January 25, 2024 • 47 mins
An interesting set of challenges crop up when you want to translate movements in a physical space to a virtual one. How do you keep people safe? How do you manage groups in the same physical space? And can you still look cool if you're running around on an omni treadmill?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and How the
tech are You? And as the poets of Stained once said,
(00:24):
it's been a while since I did an episode dedicated
to virtual reality, but I thought it would do one
this week because I actually saw a cool video that
showed Disney imagineer and now Inventor Hall of Famer Lanny
Smoot show off an invention called the hollow tile floor,
which could, among other things, potentially provide a solution for
(00:47):
folks who want to explore a virtual space while simultaneously
moving around their very real, you know, physical environments with
their actual physical bodies here in the real world, you know,
without bumping into things. And that prompted me to think
of the challenges that inventors face when designing those kinds
(01:07):
of systems. But let's lay it out. Even though some
of this is pretty obvious stuff. As I'm sure all
of you know, virtual reality is on one end of
the spectrum of mixed reality. So with virtual reality, you
have replaced some or maybe even all, sensory input from
the real world with computer generated material instead. So it's
(01:31):
possible that with a VR system you could have all
visual and audio data provided by computers, but you might
also have other stuff too. A computer might control a
selection of fans to blow air at you to simulate
wind or you know, rushing air if you're flying, or
something like that. You might even have a system that
(01:51):
releases certain sense, sort of how Disney's soaring over California
will blast riders with the smell of oranges as you
appear to fly over a grove of fruit trees. You
can have haptic feedback systems. These are ones that give
you some sort of tactile feedback, so you might have
like a vest that vibrates when you are encountering a
(02:15):
dangerous situation or something like that. They're all sorts of
different ways where a computer could provide the sensory input
that your body normally would get just through navigating through
a physical space. But the thing to remember is that
the computer is providing all this input. The computer is
replacing whatever is actually in your real world environment with
(02:39):
computer generated alternatives to that, right, and these things can
be very convincing. People have felt scared or anxious while
walking up to a virtual cliff side, even though they
know that in reality they're standing on a solid floor
in a room. There's no chance of them plummeting off
(03:01):
the side of a cliff because there's no cliff there.
But the experience of seeing it in virtual reality can
still be convincing enough to prompt your body to go
into a stress response. In fact, it could be so
convincing that some mental health professionals actually use VR systems
and scenarios as part of immersion therapy with patients who
(03:23):
experienced various phobias. I remember interviewing one psychiatrist many years
ago when I was working on a piece about VR
in medicine, and this psychiatrist actually used an airport scenario,
a virtual airport scenario, to help patients who have a
fear of flying go through a simulated process of going
(03:45):
to an airport, walking through the airport, making their way
to the departure gate, all the steps they would actually
have to do in real life if they were going
on an airplane trip, and it was all meant to
kind of gently confess front the experience, and patients would
report feeling similar sensations of anxiety and fear while they
(04:07):
were doing so, even though they knew deep down that
they weren't actually in an airport. But the scenarios gave
those patients the opportunity to experience these situations in a
safe and controlled space and gave them confidence to build
up their tolerance and understanding of the situation so that
they could ultimately go and do it in the real
world further down in their therapy. And it was a
(04:29):
really cool thing to learn about. In many ways, it
reminds me of how thrill seekers enjoy things like roller coasters, right,
because roller coasters, assuming that they are properly designed, simulate
dangerous situations. Right, That's where the thrill comes from. You're
not in control, You're going along a track at high speeds,
(04:53):
up and down, maybe in twists and loops, all this
sort of stuff. It simulates being in a dangerous situation,
and thus it is thrilling, but at the same time,
we ultimately know, or at least we certainly hope that
the ride is safe and that we're not in any
real danger. It's very similar in that regard, But there
(05:14):
are a lot of different challenges that come along with
virtual reality, and I think That's one of the many
reasons that virtual reality still isn't as widely adopted as
you might expect it to be considering how long VR
has actually been around. For those of you who are
old enough to remember, you might recall that back in
the nineteen nineties, when VR was first starting to become
(05:37):
a big deal, that a lot of money was poured
into research and development, but ultimately it kind of petered out.
Some folks even opened up VR arcades that gave the
general public the opportunity to experience it for themselves. In fact,
I did this. There was a mall that was, you know,
not too far from where I lived called Gwinet Play Small,
(06:02):
and they had a little VR arcade. You could go
there and I think it was like five or ten
bucks for like five minutes of playtime and you would
play the game. I remember. It's one that lots of
people know about from that time period called Dactyl Nightmare,
and you were fighting against polygonal pterodactyls as well as
(06:23):
other players while navigating through a very simple geometric space.
It wasn't terribly compelling from a graphics standpoint, but it
was really neat to quote unquote inhabit a game. However,
the limitations like those graphical limitations and the fact that
you really couldn't do that much in the games. The
(06:43):
games were pretty darn simple and limited because of how
much computational processing power was required for it to actually work.
It meant that people found out that we had a
really long way to go to make VR what it
had been kind of hyped up to be. The expectation
of what VR could do was at a huge gap
(07:07):
compared to what it could actually do. And you got
to remember, like there were a lot of limitations. The
headsets back then were huge, and they were heavy. In fact,
they were so heavy that most of the time you
were talking about a headset that would be suspended from
a frame in the ceiling. The suspension would let you
(07:28):
turn left or right, so it's not like you were
stuck in place. You weren't like in a static position.
You could turn left or right, but you couldn't really
move forward or backward because you had this harness essentially
that was carrying much of the weight of the headset.
If it weren't, then it would be far too heavy
for you to wear it comfortably, especially for like five
(07:49):
minutes so in order to keep you in place, you
also would end up standing on a pedestal that had
a rail around it at about waste height, and this
would keep you from toppling off the side right, so
you could turn left and right, but you couldn't actually
step forward or backward or anything like that. There were
(08:09):
other issues too. Some systems struggled with latency. That's the
delay between when you take in action and when you
see it reflected on the screen in front of you.
That delay creates this swimmy effect that for lots of people,
including me, can lead to motion sickness, and it is
incredibly unpleasant. So the various limitations sapped away a lot
(08:32):
of the enthusiasm around VR, and so funding dried up
not long after that. There were still folks who were
working in the field of virtual reality, but they really
had to scramble to get funding in order to push
research forward. So progress slowed way down because there just
wasn't enough financial support to keep it going at a
good pace. But some other tech fields ended up doing
(08:55):
quite well, and the VR industry would end up taking
notes essentially scavenging, in order to get things that other
tech fields had developed and repurposing them for the needs
of VR, and one of the big ones would be
home video games, specifically home video game consoles that became
a popular source for innovation and equipment that VR would
(09:18):
end up repurposing. And those advances were meant to enhance
console systems and to create competitive advantages against other console systems,
but the VR space would appropriate the technology to help
advance their own research, so stuff like motion controls and
camera systems and light guns and all sorts of other
peripherals and control systems and functions would find a second
(09:42):
life over in VR research. We're talking about things like
even the Nintendo Power Glove, which admittedly was a pretty
lack luster video game controller, even though it looked cool
and every kid I knew wanted one because I grew
up in the era of the Nintendo, and when the
Nintendo Power Glove came out, everyone thought that was the
coolest thing ever. Turned out to not be the most
(10:05):
practical control system, but it was something that ended up
being useful over with VR research. Now, eventually we get
up to the twenty tens, when a teenager named Palmer
Lucky It produced a prototype VR headset that would eventually
become known as the Oculus Rift. Later on Facebook, Slash
Meta would acquire Oculus and these days what used to
(10:29):
be the Oculus Quest is now the Meta Quest. So
it all dates back to the early twenty tens. Lucky
was confident that he was onto something, and he even
dropped out of college in an effort to develop a
mass produced VR headset that could become a consumer electronics item.
Like it wouldn't just be something that you would find
(10:50):
in you a VR arcade or an amusement park or something.
It could be something that people could actually own and
use in their own homes and VR could explode. So
again into the whole Oculus story would require an episode,
at least one, probably a couple plus. Then we would
probably have to acknowledge that Palmer Lucky has said and
done some stuff that has rubbed some people the wrong
(11:12):
way to put it lightly. But rather than get bogged
down in all of that, let's just take a little
side step. Well, just mention that at this point in
the twenty tens we started to see a real push
to get VR to the consumer space, and that's still
where we are today. For certain elements of VR, there
have been tons of advancements. The headset technology has really
(11:35):
come a long way to the point where now you
don't even need to have a tethered headset. So for
a very long time, if you wanted to have the
performance capabilities needed to have a good VR experience, your
headset needed to have a physical connection to a very
powerful computer. That requirement has kind of faded away over
(11:55):
the last half a decade, where now you can have
an untethered headset. That's a huge, huge leap forward, and
you know, it's possible now to make a headset that
someone can wear at least for a short gaming session
without having to mount it to the ceiling right like you.
They're no longer these enormous, clunky, heavy things, although they
(12:18):
are still significant, like you can't just wear one all
day and not feel it. They will start to wear
on you after a while, but you can at least
play for you know, a half hour or an hour
typically without it being too much of a burden, so
to speak. Controllers were getting better too. Nintendo and Sony
(12:41):
had both created control systems that used cameras and gyroscopes
and sensors and other technology to let players interface with
games by using gesture controls and waving controllers around rather
than just manipulating a joystick or a direction pad or
something like that. And this was seen as an important
component for VR as well, because anything that lets you
(13:04):
move closer to the way you would if you were
actually doing the same sort of stuff in the real
world really supports immersion when you're in the virtual world.
If the only way you can interact with the virtual
world around you is to hold a traditional game pad
in your hands and use joysticks and buttons, that creates
a kind of layer of abstraction that interferes with immersion.
(13:27):
It doesn't necessarily break it entirely, but it's not helpful,
right because that's not how we interact with the real
world when we're going around all the time. Plus, controllers
act as a kind of barrier to entry because for
non video game players having to use a game controller,
it can be an obstacle. It's an unfamiliar experience. In fact,
(13:47):
I would argue that one of the big reasons that
Nintendo we became so popular when it first came out
is that Nintendo created a few non traditional motion based
methods to interact with the game system, and that really
appealed to people who had never played video games before.
Because it didn't have this barrier to entry. You could
(14:09):
move around and that was controlling the game, and I
think that was a big reason why the we took off,
and it's one of the reasons why VR companies look
for ways to kind of reduce that barrier of entry. Well, clearly,
all those motion controls were very useful for VR, but
(14:30):
there's another challenge that relates to this. How do you
actually navigate around a virtual space while inhabiting a physical one.
That's what we're really going to focus on for the
rest of this episode. Before we get into all of that, however,
we need to take a quick break to thank our
sponsors and we'll be right back. Okay, so you're in
(15:02):
a physical space, but you want to play a virtual
experience of some sort. Maybe it's a game, maybe it's
a virtual tour, whatever it might be. How do you
move around once you're inside the virtual space? Is there
a way to make it feel like you're actually moving
through a real space even though it's all virtual? Can
you do that? Or are you stuck using video game
(15:26):
controllers to either virtually walk or as a lot of
games and experiences do teleport short distances as you navigate
through the environment, so that instead of physically moving, you
point a controller at a space that you can see
on your screen, and you select it and it zaps
you there, and then you can turn around and look.
(15:47):
Maybe you interact a little bit, and then when you
want to move, you do it again. Like that's obviously
not how we really move. I wish it were. I
would love to be able to teleport, even if it's
just line of sight. It would be super cool. That's
not how the real world works, and so it is
a bit of an immersion breaking experience. So creating an
alternative to a controller based system is a non trivial problem.
(16:11):
People are experiencing these virtual reality scenarios inside real physical spaces,
and these spaces have real obstacles in them, like furniture
or walls. Meanwhile, the person in VR can't see these
real obstacles right because everything they're seeing is coming courtesy
of a computer system. It's not reflective of the real
(16:33):
world at all. It's all what the computer has generated,
and the computer might not be generating the fact that
there's a coffee table in front of you or a
wall immediately to your left. So while in VR it
might seem like you're in a meadow of flowers, in reality,
you could be a step and a half away from
a footstool that's just waiting to ruin your whole afternoon.
So moving physically through a space while you appear to
(16:57):
be in a virtual environment is dangerous. This danger becomes
compounded if you want more than one person moving around
within that same physical environment at the same time. So
for a VR experience involving multiple people, you have to
actually figure out how can you have all of these
people come together safely within that virtual environment. Now, one
(17:20):
option is to only allow people to join over a
network connection, so they're not actually in the same physical
space at all, right, like you could each be in say,
your own homes or in adjoining rooms or whatever. But
what if you actually want to have people grouped together physically,
because there are times when you might want that. Imagine
(17:40):
that you're doing a military training simulation and you're moving
with a squad of soldiers, or maybe you're playing a
fantasy RPG style computer game and you're with a party
of adventurers and you're all in the same space and
you're all working together. You can even reach over and
tap your friend's shoulders silently to indicate it's time for
(18:01):
them to move forward. That would be pretty cool, but
you would have to have a way to orient everyone
together and to keep them from running into each other.
This is a non trivial problem. For one thing you'd
have to build in the orientation feature. I'll explain this
in an example. So let's say that you and I
are together and we want to play a cooperative VR game,
(18:21):
which sounds awesome. I would love to play a game
with you, and so we each put on our headsets.
We're in the same physical space. But let's say just
because the way we're standing and putting on our headsets,
we're not really paying attention. You're facing the north wall
of this physical room, and I happen to be facing
the east wall of this physical space, this physical room,
(18:41):
and we put our headsets on, but the game just
establishes that we're both facing the same direction within the
virtual world, even though physically we're at right angles to
each other. So the game thinks that the north wall
is your current version of forward, the east wall is
my current version of forward, and unfortunately, it thinks we're
(19:03):
both facing the same forward. So within the game, if
I were to look over to my side, I would
see you and it would look like you were facing
the same direction. I am same for you. If you
were to look over, you would see me, and it
looks like we're both facing the same direction. If I
stepped toward the east wall to you, it would look
like I took a step forward. If you took a
(19:23):
step toward the north wall, to me, it would look
like you took a step forward, even though we're now
moving within right angles to each other in the real world.
Now you can correct for this, this is not like
an unsolvable issue. You can build in what is essentially
a compass within the equipment so that it knows what
physical direction you're facing, and that compass can feed the
(19:46):
VR system information, letting it know that the two players
are actually facing different directions in the physical world, so
the game can feed each of us a different view,
so that in the game, we would be facing different
directions and I would see, oh, I'm at a right
angle to you, I need to switch. I need to
turn ninety degrees so that we're facing the same way,
(20:07):
and then that solves the issue. Right The hardware could
also instead of using a compass, it could use some
other method like cameras. Right, you could have a camera
system both externally like on the system itself, and you
could also have cameras built into the headsets, and together
these can establish which way we're facing within the real world,
and that can feed into our experience in the virtual one,
(20:30):
so that we don't have this issue. So it is
possible to work around it, but the point is you
have to build it in. It's not just naturally there.
Otherwise you end up with like an mcsher kind of
situation as people are moving in different directions in the
real world in order to move in the same direction
in the virtual one. The old VR arcades had a
(20:52):
real elegant solution for all this because the players were
held captive on those pedestals. Right. You were standing on
a little platform and you had to rail around you,
so you couldn't go anywhere. The headsets were all tethered
to the VR system. You had these huge cables that
would descend connecting to the headsets, but that also provided
a solution for orientation. You physically couldn't move around the room,
(21:17):
and the headsets were wired in such a way that
they could show a specific point of view depending upon
which way your head was pointed. But that doesn't work
so well if you want a more flexible and free experience,
if you want a bunch of untethered systems that are
all connected together in the same physical space. Now, there
have been numerous attempts to translate physical movement into virtual commands,
(21:39):
and one of them relies largely on the fact that
we human beings are not terribly good at walking in
a straight line. When we're blindfolded, we have a tendency
to veer off. We don't walk in a straight line. Typically,
when we're blindfolded, we walk in a more curved path. Now,
you can overcome this with a lot of practice. I'm
not saying that there's no way to walk a straight line,
(22:02):
it's just not how we typically move. If we aren't
using our eyes to give virtual cues so that we
stay on track, Generally speaking, we're prone to walk in circles.
But with the right approach in VR, it's actually possible
to take advantage of this and turn it into a feature,
not a bug. By presenting subtle visual cues within the
(22:24):
virtual environment, you can influence how a person perceives their
surroundings and by extension, how they move through those surroundings
by changing visual distances between points by small amounts, or
by adjusting the arc of how much your point of
view changes as you turn your head. These tweaks can
(22:45):
be subtle enough so that they don't seem strange to us,
and yet they can affect how we move through the space.
So we would perceive that we're moving in a straight line,
but in fact the system is very subtly moving us
in a curve so that we are able to continue
forward progression, but we're not in danger of walking so
(23:07):
far that we slam into the wall. And this method
is called redirected walking, which makes sense right, and it
does work, but only up to a point. You can't
design a VR experience that moves people in a really
tight curve and then convince them that they're walking on
a straight tightrope. That just doesn't work. So there's a
(23:29):
limit to how much you can redirect someone before they
no longer feel like they're walking in a straight line.
There's going to be a disconnect from what they see
and what they're feeling. So redirected walking actually requires a
pretty large physical space to allow for that kind of movement, right,
because you need to have enough space where a gentle
curve is still enough to keep someone from being in
(23:51):
a collision course with a wall. Most of us don't
live in palatial estates, and so if you do have
a room that you have set as for VR, or
one that you can use for VR, chances are it's
not so big that it would allow for redirected walking
in any meaningful way. Also, I imagine that redirected walking
(24:12):
is much easier to implement if you've built out an
experience that's intended for a specific physical space. That is
that the VR system quote unquote knows how large the
physical room is, and so it can adjust the virtual
cues accordingly, and everything is hunky dory. I imagine it
(24:34):
would be a lot more challenging to have a system
that could adapt to any given physical space and thus
make appropriate adjustments to those visual cues with regard to
how much room is available. That's a lot of complicated math, right,
Like if you were to port an experience from a
room that's maybe let's say twenty feet to a side,
(24:54):
it's a big, big room. It's twenty feet to a side,
but then you move it into one that's you know,
made be fifteen feet to a side. I don't know
how easy it would be to have a system that
could readjust for that reduced amount of physical space and
plan out new versions of visual cues to keep you
(25:15):
from running into walls. I'm sure it's possible, and I'm
sure it's been done, but I bet it's hard, and
it's got to be even harder if you're talking about
your typical consumer space, because again, most of us don't
have access to these really big rooms that would be
very useful for redirected walking. It is possible. It's something
that's been going on and I'm just not aware of it.
(25:38):
One common strategy in VR is to make use of
cameras to keep an eye on people within a physical
environment as they move through the virtual environment. And the
cameras could include some that are mounted in static positions
around the room, right like you might have some that
you have mounted on shelves, on the walls or close
(25:59):
to a one specific location. And then you typically also,
like I said, have a camera like a forward facing
camera in a headset itself, and collectively these cameras can
keep an eye on where a person is in relation
to their physical walls or other obstacles around them, and
these systems typically will give the user a visual queue
(26:22):
within the virtual experience if they start getting a little
too close to these barriers. So you might be walking
through a space and then in this like virtual space
that you're walking through, you'll see suddenly a grid outline
of a wall, and that could break the immersion right
(26:43):
like now you're suddenly seeing It's kind of like in
Star Trek you see the wall of the hola deck
or something. It breaks the immersion, but it also helps
you avoid breaking your nose on a wall or something else.
This is not an ideal solution, because in a perfect
world you would avoid anything that would take you out
of the virtual experience, but it's certainly preferable to an injury.
(27:05):
For example, the Meta Quest formerly known as the Oculus Quest,
allows users to set up boundaries and they call the
system guardian. The system gives the user the freedom to
define a play area within a physical room, and Meta
stresses that you really need six and a half feet
by six and a half feet or larger to have
(27:26):
this workout well. Otherwise you should probably play VR in
a stationary position, either seated or standing up, so smaller
than six and a half feet to a side, you're
going to encounter some frustration. The setup includes something that
you might not have thought about. You actually have to
establish the height of the floor. Now, the way meta
handles this is that you put on the headset and
(27:47):
you lower a controller down to the floor, and you
look at the controller, and this lets the system establish
where the floor is with relation to the rest of
the environment. Metaquest then lets you define the play area
by showing you pass through video in the headset. So
this is sort of like turning the Metaquest into an
augmented reality headset rather than a virtual reality headset. Augmented reality,
(28:12):
or AR, is when you have a view of the
real world around you over which digital information can be laid.
It doesn't necessarily have to involve a display. That is
the typical way we think of AR, but it's a
pretty common to do the display version now. In many ways,
(28:32):
AR gets around a lot of the challenges that you've
come across in VR when it comes to movement, because
the person who's using an AR system can still actually
see the real world around them, including the people who
are in it, it's just that the extra digital stuff
gets thrown in there too. Anyway, Using pass through video,
the player uses a controller and they use that to
(28:55):
kind of shoot a beam to trace the outline of
their intended play area within the physical room where they'll
be playing their VR stuff. So to an outside observer,
it would just look like the player is pointing a
controller and moving in a slow circle. But to the player,
they would see they were generating an outline which ultimately
would form into a box, and this becomes the defined
(29:17):
play area. So if the player were to walk close
to one of the boundaries of that play area, that's
when they would see the warning indicator, letting them know
they're getting a little too close to being out of bounds.
The boundary solution is functional for smaller spaces, but it's
not necessarily ideal for multiplayer implementations. For those, you still
need a way to keep people safely in their own
(29:38):
little physical bubble where they're not likely to slam into
each other blindly at full speed. And that will bring
us to another method, the treadmill. Before we get into that,
we need to take another quick break to thank our sponsors.
(30:03):
We're back, so treadmills in many ways, are a little
similar to those old pedestal solutions of the VR arcades
I've talked about a couple of times in this episode.
They keep each individual player confined to a physical space
within the environment, But unlike those pedestals I talked about,
the treadmills allow players to physically walk and to have
(30:26):
that physical motion translate into the VR experience as VR locomotion.
Some of the treadmills allow players to turn and change
direction while walking. In fact, some of them allow players
to even run. These omnidirectional treadmills tend to be pretty
darn expensive, and they also attempt to address several of
(30:49):
the barriers in the way of people moving freely in
a physical location while exploring a virtual one. There are
a couple of products either out on the market right
now or that are scheduled to launch very soon. Some
of them have been in development for the better part
of a decade. The ones that I'll mention here just
because they are similar and one of them is on
(31:12):
the market now and the other ones going to launch
soon would be the cat kat Walk C two Core
that's one, and the virtueix Omni one. So the C
two Core is something you can purchase right now. It's
at a hefty nine hundred ninety nine dollars. The Omni
one is available for pre order for a whopping two thousand,
(31:36):
five hundred and ninety five dollars. And considering that these
are peripherals, right, these do not include the actual VR setup.
That is a huge price tag. Right, You still have
to have the computer system. You still have to have
the VR hardware, or at least the VR hardware. There's
now standalone VR hardware. Back in the day, you had
to have a computer that was really a chonker in
(31:59):
order to run V. It's a little different today, but
you still have to have those base systems before you
even worry about these these treadmills. It's also this would
be another reason why VR in general hasn't seen widespread adoption,
because it be expensive, y'all. It is a high price
to enter, and that's before you even start thinking about
(32:20):
a library of content that you can actually use. Now,
at a casual glance, these two systems, the C two
Core and the Omni one, seem pretty darn similar. Both
consist of a treadmill quote unquote a treadmill that actually
looks more like a dish, like an upturned satellite dish,
or maybe like a very very shallow walk And both
(32:42):
of them have an arm that's mounted on the platform
that has that holds the dish. This arm is a
vertical arm, so it extends upward and it also can
rotate along the perimeter of the dish. And mounted at
the end of that arm is a harness that you
(33:03):
are to put on when you're using the device. So
as I said, the arm can actually rotate around the
whole perimeter of the dish. That lets you turn in
place while you're wearing the harness and you're using the treadmill,
and that harness keeps you from falling over or tripping
off the side of the treadmill, and also lets you
have that stability you need if you want to do
(33:25):
something like try and run in place. Obviously, like if
you've got something obscuring your vision in the real world,
your body is not going to want to run, right.
Your body's going to say, heck no, it's stupid to
run when I can't actually see the environment around me.
That harness and that arm is meant to restrain you,
so that you can feel confident that you can make
(33:46):
those kind of motions, that you can run in place
and it's not going to have you, you know, do
a kool Aid Man through the wall of your room
or anything like that. These arms are also articulated, so
they can extend up or downward. They allow you to
do things like you can squat, or you can kneel,
so if you're playing like a shooter game or something,
(34:07):
you're not just stuck at one vertical level. You can
do things like squat down. Like if a game has
that capability where you can, you know, squinch down and
get underneath a barrier, then you can actually do that
within the physical space because the treadmills allow you to
do that. So both systems act like controllers. From what
(34:30):
I understand, they are mostly compatible with existing VR titles,
to varying degrees of effectiveness. At least the ones that
allow you to navigate through the VR experience using a controller.
Most of them work pretty well from what I understand.
I have not had personal experience with either of these,
so I can't say from that regard, but from what
(34:51):
I read, it sounds like, reasonably speaking, they're fairly compatible
with a lot of these titles. They do all the
conversion for you, so there's not like extensive setup that
you need to do. In most cases, there are a
couple of differences between the two besides the price. So
the C two Core, for example, requires players to wear
(35:13):
special shoes. You have shoes that come with the platform,
and those are what you need to wear when you're
using the device. These shoes have sensors and the bottom
of the shoes that face downward. It's kind of similar
to how a laser mouse has a sensor on the
underside of the mouse that what helps it detect movement
and position. So you can't just hop onto a C
(35:35):
two Core with your normal kicks. I found an Ask
Me Anything on Reddit where a user going by the
handle of a tickle Monster five twenty eight explained how
they had put a thin pair of socks or stockings
around these shoes in order to improve how they slide
against the surface of the treadmill itself, and that as
long as it was thin enough, it didn't inhibit the
(36:00):
sensor's performance on the treadmill itself, but it made it
way easier to walk and or run on the surface
of the treadmill. The Omni one does not require you
to wear special shoes, but it does come with overshoes.
They kind of look like sandals that slip on and
(36:21):
snap on on top of your normal shoes. They have
straps and everything. You strap them to the underside of
your shoes, and that's what you use to run against
the Omni one treadmill. Otherwise, in many ways, it seems
pretty darn similar to the C two Core. They're not identical.
They do have differences, and I'm sure there are also
differences as far as compatibility and performance are concerned with
(36:44):
VR titles, But without the opportunity to try them out
for myself, I can't really compare and contrast, so I
can't say one is definitively better than the other, or
performs more consistently than the other one does I don't know.
I know that both of them, at least according to
other folks who have used these devices, can occasionally have
(37:07):
performance issues where things get a little janky. It's still,
from what I understand, incredibly immersive and really effective in
most situations. It's just once in a while you might
encounter a situation where you take a step forward, but
what you see reflected in the game or the experience
isn't a one to one match with what you were
(37:30):
doing in the physical space. So within the discourse of
the VR community, there does seem to be a mixture
of enthusiasm and skepticism around these products. Some are heralding
them as the bridge that turns VR from an interesting
diversion and a niche interest among a hobbyist community into
a compelling activity that has mainstream appeal and something that
(37:56):
could end up becoming an important part not just for
stuff like entertainment, but maybe in fields like fitness. Others
are arguing that this technology, this omni treadmill approach technology,
is not yet refined to a point where it's fun
to use, Like, clearly the potential is there, but it's
(38:18):
not ready for actual prime time yet, and that once
the shine wears off from getting something like this and
getting to try it, the limitations become more evident and
can become aggravating, and that maybe it's better to wait
a bit longer for the technology to mature. And that's
(38:40):
tough because that's kind of what the argument was for
VR back in the nineties, and it was understandable at
the time, but Waiting for something to mature requires that
the technology still have the support necessary to continue to develop. Right.
You still need the money and the talent in order
for the tech to advance. It doesn't just do it
(39:02):
on its own. And so if everybody holds off and says,
you know, it's interesting, but I don't think it's ready yet,
then you don't have the money coming in that will
fund the next generation of the technology. Meanwhile, if you
have everyone rush in, they might try it and say
this isn't what I want it at all, and then
(39:23):
they just abandon the technology entirely. You know, there's no
easy solution here. But this does bring us up to
the hollow tile invention that I mentioned at the top
of the show. The hollow tile approach uses a collection
of tiny hexagonal tiles I'm talking about like they look
like they're about the size of maybe a half dollar
(39:44):
if you're familiar with that. So each of these tiles
can act like a treadmill, and it's a treadmill that
can move in any given direction, and collectively, these tiles
can keep someone within a relatively stable position on the
floor as the person attempts to walk around a virtual environment.
So If you were to watch this, you would see
(40:05):
someone standing on what looks like almost like a carpet
of hexagonal tiles, and as they're moving in various directions,
they're not actually traveling anywhere physically right because the treadmill
is keeping them in the same relative position physically, but
within the virtual environment, they could be traveling wherever they're going. Now,
(40:25):
the demonstration was really limited. There was an early view
of this technology. It showed users walking very slowly and
using very small steps, and that implies to me that
it's very early in this technologies infancy. It cannot handle
someone just walking at a normal pace. You have to
(40:46):
be walking at like, you know, a quarter speed with
small steps in order for it to work as it
is designed right now. But the potential is pretty darn cool.
Imagine that we've reached a point where this technology can
handle people walking or maybe even running, and yet keep
them in the same relative physical location inside a big room.
(41:13):
You can have a bunch of people inside the same
physical room standing on a floor made of these hexagonal tiles.
They can be facing different directions. They could all be
walking or running at their own pace and still staying
in the same relative position so that they're not in
danger of running into each other, and yet they can
(41:33):
all interact in the same virtual environment. That is a
really cool concept. I don't know if we're ever going
to get there, but it's the potential that's really exciting.
Because those tiles will just keep you within that same
relative physical space even while you change direction and speed.
That means you can all share and experience together. You're walking,
(41:56):
but you're not really going anywhere. It's kind of like
that stereotypical nightmare where you're in a hallway and you're
running toward the end of the hallway, but you never
get any closer to the end, except you know, it's
just what's going on within the physical space. In the
virtual space, you would actually be moving all over the place.
And you can imagine how this technology would enable really
cool experiences that Disney might use and attractions in the future.
(42:18):
You know, maybe you could have an interactive virtual experience
that lets you explore a famous fictional world, like imagine
being able to walk around Wonderland or never never Land,
or dare I say it Fresno but was a joke.
I know Fresno really exists, and you could do this
with your friends and family, right, you could all be
in that same instance together, and you could all be
(42:41):
walking around and exploring this space and split up and
go your own way, and you'd be safe from running
into you know, mom and dad because everyone's on their
own little, you know, patch of hollow tiles that are
keeping them isolated from everybody else while still being able
to share this experience. Of course, for all that to happen,
(43:02):
this technology will need to work a whole lot better
than it does now. And as I said, and the demonstration,
it was clear that users were really going easy on
these tiles. They did have a demonstration where they had
two people facing different directions walking on these tiles, but
again they're doing those kind of tiny little baby steps
at very slow pace. But the demonstration was still really impressive.
(43:24):
And I think the takeaway is that solving for movement
that pairs actions in the physical world with the virtual
world is still really hard. You're pretty much forced to
make concessions. You may have to make some concessions in
order to ensure that the system is functional, or you
may have to make concessions to make sure it's safe,
or some combination of the two, or maybe there are
(43:46):
other considerations that come into play. I think it's one
of the big challenges that's holding back VR adoption in general.
As it stands, you can do some really cool stuff
in VR, but it still feels fairly limited. Beat Saber
is a really great game, but you're standing in place
while you're waving your arms around. You're not set free
(44:07):
in a virtual open world where you can explore by
really walking around a physical space. When you do use
games that allow you to do some physical walking, you
have to work within a limited play area or else
you risk slamming into a wall or knocking over a
valuable antique or something. It's going to take a bit
more work to get to a point where the reality
in virtual reality lives up to the potential of virtual reality.
(44:32):
For that reason, I think augmented reality actually has a
slightly better chance of seeing higher adoption, at least in
the relatively short term, because AR has a few advantages. Now,
it does come with its own set of challenges, like
how do you integrate, say, game elements into AR so
that they fit naturally within someone's real world environment, But
(44:56):
it removes other challenges because you can see the physical
world around so the system doesn't have to find ways
to protect you from the physical world, or to protect
the physical world from you. If you are a limb
flailing maniac like myself with AR, the limitations of the
space around you are evident, and with a really well
(45:17):
designed application, you might not even think of them as limitations.
It may just all feel like they all naturally fit together.
But programming something that can be a compelling experience no
matter what the physical location happens to be, that's not
easy either. It may be that you end up programming
a game that's fantastic if you happen to have access
to a space that's the size of a gymnasium, but
(45:39):
maybe it's way more underwhelming inside your typical den or
partially finished basement. I do like checking in on these
technologies every few years to see what sort of progress
has been made. One thing I find encouraging is that
we are seeing devices like the C two Core and
the Omni one make it to market. These could have
been cases where companies had come up with this nifty
(46:01):
idea and maybe got some seed money for it, but
it never really got much further than the prototype stage.
Like that happens all the time, especially in the fields
of VR and AR. But these made it like they
got to the point where you can buy the thing
and get it delivered to your house and have it
and use it, like that's a phenomenal achievement. But you know,
(46:26):
despite the fact that these gadgets are meant to keep
you in place, we're still moving forward. That's pretty darn cool.
All right. That's it for moving around in VR. There
are other elements we could talk about, and maybe I
will in future episodes, but I thought that was a
good way to kind of talk about an interesting set
of challenges. It gets you to think about what you
(46:48):
need to solve for in order to create the experience
you want. That's really a big part of what engineering
is all about, right, It's problem solving. It's one of
my favorite things about inering in general and talking to engineers,
because engineers, when you talk to them, you realize they're
constantly attempting to solve problems, even if they're not aware
of it, and I think it's fascinating. I hope you're
(47:11):
all well. I am glad that I'm back and podcasting again.
We'll be talking to you again on Friday. I'll be
doing a news episode about what's been going on this
week in tech, and I'll talk to you again really soon.
(47:32):
Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and How the
tech are You? And as the poets of Stained once said,
(00:24):
it's been a while since I did an episode dedicated
to virtual reality, but I thought it would do one
this week because I actually saw a cool video that
showed Disney imagineer and now Inventor Hall of Famer Lanny
Smoot show off an invention called the hollow tile floor,
which could, among other things, potentially provide a solution for
(00:47):
folks who want to explore a virtual space while simultaneously
moving around their very real, you know, physical environments with
their actual physical bodies here in the real world, you know,
without bumping into things. And that prompted me to think
of the challenges that inventors face when designing those kinds
(01:07):
of systems. But let's lay it out. Even though some
of this is pretty obvious stuff. As I'm sure all
of you know, virtual reality is on one end of
the spectrum of mixed reality. So with virtual reality, you
have replaced some or maybe even all, sensory input from
the real world with computer generated material instead. So it's
(01:31):
possible that with a VR system you could have all
visual and audio data provided by computers, but you might
also have other stuff too. A computer might control a
selection of fans to blow air at you to simulate
wind or you know, rushing air if you're flying, or
something like that. You might even have a system that
(01:51):
releases certain sense, sort of how Disney's soaring over California
will blast riders with the smell of oranges as you
appear to fly over a grove of fruit trees. You
can have haptic feedback systems. These are ones that give
you some sort of tactile feedback, so you might have
like a vest that vibrates when you are encountering a
(02:15):
dangerous situation or something like that. They're all sorts of
different ways where a computer could provide the sensory input
that your body normally would get just through navigating through
a physical space. But the thing to remember is that
the computer is providing all this input. The computer is
replacing whatever is actually in your real world environment with
(02:39):
computer generated alternatives to that, right, and these things can
be very convincing. People have felt scared or anxious while
walking up to a virtual cliff side, even though they
know that in reality they're standing on a solid floor
in a room. There's no chance of them plummeting off
(03:01):
the side of a cliff because there's no cliff there.
But the experience of seeing it in virtual reality can
still be convincing enough to prompt your body to go
into a stress response. In fact, it could be so
convincing that some mental health professionals actually use VR systems
and scenarios as part of immersion therapy with patients who
(03:23):
experienced various phobias. I remember interviewing one psychiatrist many years
ago when I was working on a piece about VR
in medicine, and this psychiatrist actually used an airport scenario,
a virtual airport scenario, to help patients who have a
fear of flying go through a simulated process of going
(03:45):
to an airport, walking through the airport, making their way
to the departure gate, all the steps they would actually
have to do in real life if they were going
on an airplane trip, and it was all meant to
kind of gently confess front the experience, and patients would
report feeling similar sensations of anxiety and fear while they
(04:07):
were doing so, even though they knew deep down that
they weren't actually in an airport. But the scenarios gave
those patients the opportunity to experience these situations in a
safe and controlled space and gave them confidence to build
up their tolerance and understanding of the situation so that
they could ultimately go and do it in the real
world further down in their therapy. And it was a
(04:29):
really cool thing to learn about. In many ways, it
reminds me of how thrill seekers enjoy things like roller coasters, right,
because roller coasters, assuming that they are properly designed, simulate
dangerous situations. Right, That's where the thrill comes from. You're
not in control, You're going along a track at high speeds,
(04:53):
up and down, maybe in twists and loops, all this
sort of stuff. It simulates being in a dangerous situation,
and thus it is thrilling, but at the same time,
we ultimately know, or at least we certainly hope that
the ride is safe and that we're not in any
real danger. It's very similar in that regard, But there
(05:14):
are a lot of different challenges that come along with
virtual reality, and I think That's one of the many
reasons that virtual reality still isn't as widely adopted as
you might expect it to be considering how long VR
has actually been around. For those of you who are
old enough to remember, you might recall that back in
the nineteen nineties, when VR was first starting to become
(05:37):
a big deal, that a lot of money was poured
into research and development, but ultimately it kind of petered out.
Some folks even opened up VR arcades that gave the
general public the opportunity to experience it for themselves. In fact,
I did this. There was a mall that was, you know,
not too far from where I lived called Gwinet Play Small,
(06:02):
and they had a little VR arcade. You could go
there and I think it was like five or ten
bucks for like five minutes of playtime and you would
play the game. I remember. It's one that lots of
people know about from that time period called Dactyl Nightmare,
and you were fighting against polygonal pterodactyls as well as
(06:23):
other players while navigating through a very simple geometric space.
It wasn't terribly compelling from a graphics standpoint, but it
was really neat to quote unquote inhabit a game. However,
the limitations like those graphical limitations and the fact that
you really couldn't do that much in the games. The
(06:43):
games were pretty darn simple and limited because of how
much computational processing power was required for it to actually work.
It meant that people found out that we had a
really long way to go to make VR what it
had been kind of hyped up to be. The expectation
of what VR could do was at a huge gap
(07:07):
compared to what it could actually do. And you got
to remember, like there were a lot of limitations. The
headsets back then were huge, and they were heavy. In fact,
they were so heavy that most of the time you
were talking about a headset that would be suspended from
a frame in the ceiling. The suspension would let you
(07:28):
turn left or right, so it's not like you were
stuck in place. You weren't like in a static position.
You could turn left or right, but you couldn't really
move forward or backward because you had this harness essentially
that was carrying much of the weight of the headset.
If it weren't, then it would be far too heavy
for you to wear it comfortably, especially for like five
(07:49):
minutes so in order to keep you in place, you
also would end up standing on a pedestal that had
a rail around it at about waste height, and this
would keep you from toppling off the side right, so
you could turn left and right, but you couldn't actually
step forward or backward or anything like that. There were
(08:09):
other issues too. Some systems struggled with latency. That's the
delay between when you take in action and when you
see it reflected on the screen in front of you.
That delay creates this swimmy effect that for lots of people,
including me, can lead to motion sickness, and it is
incredibly unpleasant. So the various limitations sapped away a lot
(08:32):
of the enthusiasm around VR, and so funding dried up
not long after that. There were still folks who were
working in the field of virtual reality, but they really
had to scramble to get funding in order to push
research forward. So progress slowed way down because there just
wasn't enough financial support to keep it going at a
good pace. But some other tech fields ended up doing
(08:55):
quite well, and the VR industry would end up taking
notes essentially scavenging, in order to get things that other
tech fields had developed and repurposing them for the needs
of VR, and one of the big ones would be
home video games, specifically home video game consoles that became
a popular source for innovation and equipment that VR would
(09:18):
end up repurposing. And those advances were meant to enhance
console systems and to create competitive advantages against other console systems,
but the VR space would appropriate the technology to help
advance their own research, so stuff like motion controls and
camera systems and light guns and all sorts of other
peripherals and control systems and functions would find a second
(09:42):
life over in VR research. We're talking about things like
even the Nintendo Power Glove, which admittedly was a pretty
lack luster video game controller, even though it looked cool
and every kid I knew wanted one because I grew
up in the era of the Nintendo, and when the
Nintendo Power Glove came out, everyone thought that was the
coolest thing ever. Turned out to not be the most
(10:05):
practical control system, but it was something that ended up
being useful over with VR research. Now, eventually we get
up to the twenty tens, when a teenager named Palmer
Lucky It produced a prototype VR headset that would eventually
become known as the Oculus Rift. Later on Facebook, Slash
Meta would acquire Oculus and these days what used to
(10:29):
be the Oculus Quest is now the Meta Quest. So
it all dates back to the early twenty tens. Lucky
was confident that he was onto something, and he even
dropped out of college in an effort to develop a
mass produced VR headset that could become a consumer electronics item.
Like it wouldn't just be something that you would find
(10:50):
in you a VR arcade or an amusement park or something.
It could be something that people could actually own and
use in their own homes and VR could explode. So
again into the whole Oculus story would require an episode,
at least one, probably a couple plus. Then we would
probably have to acknowledge that Palmer Lucky has said and
done some stuff that has rubbed some people the wrong
(11:12):
way to put it lightly. But rather than get bogged
down in all of that, let's just take a little
side step. Well, just mention that at this point in
the twenty tens we started to see a real push
to get VR to the consumer space, and that's still
where we are today. For certain elements of VR, there
have been tons of advancements. The headset technology has really
(11:35):
come a long way to the point where now you
don't even need to have a tethered headset. So for
a very long time, if you wanted to have the
performance capabilities needed to have a good VR experience, your
headset needed to have a physical connection to a very
powerful computer. That requirement has kind of faded away over
(11:55):
the last half a decade, where now you can have
an untethered headset. That's a huge, huge leap forward, and
you know, it's possible now to make a headset that
someone can wear at least for a short gaming session
without having to mount it to the ceiling right like you.
They're no longer these enormous, clunky, heavy things, although they
(12:18):
are still significant, like you can't just wear one all
day and not feel it. They will start to wear
on you after a while, but you can at least
play for you know, a half hour or an hour
typically without it being too much of a burden, so
to speak. Controllers were getting better too. Nintendo and Sony
(12:41):
had both created control systems that used cameras and gyroscopes
and sensors and other technology to let players interface with
games by using gesture controls and waving controllers around rather
than just manipulating a joystick or a direction pad or
something like that. And this was seen as an important
component for VR as well, because anything that lets you
(13:04):
move closer to the way you would if you were
actually doing the same sort of stuff in the real
world really supports immersion when you're in the virtual world.
If the only way you can interact with the virtual
world around you is to hold a traditional game pad
in your hands and use joysticks and buttons, that creates
a kind of layer of abstraction that interferes with immersion.
(13:27):
It doesn't necessarily break it entirely, but it's not helpful,
right because that's not how we interact with the real
world when we're going around all the time. Plus, controllers
act as a kind of barrier to entry because for
non video game players having to use a game controller,
it can be an obstacle. It's an unfamiliar experience. In fact,
(13:47):
I would argue that one of the big reasons that
Nintendo we became so popular when it first came out
is that Nintendo created a few non traditional motion based
methods to interact with the game system, and that really
appealed to people who had never played video games before.
Because it didn't have this barrier to entry. You could
(14:09):
move around and that was controlling the game, and I
think that was a big reason why the we took off,
and it's one of the reasons why VR companies look
for ways to kind of reduce that barrier of entry. Well, clearly,
all those motion controls were very useful for VR, but
(14:30):
there's another challenge that relates to this. How do you
actually navigate around a virtual space while inhabiting a physical one.
That's what we're really going to focus on for the
rest of this episode. Before we get into all of that, however,
we need to take a quick break to thank our
sponsors and we'll be right back. Okay, so you're in
(15:02):
a physical space, but you want to play a virtual
experience of some sort. Maybe it's a game, maybe it's
a virtual tour, whatever it might be. How do you
move around once you're inside the virtual space? Is there
a way to make it feel like you're actually moving
through a real space even though it's all virtual? Can
you do that? Or are you stuck using video game
(15:26):
controllers to either virtually walk or as a lot of
games and experiences do teleport short distances as you navigate
through the environment, so that instead of physically moving, you
point a controller at a space that you can see
on your screen, and you select it and it zaps
you there, and then you can turn around and look.
(15:47):
Maybe you interact a little bit, and then when you
want to move, you do it again. Like that's obviously
not how we really move. I wish it were. I
would love to be able to teleport, even if it's
just line of sight. It would be super cool. That's
not how the real world works, and so it is
a bit of an immersion breaking experience. So creating an
alternative to a controller based system is a non trivial problem.
(16:11):
People are experiencing these virtual reality scenarios inside real physical spaces,
and these spaces have real obstacles in them, like furniture
or walls. Meanwhile, the person in VR can't see these
real obstacles right because everything they're seeing is coming courtesy
of a computer system. It's not reflective of the real
(16:33):
world at all. It's all what the computer has generated,
and the computer might not be generating the fact that
there's a coffee table in front of you or a
wall immediately to your left. So while in VR it
might seem like you're in a meadow of flowers, in reality,
you could be a step and a half away from
a footstool that's just waiting to ruin your whole afternoon.
So moving physically through a space while you appear to
(16:57):
be in a virtual environment is dangerous. This danger becomes
compounded if you want more than one person moving around
within that same physical environment at the same time. So
for a VR experience involving multiple people, you have to
actually figure out how can you have all of these
people come together safely within that virtual environment. Now, one
(17:20):
option is to only allow people to join over a
network connection, so they're not actually in the same physical
space at all, right, like you could each be in say,
your own homes or in adjoining rooms or whatever. But
what if you actually want to have people grouped together physically,
because there are times when you might want that. Imagine
(17:40):
that you're doing a military training simulation and you're moving
with a squad of soldiers, or maybe you're playing a
fantasy RPG style computer game and you're with a party
of adventurers and you're all in the same space and
you're all working together. You can even reach over and
tap your friend's shoulders silently to indicate it's time for
(18:01):
them to move forward. That would be pretty cool, but
you would have to have a way to orient everyone
together and to keep them from running into each other.
This is a non trivial problem. For one thing you'd
have to build in the orientation feature. I'll explain this
in an example. So let's say that you and I
are together and we want to play a cooperative VR game,
(18:21):
which sounds awesome. I would love to play a game
with you, and so we each put on our headsets.
We're in the same physical space. But let's say just
because the way we're standing and putting on our headsets,
we're not really paying attention. You're facing the north wall
of this physical room, and I happen to be facing
the east wall of this physical space, this physical room,
(18:41):
and we put our headsets on, but the game just
establishes that we're both facing the same direction within the
virtual world, even though physically we're at right angles to
each other. So the game thinks that the north wall
is your current version of forward, the east wall is
my current version of forward, and unfortunately, it thinks we're
(19:03):
both facing the same forward. So within the game, if
I were to look over to my side, I would
see you and it would look like you were facing
the same direction. I am same for you. If you
were to look over, you would see me, and it
looks like we're both facing the same direction. If I
stepped toward the east wall to you, it would look
like I took a step forward. If you took a
(19:23):
step toward the north wall, to me, it would look
like you took a step forward, even though we're now
moving within right angles to each other in the real world.
Now you can correct for this, this is not like
an unsolvable issue. You can build in what is essentially
a compass within the equipment so that it knows what
physical direction you're facing, and that compass can feed the
(19:46):
VR system information, letting it know that the two players
are actually facing different directions in the physical world, so
the game can feed each of us a different view,
so that in the game, we would be facing different
directions and I would see, oh, I'm at a right
angle to you, I need to switch. I need to
turn ninety degrees so that we're facing the same way,
(20:07):
and then that solves the issue. Right The hardware could
also instead of using a compass, it could use some
other method like cameras. Right, you could have a camera
system both externally like on the system itself, and you
could also have cameras built into the headsets, and together
these can establish which way we're facing within the real world,
and that can feed into our experience in the virtual one,
(20:30):
so that we don't have this issue. So it is
possible to work around it, but the point is you
have to build it in. It's not just naturally there.
Otherwise you end up with like an mcsher kind of
situation as people are moving in different directions in the
real world in order to move in the same direction
in the virtual one. The old VR arcades had a
(20:52):
real elegant solution for all this because the players were
held captive on those pedestals. Right. You were standing on
a little platform and you had to rail around you,
so you couldn't go anywhere. The headsets were all tethered
to the VR system. You had these huge cables that
would descend connecting to the headsets, but that also provided
a solution for orientation. You physically couldn't move around the room,
(21:17):
and the headsets were wired in such a way that
they could show a specific point of view depending upon
which way your head was pointed. But that doesn't work
so well if you want a more flexible and free experience,
if you want a bunch of untethered systems that are
all connected together in the same physical space. Now, there
have been numerous attempts to translate physical movement into virtual commands,
(21:39):
and one of them relies largely on the fact that
we human beings are not terribly good at walking in
a straight line. When we're blindfolded, we have a tendency
to veer off. We don't walk in a straight line. Typically,
when we're blindfolded, we walk in a more curved path. Now,
you can overcome this with a lot of practice. I'm
not saying that there's no way to walk a straight line,
(22:02):
it's just not how we typically move. If we aren't
using our eyes to give virtual cues so that we
stay on track, Generally speaking, we're prone to walk in circles.
But with the right approach in VR, it's actually possible
to take advantage of this and turn it into a feature,
not a bug. By presenting subtle visual cues within the
(22:24):
virtual environment, you can influence how a person perceives their
surroundings and by extension, how they move through those surroundings
by changing visual distances between points by small amounts, or
by adjusting the arc of how much your point of
view changes as you turn your head. These tweaks can
(22:45):
be subtle enough so that they don't seem strange to us,
and yet they can affect how we move through the space.
So we would perceive that we're moving in a straight line,
but in fact the system is very subtly moving us
in a curve so that we are able to continue
forward progression, but we're not in danger of walking so
(23:07):
far that we slam into the wall. And this method
is called redirected walking, which makes sense right, and it
does work, but only up to a point. You can't
design a VR experience that moves people in a really
tight curve and then convince them that they're walking on
a straight tightrope. That just doesn't work. So there's a
(23:29):
limit to how much you can redirect someone before they
no longer feel like they're walking in a straight line.
There's going to be a disconnect from what they see
and what they're feeling. So redirected walking actually requires a
pretty large physical space to allow for that kind of movement, right,
because you need to have enough space where a gentle
curve is still enough to keep someone from being in
(23:51):
a collision course with a wall. Most of us don't
live in palatial estates, and so if you do have
a room that you have set as for VR, or
one that you can use for VR, chances are it's
not so big that it would allow for redirected walking
in any meaningful way. Also, I imagine that redirected walking
(24:12):
is much easier to implement if you've built out an
experience that's intended for a specific physical space. That is
that the VR system quote unquote knows how large the
physical room is, and so it can adjust the virtual
cues accordingly, and everything is hunky dory. I imagine it
(24:34):
would be a lot more challenging to have a system
that could adapt to any given physical space and thus
make appropriate adjustments to those visual cues with regard to
how much room is available. That's a lot of complicated math, right,
Like if you were to port an experience from a
room that's maybe let's say twenty feet to a side,
(24:54):
it's a big, big room. It's twenty feet to a side,
but then you move it into one that's you know,
made be fifteen feet to a side. I don't know
how easy it would be to have a system that
could readjust for that reduced amount of physical space and
plan out new versions of visual cues to keep you
(25:15):
from running into walls. I'm sure it's possible, and I'm
sure it's been done, but I bet it's hard, and
it's got to be even harder if you're talking about
your typical consumer space, because again, most of us don't
have access to these really big rooms that would be
very useful for redirected walking. It is possible. It's something
that's been going on and I'm just not aware of it.
(25:38):
One common strategy in VR is to make use of
cameras to keep an eye on people within a physical
environment as they move through the virtual environment. And the
cameras could include some that are mounted in static positions
around the room, right like you might have some that
you have mounted on shelves, on the walls or close
(25:59):
to a one specific location. And then you typically also,
like I said, have a camera like a forward facing
camera in a headset itself, and collectively these cameras can
keep an eye on where a person is in relation
to their physical walls or other obstacles around them, and
these systems typically will give the user a visual queue
(26:22):
within the virtual experience if they start getting a little
too close to these barriers. So you might be walking
through a space and then in this like virtual space
that you're walking through, you'll see suddenly a grid outline
of a wall, and that could break the immersion right
(26:43):
like now you're suddenly seeing It's kind of like in
Star Trek you see the wall of the hola deck
or something. It breaks the immersion, but it also helps
you avoid breaking your nose on a wall or something else.
This is not an ideal solution, because in a perfect
world you would avoid anything that would take you out
of the virtual experience, but it's certainly preferable to an injury.
(27:05):
For example, the Meta Quest formerly known as the Oculus Quest,
allows users to set up boundaries and they call the
system guardian. The system gives the user the freedom to
define a play area within a physical room, and Meta
stresses that you really need six and a half feet
by six and a half feet or larger to have
(27:26):
this workout well. Otherwise you should probably play VR in
a stationary position, either seated or standing up, so smaller
than six and a half feet to a side, you're
going to encounter some frustration. The setup includes something that
you might not have thought about. You actually have to
establish the height of the floor. Now, the way meta
handles this is that you put on the headset and
(27:47):
you lower a controller down to the floor, and you
look at the controller, and this lets the system establish
where the floor is with relation to the rest of
the environment. Metaquest then lets you define the play area
by showing you pass through video in the headset. So
this is sort of like turning the Metaquest into an
augmented reality headset rather than a virtual reality headset. Augmented reality,
(28:12):
or AR, is when you have a view of the
real world around you over which digital information can be laid.
It doesn't necessarily have to involve a display. That is
the typical way we think of AR, but it's a
pretty common to do the display version now. In many ways,
(28:32):
AR gets around a lot of the challenges that you've
come across in VR when it comes to movement, because
the person who's using an AR system can still actually
see the real world around them, including the people who
are in it, it's just that the extra digital stuff
gets thrown in there too. Anyway, Using pass through video,
the player uses a controller and they use that to
(28:55):
kind of shoot a beam to trace the outline of
their intended play area within the physical room where they'll
be playing their VR stuff. So to an outside observer,
it would just look like the player is pointing a
controller and moving in a slow circle. But to the player,
they would see they were generating an outline which ultimately
would form into a box, and this becomes the defined
(29:17):
play area. So if the player were to walk close
to one of the boundaries of that play area, that's
when they would see the warning indicator, letting them know
they're getting a little too close to being out of bounds.
The boundary solution is functional for smaller spaces, but it's
not necessarily ideal for multiplayer implementations. For those, you still
need a way to keep people safely in their own
(29:38):
little physical bubble where they're not likely to slam into
each other blindly at full speed. And that will bring
us to another method, the treadmill. Before we get into that,
we need to take another quick break to thank our sponsors.
(30:03):
We're back, so treadmills in many ways, are a little
similar to those old pedestal solutions of the VR arcades
I've talked about a couple of times in this episode.
They keep each individual player confined to a physical space
within the environment, But unlike those pedestals I talked about,
the treadmills allow players to physically walk and to have
(30:26):
that physical motion translate into the VR experience as VR locomotion.
Some of the treadmills allow players to turn and change
direction while walking. In fact, some of them allow players
to even run. These omnidirectional treadmills tend to be pretty
darn expensive, and they also attempt to address several of
(30:49):
the barriers in the way of people moving freely in
a physical location while exploring a virtual one. There are
a couple of products either out on the market right
now or that are scheduled to launch very soon. Some
of them have been in development for the better part
of a decade. The ones that I'll mention here just
because they are similar and one of them is on
(31:12):
the market now and the other ones going to launch
soon would be the cat kat Walk C two Core
that's one, and the virtueix Omni one. So the C
two Core is something you can purchase right now. It's
at a hefty nine hundred ninety nine dollars. The Omni
one is available for pre order for a whopping two thousand,
(31:36):
five hundred and ninety five dollars. And considering that these
are peripherals, right, these do not include the actual VR setup.
That is a huge price tag. Right, You still have
to have the computer system. You still have to have
the VR hardware, or at least the VR hardware. There's
now standalone VR hardware. Back in the day, you had
to have a computer that was really a chonker in
(31:59):
order to run V. It's a little different today, but
you still have to have those base systems before you
even worry about these these treadmills. It's also this would
be another reason why VR in general hasn't seen widespread adoption,
because it be expensive, y'all. It is a high price
to enter, and that's before you even start thinking about
(32:20):
a library of content that you can actually use. Now,
at a casual glance, these two systems, the C two
Core and the Omni one, seem pretty darn similar. Both
consist of a treadmill quote unquote a treadmill that actually
looks more like a dish, like an upturned satellite dish,
or maybe like a very very shallow walk And both
(32:42):
of them have an arm that's mounted on the platform
that has that holds the dish. This arm is a
vertical arm, so it extends upward and it also can
rotate along the perimeter of the dish. And mounted at
the end of that arm is a harness that you
(33:03):
are to put on when you're using the device. So
as I said, the arm can actually rotate around the
whole perimeter of the dish. That lets you turn in
place while you're wearing the harness and you're using the treadmill,
and that harness keeps you from falling over or tripping
off the side of the treadmill, and also lets you
have that stability you need if you want to do
(33:25):
something like try and run in place. Obviously, like if
you've got something obscuring your vision in the real world,
your body is not going to want to run, right.
Your body's going to say, heck no, it's stupid to
run when I can't actually see the environment around me.
That harness and that arm is meant to restrain you,
so that you can feel confident that you can make
(33:46):
those kind of motions, that you can run in place
and it's not going to have you, you know, do
a kool Aid Man through the wall of your room
or anything like that. These arms are also articulated, so
they can extend up or downward. They allow you to
do things like you can squat, or you can kneel,
so if you're playing like a shooter game or something,
(34:07):
you're not just stuck at one vertical level. You can
do things like squat down. Like if a game has
that capability where you can, you know, squinch down and
get underneath a barrier, then you can actually do that
within the physical space because the treadmills allow you to
do that. So both systems act like controllers. From what
(34:30):
I understand, they are mostly compatible with existing VR titles,
to varying degrees of effectiveness. At least the ones that
allow you to navigate through the VR experience using a controller.
Most of them work pretty well from what I understand.
I have not had personal experience with either of these,
so I can't say from that regard, but from what
(34:51):
I read, it sounds like, reasonably speaking, they're fairly compatible
with a lot of these titles. They do all the
conversion for you, so there's not like extensive setup that
you need to do. In most cases, there are a
couple of differences between the two besides the price. So
the C two Core, for example, requires players to wear
(35:13):
special shoes. You have shoes that come with the platform,
and those are what you need to wear when you're
using the device. These shoes have sensors and the bottom
of the shoes that face downward. It's kind of similar
to how a laser mouse has a sensor on the
underside of the mouse that what helps it detect movement
and position. So you can't just hop onto a C
(35:35):
two Core with your normal kicks. I found an Ask
Me Anything on Reddit where a user going by the
handle of a tickle Monster five twenty eight explained how
they had put a thin pair of socks or stockings
around these shoes in order to improve how they slide
against the surface of the treadmill itself, and that as
long as it was thin enough, it didn't inhibit the
(36:00):
sensor's performance on the treadmill itself, but it made it
way easier to walk and or run on the surface
of the treadmill. The Omni one does not require you
to wear special shoes, but it does come with overshoes.
They kind of look like sandals that slip on and
(36:21):
snap on on top of your normal shoes. They have
straps and everything. You strap them to the underside of
your shoes, and that's what you use to run against
the Omni one treadmill. Otherwise, in many ways, it seems
pretty darn similar to the C two Core. They're not identical.
They do have differences, and I'm sure there are also
differences as far as compatibility and performance are concerned with
(36:44):
VR titles, But without the opportunity to try them out
for myself, I can't really compare and contrast, so I
can't say one is definitively better than the other, or
performs more consistently than the other one does I don't know.
I know that both of them, at least according to
other folks who have used these devices, can occasionally have
(37:07):
performance issues where things get a little janky. It's still,
from what I understand, incredibly immersive and really effective in
most situations. It's just once in a while you might
encounter a situation where you take a step forward, but
what you see reflected in the game or the experience
isn't a one to one match with what you were
(37:30):
doing in the physical space. So within the discourse of
the VR community, there does seem to be a mixture
of enthusiasm and skepticism around these products. Some are heralding
them as the bridge that turns VR from an interesting
diversion and a niche interest among a hobbyist community into
a compelling activity that has mainstream appeal and something that
(37:56):
could end up becoming an important part not just for
stuff like entertainment, but maybe in fields like fitness. Others
are arguing that this technology, this omni treadmill approach technology,
is not yet refined to a point where it's fun
to use, Like, clearly the potential is there, but it's
(38:18):
not ready for actual prime time yet, and that once
the shine wears off from getting something like this and
getting to try it, the limitations become more evident and
can become aggravating, and that maybe it's better to wait
a bit longer for the technology to mature. And that's
(38:40):
tough because that's kind of what the argument was for
VR back in the nineties, and it was understandable at
the time, but Waiting for something to mature requires that
the technology still have the support necessary to continue to develop. Right.
You still need the money and the talent in order
for the tech to advance. It doesn't just do it
(39:02):
on its own. And so if everybody holds off and says,
you know, it's interesting, but I don't think it's ready yet,
then you don't have the money coming in that will
fund the next generation of the technology. Meanwhile, if you
have everyone rush in, they might try it and say
this isn't what I want it at all, and then
(39:23):
they just abandon the technology entirely. You know, there's no
easy solution here. But this does bring us up to
the hollow tile invention that I mentioned at the top
of the show. The hollow tile approach uses a collection
of tiny hexagonal tiles I'm talking about like they look
like they're about the size of maybe a half dollar
(39:44):
if you're familiar with that. So each of these tiles
can act like a treadmill, and it's a treadmill that
can move in any given direction, and collectively, these tiles
can keep someone within a relatively stable position on the
floor as the person attempts to walk around a virtual environment.
So If you were to watch this, you would see
(40:05):
someone standing on what looks like almost like a carpet
of hexagonal tiles, and as they're moving in various directions,
they're not actually traveling anywhere physically right because the treadmill
is keeping them in the same relative position physically, but
within the virtual environment, they could be traveling wherever they're going. Now,
(40:25):
the demonstration was really limited. There was an early view
of this technology. It showed users walking very slowly and
using very small steps, and that implies to me that
it's very early in this technologies infancy. It cannot handle
someone just walking at a normal pace. You have to
(40:46):
be walking at like, you know, a quarter speed with
small steps in order for it to work as it
is designed right now. But the potential is pretty darn cool.
Imagine that we've reached a point where this technology can
handle people walking or maybe even running, and yet keep
them in the same relative physical location inside a big room.
(41:13):
You can have a bunch of people inside the same
physical room standing on a floor made of these hexagonal tiles.
They can be facing different directions. They could all be
walking or running at their own pace and still staying
in the same relative position so that they're not in
danger of running into each other, and yet they can
(41:33):
all interact in the same virtual environment. That is a
really cool concept. I don't know if we're ever going
to get there, but it's the potential that's really exciting.
Because those tiles will just keep you within that same
relative physical space even while you change direction and speed.
That means you can all share and experience together. You're walking,
(41:56):
but you're not really going anywhere. It's kind of like
that stereotypical nightmare where you're in a hallway and you're
running toward the end of the hallway, but you never
get any closer to the end, except you know, it's
just what's going on within the physical space. In the
virtual space, you would actually be moving all over the place.
And you can imagine how this technology would enable really
cool experiences that Disney might use and attractions in the future.
(42:18):
You know, maybe you could have an interactive virtual experience
that lets you explore a famous fictional world, like imagine
being able to walk around Wonderland or never never Land,
or dare I say it Fresno but was a joke.
I know Fresno really exists, and you could do this
with your friends and family, right, you could all be
in that same instance together, and you could all be
(42:41):
walking around and exploring this space and split up and
go your own way, and you'd be safe from running
into you know, mom and dad because everyone's on their
own little, you know, patch of hollow tiles that are
keeping them isolated from everybody else while still being able
to share this experience. Of course, for all that to happen,
(43:02):
this technology will need to work a whole lot better
than it does now. And as I said, and the demonstration,
it was clear that users were really going easy on
these tiles. They did have a demonstration where they had
two people facing different directions walking on these tiles, but
again they're doing those kind of tiny little baby steps
at very slow pace. But the demonstration was still really impressive.
(43:24):
And I think the takeaway is that solving for movement
that pairs actions in the physical world with the virtual
world is still really hard. You're pretty much forced to
make concessions. You may have to make some concessions in
order to ensure that the system is functional, or you
may have to make concessions to make sure it's safe,
or some combination of the two, or maybe there are
(43:46):
other considerations that come into play. I think it's one
of the big challenges that's holding back VR adoption in general.
As it stands, you can do some really cool stuff
in VR, but it still feels fairly limited. Beat Saber
is a really great game, but you're standing in place
while you're waving your arms around. You're not set free
(44:07):
in a virtual open world where you can explore by
really walking around a physical space. When you do use
games that allow you to do some physical walking, you
have to work within a limited play area or else
you risk slamming into a wall or knocking over a
valuable antique or something. It's going to take a bit
more work to get to a point where the reality
in virtual reality lives up to the potential of virtual reality.
(44:32):
For that reason, I think augmented reality actually has a
slightly better chance of seeing higher adoption, at least in
the relatively short term, because AR has a few advantages. Now,
it does come with its own set of challenges, like
how do you integrate, say, game elements into AR so
that they fit naturally within someone's real world environment, But
(44:56):
it removes other challenges because you can see the physical
world around so the system doesn't have to find ways
to protect you from the physical world, or to protect
the physical world from you. If you are a limb
flailing maniac like myself with AR, the limitations of the
space around you are evident, and with a really well
(45:17):
designed application, you might not even think of them as limitations.
It may just all feel like they all naturally fit together.
But programming something that can be a compelling experience no
matter what the physical location happens to be, that's not
easy either. It may be that you end up programming
a game that's fantastic if you happen to have access
to a space that's the size of a gymnasium, but
(45:39):
maybe it's way more underwhelming inside your typical den or
partially finished basement. I do like checking in on these
technologies every few years to see what sort of progress
has been made. One thing I find encouraging is that
we are seeing devices like the C two Core and
the Omni one make it to market. These could have
been cases where companies had come up with this nifty
(46:01):
idea and maybe got some seed money for it, but
it never really got much further than the prototype stage.
Like that happens all the time, especially in the fields
of VR and AR. But these made it like they
got to the point where you can buy the thing
and get it delivered to your house and have it
and use it, like that's a phenomenal achievement. But you know,
(46:26):
despite the fact that these gadgets are meant to keep
you in place, we're still moving forward. That's pretty darn cool.
All right. That's it for moving around in VR. There
are other elements we could talk about, and maybe I
will in future episodes, but I thought that was a
good way to kind of talk about an interesting set
of challenges. It gets you to think about what you
(46:48):
need to solve for in order to create the experience
you want. That's really a big part of what engineering
is all about, right, It's problem solving. It's one of
my favorite things about inering in general and talking to engineers,
because engineers, when you talk to them, you realize they're
constantly attempting to solve problems, even if they're not aware
of it, and I think it's fascinating. I hope you're
(47:11):
all well. I am glad that I'm back and podcasting again.
We'll be talking to you again on Friday. I'll be
doing a news episode about what's been going on this
week in tech, and I'll talk to you again really soon.
(47:32):
Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
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TechStuff News
Host
Jonathan Strickland
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