelchair is the perfect way to interact with a VR environment. Two large discs on independent rotation encoders make for an incredibly cheap and portable interface. Moving around the environment is intuitive and user actions have an obvious physical meaning in the environment. You get a rudimentary form of haptic feedback for free, as feeling the angular momentum of the spinning wheels gives the user information about their momentum in the virtual space. If you really felt like getting fancy, you could add a stepper motor to each shaft for the price of even the cheapest position tracking system. With the motor, you can provide the counter torque to simulate going up a hill or spin the wheels up as you go down a ramp. A system that lets a standing user instantly grasp the terrain under their feet would cost an astronomical amount, but it's trivial in a chair. Just the simple immersion of needing to give a little extra force to get a wheel over a door jam would make a huge difference.