It just makes me think of the scenes in the Ready Player One movie when they’re in the place with all the people in debt to the company who are trapped on something like this to be forced to work in VR for the company.
Something I don’t quite get: it seems like this would grind the shit outta any surface it comes in contact with (or, be ground to shit if whatever’s on it is harder than the material of the cone thingies).
Does anyone have any idea how the constant abrasion is mitigated? Or is it somehow just not that big a deal, like it doesn’t actually chew chunks outta (for example) shoe soles?
It doesn’t grind anything basically the same way a treadmill doesn’t sand anything. You’re not forcing anything to stay put on the surface, you’re maneuvering on the surface while the surface is counter-moving you.
The debris isn’t uniform and is quite obviously not part of the roller material; I just kind of assumed that it was from stuff they’d been testing on it, though I suppose it could be generic workshop crud that fell on the rollers too 🤷
There’s probably very minimal sliding against that surface. From the point of view of each point of contact, it’s mostly static friction, with very little dynamic friction/slippage.
What… they aren’t spinning at high speeds and “grinding” the surface that’s on them. They only spin as quickly as they need to move the surface. Imagine a treadmill, it’s not going quicker than you are running on it, your shoes never slide on the surface, same here.
I really don’t understand how you have misunderstood this so badly.
If you watch MKBHD’s video, you see him spinning himself around on a chair. The chair legs are in constant contact with some part of the cone thingies while they’re rolling, which means friction, which means wear. I posted a screenshot from MKBHD’s video in another response that shows what looks like debris all over the surface of the cone rollers; the debris is not uniform and is quite clearly not part of the roller material (I put a screenshot in the reply to another comment, so I’ll just link it here), so I assumed that it was from testing the treadmill with various objects.
Yeah, there’s friction, just like there is friction from walking on marble steps, such as those in the Tower of Pisa. But since they are mostly moving with the object on top of them, wear is reduced. In the end, the little wheels will be working in concert to move whatever object is on them in a given direction, but they are round and so will have a bit of drift in short order, which is managed by putting the wheels at angles so only a portion of one side is touching the object. They are likely made of a moderate friction substance with high durability and are probably replaceable, just like the tires on your car.
If you ever run barefoot or in socks on a regular treadmill, you’ll feel that it’s a little bit rougher than just walking around normally. But it’s still not enough to really make noticeable wear on shoes (any more than normal running on pavement is).
Basically, shoe soles are specifically made to be pretty tough, so this type of treadmill shouldn’t be worse than normal.
Spent a lot of time with engineers, but am not one myself. Most grinding discs and things that wear stuff down have a surface made to rip in, and higher opposed friction. Think sandpaper, it digs into a surface with those hills from the grit, and uses the friction to then drag through cutting the surface and removing material.
With this floor, it looks like the wheels are smooth, so all though there's some friction, it isn't a cutting action. There's also the fact that their friction is unopposed and can actually move the person, so the energy gets converted into movement, not the cutting force that would grind things down.
They really are just tiny treadmills, the only reason they're discs is so they can be tilted to change the direction the "treadmill" is going to push you. If the disc is tilted to the right, the left most edge is going forward, if the disk is tilted to the left, that right edge is moving backwards. Otherwise exact same principle as a treadmill of creating friction to move the object on it.
Hope that helps some. Diagrams would probably help more.
A company called Virtuix already developed a treadmill like this called the Omni like 10 years ago. They have released a few home versions of it and some larger ones for arcades. They’re still refining it for mass production it seems.
When walking on it, there is a feeling of one’s body moving in an unexpected direction, but that was something he found himself getting used to.
It’s been a decade since VR needed to reflect the inner ear, instead of stalking around it. For basic head-tracked uses - you know where the user’s expected down-vector is, and you know where the character’s down-vector is. Make them match and it’ll be fine. Sit perfectly still in a virtual race car and you’ll have to look up to see the horizon. It’s the opposite of tilty simulators from the 1960s.
Really interesting video. I can imagine playing an MMORPG where you get around by actually walking and running. Suddenly the biggest computer geeks would be super fit.
like when the collective world went outside at the same time when Pokemon Go launched. Our quiet downtown area was amazing to walk through. all those people.
Niantic was already killing interest in the game long before COVID wrecked it up a good bit, and they haven’t let up on pissing off the Pokemon Go gaming community since.
It was 3.6 years after? And it was pretty dead at that point. Like it was popular with a core group who were making Niantic and TPC tons of money, but the phenomenon was dead by the anniversary.
It died in my area when they dropped the amount of spawn nodes to the point where you couldn’t really walk around. You had to drive pretty far at that point, and that kill let most people’s enthusiasm.
I don’t know if it was complaints by local businesses or what, but after that I never saw large groups walking around again.
COVID hit and they released “play safe” features like remote raids and increased spawn radius. Then they started enshitification and striped features, raised prices, started starving players of resources and new features were pay gated. It’s still mildly popular but you need to join discord groups to raid.
Just think how annoying it would be if like the best players in the world were only good because they were literally Olympic sprinters and just ran literal circles around you in a fight lol
Unikely.. Kinda why VR also didnt get too popular, most players just prefer "classic" controls and not movement-controls.
But this is huge for VR and other usages of this, probably even useful for production routing, but i dont have any knowledge of that.
Personally I’m surprised that there are so few non-full-body-movement games. It’s amazing to sit down and play whatever game in a completely different 3D world. Moss is a great platformer in VR, pinball games are really cool in VR, and driving sims with a wheel and pedals kick absolut ass in VR. I bet games like FIFA, NBA, NHL etc would be amazing, top down car games would be amazing etc etc.
It’s just really difficult and expensive to make proper games for VR, and the market isn’t quite there for it to be worth it. Lots of people still say Half Life Alyx is the only “full” VR game made by a popular company while a lot of PSVR titles felt like tech demos.
Well what I’m saying is there should be more “less full” VR games. VR could be a somewhat simple add-on to many types of games. The difficult thing with VR is the object interaction, the handling of resources etc. if you’re in a large 1:1 world, but if you’re implement VR as basically just an extra viewport it’s not that difficult (for many types of games that are not FPS) and it could still add a lot to the game. Or you can do something like Moss, which is a really cool game.
It really isn’t, you’re probably just not aware of all the “proper” games that are out there for VR. Browse the Steam store and look at all the VR games sometime.
I have about 40 VR games in my Steam library, for example. I admit I haven’t played them all yet but I’ve played a lot of them and most of them are great. There are tons more that I could buy if I had the time to play all that shit.
The only real way for vr to explode would be for already established companies to make vr controls for their games, I’m thinking service games specifically. Imagine roaming in ff14 or wow in VR. I would still do hardcore content with standard controllers but I would 100 percent roam around doing stuff in VR.
I’ve recently been thinking about what I am calling double or compound walking where you walk with both the joystick and your real body for potentially combined movement speed. I don’t have enough room to verify if it works in any games but after I move I have a decently long hallway I could test it in. My thinking is to work around the abysmal stamina in the vr games I’ve played so far and weirdly slow movement speed.
The holotile would probably need some way to pass its tracking to the game if that was being used though.
Somewhat unrelated but that happened to me once on an escalator as a kid - I had very long hair when I was a young girl, and I went to the mall with my mom. I was on a department store escalator and suddenly felt my hair being pulled towards one of the sides/handrails. My mom noticed pretty quick, thankfully, and was able to yank it out before anything happened besides me being terrified as fuck.
That was decades ago and I still remember it vividly. Thanks for the PTSD flashback, lol
I wonder if a layer of Ripstop over the tiles would reduce performance. I could imagine fabric being a less expensive option than R&Ding more proprietary tech like making the tiles even smaller.
Edit: Glossed over the fact the tiles rotate. Nevermind me.
That was just an example—it might also be a problem for shoes with heels, or textured soles, or people with feet too small to cover enough disks at once.
Disney also employs badass engineers they call ‘imagineers’. I got contacted by recruiting for that but didn’t have enough personal just for fun creative engineering projects in my portfolio to land it
Still cool to have been contacted by their recruiters at all for such a neat job! It’s one of the few areas of Disney that actually seems like it would be a blast to work in.
Until the mouse shows up expecting more results, or like xerox with early computers where they basically had everything figured out but corporate just didn’t get it so they just gave everything to apple
I was mostly joking, but multidirectional treadmill - at least for being able to keep the holodeck to one room and not have to worry about bumping into walls. VR wasn’t a thing yet so I had no idea how any other parts of it would work, but like I said - I was a kid. I’m glad there are “real” big brains working in it, though lol
I don't think it needs to be much bigger for an individual, just fast enough to keep them near the center even at a run. Smaller pads will be the way to go, just have to drive and control them in sync. Maybe predictive software to only run where your feet are at or will be, to minimize the noise.
I could see them innovating with electromagnetic suspension, like with predictive magnetic suspensions in supercars. General Atomics has also been developing a rarely green-lit, high-speed maglev train for freight in California, so we may see proliferation of that tech if the project shows success.
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