Ever since reading Ready Player One, I've been struck by the concept of omnidirectional VR treadmills.
These shoes are so much cooler than that. Now all we need are low-profile haptic gloves and possibly some system for generating wind to help generate the illusion of motion.
An omnidirectional treadmill does not seem like a pleasant experience. If you actually wanted to be able to move around it would need to be very big so that it could get away with moving slowly, it would be noisy, it would be expensive, you would need to have good balance as the floor moves out from underneath you.
In particular, in the film they do a bit of trickery with the shots to hide how much smaller the omni-treadmill is than the actual running stride of the actor.
It won’t work. Ready Player One (as implied by the book or visually shown in the film) is actually immersive in way that is impossible to input with physical controls.
Take a step irl. In game your foot goes through a wall. In Ready Player One your foot is stopped by the wall. This contradiction can’t exist.
It’s more ok for hands where you can just demand the hand move back before the wall irl. But with feet that’s your whole sense of balance.
I think an omni-treadmill could fake it a little if you were harnessed in place over it, by way of directionally locking up based on available in-game movement. There would still be a gap in perception there, but it would get closer to, for example, being able to navigate an area blind.
It would be very hard. You would fall. Which would be wrong because you’re not falling in game. You said harness but it would need to by a smart dynamic harness that adapts the tension which would be weird if you moved your leg oddly.
Some relevant edge cases:
1) you’re at a ledge and trying to dip your foot down (or conversely as shown in ready player one the film, you’re at a precipice and feel off balance because your VR foot is not fully supported by VR ground)
2) you’re running and a limb or foot hits a small object in a way that should realistically cause you to fall or be obstructed. Extremely tough problem to solve with the harness idea.
You can handle different edge cases with reasonable band aids but not comprehensively in a way that will work for general movement.
Some are convinced sensory stimulation needs to be perfect. But in my own limited experience, including some fun "walk the plank" demo between two abandoned buildings they had at MiddleVR, it doesn’t take much.
The goal isn’t to fool the brain. Just to give it enough it can fool itself.
Would be nice if they works but the video never shows any extended walking without stops or cuts. I assume this means their algorithms for recentering don't work this well.
It may look like the person in the demo videos is having to step very carefully because they don't feel very stable underfoot, but in actuality they have to pee really badly and they're desperately searching for a bathroom.
Same problem as VR treadmills. Tweaking your feet can't fool the accelerometer in your inner ear. Any movement that involves acceleration (all of them) will be wrong. It will never feel like natural movement.
I remember a video years ago that showed a device you put on your head that could affect your balance using electrical signals directed at your inner ear. They were demoing it in this news report as a human remote control sort of thing. You could control the direction the people wearing it were walking using a wireless joystick. I want to say everyone was Japanese but they could've been from anywhere in Asia. Hopefully somebody can dig it up.
I wonder if there has been any progress on increasing the capabilities of that system. It could just be another component attached to the HMD. I bet as it is now though, even with improvements, it would make you sick, which VR already has trouble with.
This technology is called galvanic vestibular stimulation and I found a relatively recent paper that actually tried to reduce VR motion sickness using it
Excerpt: "The sensation is undeniable. The direction of the tip is dependent on the direction of the current, as evidenced by just swapping the electrodes. Obviously, since these were batteries, this was a DC current. Sensation grew stronger over a brief period of time until it saturated. It sort of feels like someone pushing or pulling you over, except there is no tug on your arm. The ramp-up in the feeling made me think of charging a small capacitor."
I remember it pretty clearly even today, which is weird because I tend to but remember this very well, but maybe it was just the excitement of the experiment. It was a relatively strong effect, and it was fairly easy to achieve (of I could do it with my crude setup, a real product should have no problem), but there were some distinct issues.
First of all, there was a lag in response, and it was a pretty large one. IIRC, it took at least half a second before I started noticing any change after turning on the current.
Next, it was fairly binary, and single axis. I could tilt left/right, but that was it, no front/back. It took time to ramp up to full tilt, and then I could only achieve about 50% tilt.
I briefly forgot what I was working with and thought I might try to limit the sensation by pulse width modulation of electrical signal. That was quite a shock! I mean that seriously!
Anyway, I came away from the experience feeling slightly nauseous and that GVS was too limited to work out.
Even if it controlled your vestibular system perfectly, it unfortunately wouldn't help. You need your sense of balance to stand and walk. If you mess with it too much you will hit the floor very quickly. Physics isn't fooled.
You could imagine supporting yourself with a harness so you wouldn't fall, but certainly you can also imagine that constantly struggling against a harness won't feel like natural walking either.
And there's also proprioception that will sense that your limbs are not moving in the way your inner ear predicts they should. Proprioception can't be fooled. If it could your limbs would get out of sync with your brain and who knows what chaos would result.
Unfortunately we won't be running around freely in arbitrary VR environments until the invention of The Matrix's brain jack. So, not likely within our lifetimes.
The first chapter from The Brain That Changes Itself is about a woman who couldn't walk because of some bacteria (iirc?) that attacked something in her inner ear that wound up destroying her balance. The chapter is a story about attaching electrodes to her tongue connected to a helmet with accelerometers that helped restore her sense of balance. Initially the effect persisted for a short time after removing the helmet and electrodes. With subsequent sessions the duration got longer and longer and after several years her balance was completely normal again.
Actually, proprioception can be fooled quite easily. There are a number of different examples involving phantom limbs, vestigial tails, redirected walking, etc.
Almost none of the human senses are absolute. They are holistic, subjective, and relative to experience (both recent and past), culture, age, etc. Honestly, the fact that we can get any semblance of objective communication of our senses together, based on how wonky and unreliable the individual parts can be, is amazing.
There was a thing called OtoTech talked about on Reddit years ago that I think people were making DIY versions of. It was supposed to cure motion sickness without using electrical stimulation I believe, but it's been a long time since I've looked into it much and the company never made consumer versions but stuck to military and medical stuff.
I was excited about this too! They're going the FDA route so expect it sometime before the heat death of the universe, if your insurance covers it. https://otolithlabs.com/
No. Your head has a gyro too and it can tell the difference between the floor tilting and running on flat ground. It doesn't matter what happens at your feet. The accelerometer and gyro in your inner ear are not fooled.
Once someone slips and breaks their neck using this thing its game over.
I've sat in a jury for a frivolous lawsuit and there are tons of sharks out there.
That would be my worry too, especially since they claim "no harness required".
Yeah good luck. No visual references because one is wearing an HMD, shoes with rollers/wheels (doesn't matter how/whether they are braked or not - equipment does break!) and no safety equipment?
This is again a typical project of someone who thought they have a "good idea" and didn't think it completely through. Or think that what works for them in their garage/lab is automatically also a viable product.
It isn't even a new idea - similar gizmos have been designed and tried before - and 100% of them flopped once the realities of the market hit:
- It is dangerous, full stop. No restraints to prevent the user from falling, in a living room with sharp furniture corners and with their vision impeded by a VR helmet? That's a lawsuit waiting to happen, no matter how many disclaimers the vendor sticks on it. And once the necessary safety gear is added to make it actually comply with the consumer safety regulations in various jurisdiction, the device becomes so unwieldy and expensive that it will be unviable.
- It universally over-promises and under-delivers - walking in place is never "natural", no matter what the vendor claims. Even more so when one emulates joystick by walking instead of actually translating walking in place to walking in game. That's just jarring and not natural at all. It will likely cause a lot of motion sickness because of the mismatch between the perceived movement on the screen and the walking happening at a different pace (since we are emulating a joystick motion and not actual walking). Humans don't think and move in terms of joystick movement ...
- It may be a good idea on paper - but most people promoting these solutions (treadmills, various "sliding shoes", etc.) have obviously not tried to actually use them to play a game where one has to extensively move around by walking or running. Have you tried to run around for an hour (doesn't matter whether for real or in place/on a treadmill)? Surprise - it is exhausting!
- Software support is going to suck - either one has to emulate a controller which is going to feel like everything but "natural" or the titles have to support the device explicitly. Good luck with the latter unless you are a really big player in the market already - nobody will even want to talk to you about it. That will result in something that isn't usable in titles people actually want to play with it.
- The company tends to disappear after a few years after the investment money runs out. Or it gets acquired - and the product promptly cancelled. Either way leaving early adopters with a useless piece of electronic junk and no support.
I don't want to rain on their parade but we have been here many times since 2012 already.
I just doubt the treadmill approach will work without risk of injury or very limited motion speed.
Cybershoes are just a kind of controller for your feet you use while seated. Less risk of injury and no speed limit, maybe the game but not the player.
Cybershoes are fun but limited. They have to be used whilst seated (and it came with a dedicated stool for this). Also game support is limited. There’s a list of supported games on the site, and I don’t think anything new has been added for several years. My guess is that it needs developers to write to its API, so it can’t serve as a drop-in replacement for any game with free locomotion. (If the Freeaim can support this, that’d be a good selling point.)
Having said that, I’ve gotten a lot of enjoyment from using them to walk across the world in Skyrim VR. The movement required (rolling your feet back towards you) is different to walking but feels convincing enough when you’re in the game.
lol. That is too complex for the purpose of long-range movement in VR.
Just make a controller with a control patterns of electric unicycle, or maybe "hoverboard".
The unicycle idea is actually interesting, I could imagine that working well for a game where you play a little robot character, or a guy stuck on a unicycle. I guess with all the existing biological limitations that hinder immersion, it's smarter to explore ways to get the human mind/body to accept other standards, so that you lean into the limitations
I have been following the Youtube channed "Finally Functional" for a few years. The guy (Alex) built all kinds of VR shoes and rigs in his basement or garage and he was very open with the flaws of each design that he tried. Really insightful stuff.
Many years ago, I recall a demo of someone walking around a very large field in VR, but there was an algorithm to gently curve a person who thought they were walking in a straight line, so as to give the illusion of unlimited space to walk around in. Similar thing happening here, with the exception that the person doesn’t feel like they are moving, and might get nauseated. With MR, and a decent sized house, I think you could perhaps programmatically create VR landscapes/levels that give the illusion of endless-walking while simply guiding you around your limited play area. That would be pretty cool, and I could see working well with games that had an indoor setting, especially if you added virtual elevators to get you to do a 180 in a natural way. Maybe add in a teleportation system like Portal, and you’ve got the recipe for exploring what feels like immense areas all from a small home.
Not sure my brain has made it to 2024 yet, but i was somehow disappointed to find out, it's about physical shoes and not virtual shoes. Not sure what i expected, but i was wondering what VR shoes might be – especially with a few dozen comments on HN.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 111 ms ] threadThese shoes are so much cooler than that. Now all we need are low-profile haptic gloves and possibly some system for generating wind to help generate the illusion of motion.
Real omni-treadmills have you attached to an arm or harnessed in.
Take a step irl. In game your foot goes through a wall. In Ready Player One your foot is stopped by the wall. This contradiction can’t exist.
It’s more ok for hands where you can just demand the hand move back before the wall irl. But with feet that’s your whole sense of balance.
Some relevant edge cases:
1) you’re at a ledge and trying to dip your foot down (or conversely as shown in ready player one the film, you’re at a precipice and feel off balance because your VR foot is not fully supported by VR ground)
2) you’re running and a limb or foot hits a small object in a way that should realistically cause you to fall or be obstructed. Extremely tough problem to solve with the harness idea.
You can handle different edge cases with reasonable band aids but not comprehensively in a way that will work for general movement.
I suspect these shoes feel more like walking on ice.
The goal isn’t to fool the brain. Just to give it enough it can fool itself.
You know what they say about assumption ;-)
Looks very uncomfortable though.
> gShoe is an internal joke about a product [Google] shouldn't make, and is used in many internal trainings as a placeholder for any Google product
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/google/s/fHCBJipqdP
I wonder if there has been any progress on increasing the capabilities of that system. It could just be another component attached to the HMD. I bet as it is now though, even with improvements, it would make you sick, which VR already has trouble with.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9714040 https://youtu.be/z91PZpejFeE?feature=shared
Pretty neat
Excerpt: "The sensation is undeniable. The direction of the tip is dependent on the direction of the current, as evidenced by just swapping the electrodes. Obviously, since these were batteries, this was a DC current. Sensation grew stronger over a brief period of time until it saturated. It sort of feels like someone pushing or pulling you over, except there is no tug on your arm. The ramp-up in the feeling made me think of charging a small capacitor."
I remember it pretty clearly even today, which is weird because I tend to but remember this very well, but maybe it was just the excitement of the experiment. It was a relatively strong effect, and it was fairly easy to achieve (of I could do it with my crude setup, a real product should have no problem), but there were some distinct issues.
First of all, there was a lag in response, and it was a pretty large one. IIRC, it took at least half a second before I started noticing any change after turning on the current.
Next, it was fairly binary, and single axis. I could tilt left/right, but that was it, no front/back. It took time to ramp up to full tilt, and then I could only achieve about 50% tilt.
I briefly forgot what I was working with and thought I might try to limit the sensation by pulse width modulation of electrical signal. That was quite a shock! I mean that seriously!
Anyway, I came away from the experience feeling slightly nauseous and that GVS was too limited to work out.
You could imagine supporting yourself with a harness so you wouldn't fall, but certainly you can also imagine that constantly struggling against a harness won't feel like natural walking either.
And there's also proprioception that will sense that your limbs are not moving in the way your inner ear predicts they should. Proprioception can't be fooled. If it could your limbs would get out of sync with your brain and who knows what chaos would result.
Unfortunately we won't be running around freely in arbitrary VR environments until the invention of The Matrix's brain jack. So, not likely within our lifetimes.
Almost none of the human senses are absolute. They are holistic, subjective, and relative to experience (both recent and past), culture, age, etc. Honestly, the fact that we can get any semblance of objective communication of our senses together, based on how wonky and unreliable the individual parts can be, is amazing.
Have you ever been to a "mystery" house/spot?
Yeah good luck. No visual references because one is wearing an HMD, shoes with rollers/wheels (doesn't matter how/whether they are braked or not - equipment does break!) and no safety equipment?
This is again a typical project of someone who thought they have a "good idea" and didn't think it completely through. Or think that what works for them in their garage/lab is automatically also a viable product.
It isn't even a new idea - similar gizmos have been designed and tried before - and 100% of them flopped once the realities of the market hit:
- It is dangerous, full stop. No restraints to prevent the user from falling, in a living room with sharp furniture corners and with their vision impeded by a VR helmet? That's a lawsuit waiting to happen, no matter how many disclaimers the vendor sticks on it. And once the necessary safety gear is added to make it actually comply with the consumer safety regulations in various jurisdiction, the device becomes so unwieldy and expensive that it will be unviable.
- It universally over-promises and under-delivers - walking in place is never "natural", no matter what the vendor claims. Even more so when one emulates joystick by walking instead of actually translating walking in place to walking in game. That's just jarring and not natural at all. It will likely cause a lot of motion sickness because of the mismatch between the perceived movement on the screen and the walking happening at a different pace (since we are emulating a joystick motion and not actual walking). Humans don't think and move in terms of joystick movement ...
- It may be a good idea on paper - but most people promoting these solutions (treadmills, various "sliding shoes", etc.) have obviously not tried to actually use them to play a game where one has to extensively move around by walking or running. Have you tried to run around for an hour (doesn't matter whether for real or in place/on a treadmill)? Surprise - it is exhausting!
- Software support is going to suck - either one has to emulate a controller which is going to feel like everything but "natural" or the titles have to support the device explicitly. Good luck with the latter unless you are a really big player in the market already - nobody will even want to talk to you about it. That will result in something that isn't usable in titles people actually want to play with it.
- The company tends to disappear after a few years after the investment money runs out. Or it gets acquired - and the product promptly cancelled. Either way leaving early adopters with a useless piece of electronic junk and no support.
I don't want to rain on their parade but we have been here many times since 2012 already.
https://www.cybershoes.com/
Cybershoes are just a kind of controller for your feet you use while seated. Less risk of injury and no speed limit, maybe the game but not the player.
Having said that, I’ve gotten a lot of enjoyment from using them to walk across the world in Skyrim VR. The movement required (rolling your feet back towards you) is different to walking but feels convincing enough when you’re in the game.
Now that I looked at his channel again it turns out that he actually became part of the Freeaim team: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRrg99wCKBE