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You're making some unjustified assumptions about where the calories go when walking. If you walk across a flat surface, such as from one end of a sports field to another, you will expend very little energy [1] in that motion. (Proof: There are other more efficient ways to do it, such as bicycles.) You will expend some energy in air resistance, and you'll expend a lot of energy in moving your limbs up and down and sideways. Swinging motions help the efficiency but that's still where your energy goes. When you're run out of energy and can't run anymore, note that the problem isn't that you are no longer capable of moving forward, but that you're no longer capable of convincing your legs to pick up off the ground. (Again, if you gas out on a bike, you may not be able to pedal anymore, but it's not like your body suddenly stops because of that. You keep coasting.)

For more direct proof, play Dance Dance Revolution on a high difficulty mode. You won't go anywhere, but you'll be feeling it.

This could well improve people's physical activity level. It especially opens up some options in places where "just go outside" is not necessarily a viable option, or not necessarily a particularly helpful one.

[1]: Note "energy" here is chemical energy expended by the body, the "human" definition, not the physics definition.

> If good full-body tracking comes to mainstream VR, we'll be doing it with cameras, not wearables.

you're not going to physically move your body through 3d space with cameras.

dude your post is all over the place. i can't ascertain if you play VR games or if you even watched the linked video.

and not for nothing, but you can't ask for no sensors and also ask for no dystopia. except we're not going to be fat, we're going to be plunged in some weird seasalt bath with no holes on our body anymore except the Lightning jack that's replaced our faces

>VR will succeed

Dang, that's a big assumption. As someone who's been a researcher in the field for over a decade, I definitely can't make that claim.

Valve even says the total concept may be flawed and they are comfortable[1] with complete failure.

Three (of many) big things to overcome:

* Lock in. People watch movies in the dark with other people. Head lunchbox is isolating and annoying.

* Transmittable skin infections.

* Stereo depth eye tricks messing with focus makes almost everyone sick and can have huge unknown effects on the brain, balance, and perception

We don't have light fields[2], easy holograms[3], or laser scanning projectors on a chip[4] yet, but we might next week. Very probably VR at current is the stone axe we are using to invent the steel one. In almost every practical way it's broken, even if useful. We have no fucking clue what the final form is going to look like.

[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-38992294

[2] https://www.magicleap.com/

[3] http://www.red.com/hydrogen

[4] http://www.bosch-presse.de/pressportal/de/en/mobile-world-co...

It's only annoying because there is currently no output for your friends to watch along while you're playing that isn't a complete hack.

That was worded like a rebuttal, but I think you agree with me. Sweet.

> Its clear that Hyneman is trying to ride the VR hype to sell motorized shoes

Those are about being able to walk without moving. Yes, the shoes will be able to move you around but that's for centering the user back in the middle of the VR play area.

Outdoor / locomotion use is phase 3 which is "dream phase" and likely will never happen.

Anyway, this is a moot point since this crowdfunding is for prototype v.7 and not even for a product.

"Short range travel should be by foot and losing that will just make our obesity epidemic worse."

Yes -- the people in Wall-E. It has already begun without yet having autonomous shoes. That movie is frighteningly predictive.

Speaking of which, I could really go for some cupcake in a cup right now...~

But I live in America. Most short range travel doesn't even get you to the nearest grocer. If you can actually get anywhere by walking, you live in the urban core of a major city.

The Axiom is--by virtue of it being a cruise ship--essentially an ultra-dense city with a giant propulsion system strapped to it. It's probably around 4 km long, if you include the narrow pointy bits, with some minor convolution of the major pedestrian travel routes. In the early "cabin fever" years of the cruise, walking around everywhere was likely a common occurrence. But as new generations replace the old, distance expectations readjust. 100m becomes a long way to walk, because it is 2.5% the length of your world, and might take you two whole minutes if you stroll leisurely enough. Those are minutes you would have to be watching the interactive teledramas of the ship's integrated entertainment system on your tiny wearable screen, when it could be on a much larger, more immersive display!

The hoverchairs of the Axiom weren't just about not walking; they were also about being connected to the network 24-7, like Borg or Cybermen. Recall how extraordinary it was for Wall-E to get just two of the humans to notice that something interesting and different was happening away from their screens, in the real world. And they were excited about it, because they had never meaningfully explored the "real" world in their entire lifetime ("I didn't know we had a pool!"), so it was all new to them, and rendered in perfect photorealistic quality, with no level qeometry errors or frame-dropping.

Ready Player One is coming to theater screens soon, and if there were any justice in the world, Snow Crash would be, too. Humanity has this dream of connecting everyone to everyone else through the network, and it also has a nightmare where the network is an addictive drug, and everyone becomes a netjunkie and lets the real world become a barren wasteland.

Distance sucks. The great burden of civilization is that moving goods around takes time, because between where they are and where we want them to be, there's just so much distance. The mere proposal that treadmill shoes should exist for VR is an indication that world programmers are doing a stupid thing. They are importing the thing that many people hate about the real world, and making it a hard rule of the simulated world, too. You would be better off strapping a vibrating belt to your waist; let it buzz whenever you fire the thrusters on your powered exoskeleton, and give yourself a tiny shock whenever you activate a teleporter or traverse a portal. People want instant travel, and you don't need simulated walking for that.

The network generates a new distance expectation. The world is now zero meters across. Stepping from New York to London is a journey of milliseconds rather than miles. Whether the world is 4 km long, or 40000 km around, walking just can't compete with that. If you can go anywhere interesting faster than you can walk to your mailbox, pedestrian travel is just doomed. Even mechanized travel is doomed. That's why delivery services like Amazon are booming. For brick-and-mortar stores, you have to spend 15 minutes on traversing distance before you can even start shopping. And that store might not even have what you want.