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Comment by rubicon33 | Hacker News Reader

I'm really curious about how VR will solve the movement problem.

See, a virtual environment is only part of the equation. Oculus peeled the onion back further, with touch (and Vive equivalent).

How will they solve movement? Using a pad to move forward or backward is not nearly as immersive as walking...

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The Void is a company doing some interesting stuff involving movement within VR. [1] However, to feel like you're walking in a straight line you have to have a space of (if I recall) about 30 feet. Humans are actually really bad at walking in a straight line without any visual cues [2], and this amount of space can trick someone to walking in circles while feeling like they're going forward.

Unfortunately, most of us don't have a basketball court to walk around on, so this sort of solution will probably be reserved for bespoke VR experiences made by The Void and other companies like them.

[1] https://thevoid.com/

[2]http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/06/01/131050832/a-...

There's a forum post from a few years ago [0] with a few links to projects; I don't know how active they are though. One of them [1] is an array of treadmills running in one dimension, mounted on a track that moves them in the perpendicular direction, and it tracks your movement to keep you near the centre of the platform. Another [2] holds you in place while you run with slippery shoes inside a saucer-shaped surface.

[0] https://forums.oculus.com/community/discussion/388/2d-treadm...

[1] http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-softwar...

[2] http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/01/the-virtuix-omni-vr-t...

I've tried a few different headsets with different control schemes, and I don't think it's even the immersion that's the problem. It's the motion sickness. If you're not walking, but your view is, that's a problem.

I wrote my original post quickly, and forgot to specify, that one of the MAIN problems I see with the movement issue is indeed the nausea.

I'm not someone who has every gotten motion sickness. I can read in a car, love roller coasters, and have never been sick on a boat once in my life.

Certain movements in oculus give me motion sickness.

Quite concerning is that my person experience in talking with oculus engineers is, they have no good solutions for this. And looking at all the current solutions doesn't provide much hope either. The Omni tracker is perhaps one of the "best" solutions allowing natural movement in a VR space... But I have a hard time believing that will ever be mainstream.

Part of that question is immersion, to which I have no good answer. An expensive, tipping chair perhaps. There are some disneyland type rides where the audience area is moved around with hydraulics, and they make you feel like you are accelerating by tipping the whole room backward.

The other part of this question is nausea - I played Onward for a while and it started to make me uncomfortable, because you can move with the control pad. I'm not very susceptible to nausea but that did it.

Then I learned to simply _run in place_ whenever I move myself in game. It works wonders. I played for 4 hours twice without even the slightest nausea.

I think triggering in-game movement by some physical movement - it doesn't even have to map one-to-one to physical steps - does a lot to create a notion of control over what is happening, removing the queasy 'whole world is sliding around ' feeling.

After all, we learn to move our legs in circles to move forward (when on a bike), pull on a set of handlebars (when rowing), etc., without becoming sick over it.

I've always wondered why they dont stick a camera on the front of it, then overlay the virtual world onto the physical world.

Wouldn't that delve into the augmented type of reality rather than virtual?

The Vive has this feature although its not used in games.

It is used for overlaying some info like the room borders and barriers.

It is exposed to the devs but the quality of the camera doesn't really allow for AR experience so it's not really used.

You can enable this on the Vive through Steam VR, and has a couple options:

- Show borders of things the camera sees on top of the 3d

- Show camera view aside from your controller in the "menu/system" screen

It requires more bandwidth through USB, though, so it might not work.

(I know there is a third option, but i cannot recall what it does)

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