Walking Dream – single-player adventure game for the Oculus Quest
walkingdre.am
walkingdre.am
Redirected walking means distorting the mapping when moving or rotating, to fit any game world into limited playing space. In research it's always applied in larger spaces, x5 times bigger than living rooms. If you distort moving or turning too much, users lose balance or become nauseous.
Here's a decent intro paper. 15 Years of Research on Redirected Walking in Immersive Virtual Environments https://illusioneering.cs.umn.edu/papers/nilsson-cga2018.pdf
I used to do gymnastics and as part of that I trained doing long series of cartwheels along a marked line. I managed to get good at doing it without deviating from that line. I looked straight ahead and it went fast enough that everything was a blur. However, I still couldn't do it with my eyes closed.
But I feel we may be overthinking it. I believe simply tracking leg movement and having the player jog on the spot is the solution.
Having simulated this myself by holding forward on the controller while jogging on the spot, I believe it's the way forward. If you have a headset, give it a try. I admit walking doesn't feel very natural, but jogging works well.
Of course, games don't have this option with most popular current hardware (but foot trackers and whole body trackers do exist).
It would be tricky to blend/differentiate movement and jogging, but I think it's doable.
I predict that future headsets will do inside-out tracking of your entire body, including the legs (they made need a flip out camera to be far enough out from the body to do this). They've already put out a software update for the Quest that does surprisingly good controller-free hand tracking.
There was also a comment on HN a few weeks ago (I'll try to find it) where someone implemented this system and said it worked well.
There's a great low tech solution - pair your mobile phone and leave it in your pocket. The accelerometer data is more than good enough to detect jogging.
There was an app for Steam VR that did this and I recall it worked quite well.
EDIT: here: http://pocketstrafe.com/
That book has very interesting art. I hope he brings that style to the game. I hope he does something strange like implement the game in Lisp and use some sort of self-modifying game engine.
> Walking Dream, on the other hand, is built on a brand new combat engine with a rich weapons crafting system. This system is shared by both the player as well as the many enemies, and turns each battle into a completely novel experience, requiring completely novel strategies at every encounter!
How does one solve the "tell me about this in a few weeks/months when you launch" without email notification?
There's no reliable way to notify someone via Twitter or Facebook. Timelines are too noisy and there's no mass private messaging APIs.
I love my email but I've noticed that projects and products are beginning to appear that shun email communication totally.
I nagged a few projects into starting a simple list via Google Forms because I knew I wouldn't notice when they launched any other way. But "Me nagging" doesn't seem very scalable.
https://pay.reddit.com/r/OculusQuest/comments/hlyp0o/walking...
The Quest is my favorite toy/leisure activity device. Can’t wait!
I tried tea for god on the quest and I was sold on it. It’s the future of VR IMO.