Mechanical backpack boosts the sensation of jumping in virtual reality
newscientist.com
newscientist.com
On another note, there was another presentation by what I believe was the same research group, which was haptic feedback on the hands without covering the palm or underside of the fingers (and non-invasively). That was a particularly interesting, as the XR possibilities actually open up when you don't have bulky gloves covering that highly sensitive region (palm, finger tips, etc), and instead only have electrodes on the back of the hand, meaning you can overlap the sensations without damping by gloves. And this is not just for VR stuff (though they showed things like climbing in VR), but with AR/XR utility too! Need to do precise soldering work? This would let you have the full physical feedback, and then overlay it with helpful haptic feedback so you get nudged towards the right area and then don't stray (so you don't accidentally knock something off, perhaps). So this would be actually useful XR without any headset. Given the bulky setups that existing approaches use, I found it surprising this wasn't covered in the article, especially as part of a "here's other stuff the research group is working on for VR/XR" shortlist.
Got a link? That's definitely interesting.
>This method depends on what’s called “referred sensation,” where stimulation of your body in one place gets felt in another place—it’s like when you accidentally bash your elbow against something but can feel tingling up through your fingers, because the signal has traveled along your nerves up through your hand. In some places, including in the fingers, referred sensation can be targeted with a reasonable amount of precision. With a signal electrode on the top of a finger and a ground electrode closer to the wrist, it’s possible to stimulate individual parts of each finger, creating 11 separately controllable tactile zones across five fingers and the palm.
>However, just zapping fingers doesn’t provide a way of getting those signals to show up just on the bottom (palmar) side of the fingers, rather than the top (dorsal) side, which is where the signal is originating. Fortunately, the asymmetrical way that the nerves in our hands are set up makes this possible. The backhanded stimulation technique works because your palm and finger pads are way, way more sensitive than the backs of your hands, thanks to about 60 times more mechanoreceptors on the palmar side. So, if you use an electrode to stimulate the back of one of your fingers, the sensitivity on the front is so much higher that you’re going to feel it there much more strongly, even though the electrode is in direct contact with the back side. The researchers were able to find a stimulation intensity that was enough to trigger nerves on the finger pads, while staying below the detection threshold on the back side of the fingers, neatly solving the problem.
Immersive-ness doesn't only come from just the screen, but also from the fact that you can't multi-task (one could say this is a sad state of my attention).
I play various kind of games. My main usage is "sport", with synthriders and beat saber. I love story telling/puzzle games, though they are quite costly (like 30€ for 4 hours of game play) so that doesn't account for a lot of play time. But I also like a small Cities Skyline (Cities: VR by the people from Cities Skyline), Deisim where you play a god, and Derail Valley, where you drive a train in a miniature world.
As a software engineer I have tried using it for other stuff than gaming, but even though it feels cool, I never found it actually useful. I can keep the headset 4 hours (and probably the whole day) without any issue (assuming no frame drop, which do happen when running from Windows, not in the Quest environment), so that's not the issue. Maybe with a better display resolution it could be better, but honestly I doubt it.
Just a word on the metaverse: I do think it can be pretty cool for socializing (Ready Player One is IMO not that far-fetched), though Meta's universe development still looks extremely primitive compared to everything else that exists. At this point, I think that a Meta Quest 3 with face emotion detection (and improved SoC and display compared to Quest 2), and let competing companies provide a good environment based on that hardware+OS (for instance Rec Room) would be pretty good, but I doubt that could follow Meta's bottom line.
We are nowhere close.
Having one VR universe from which you can join various worlds where a world is pretty much its own game, and you can join friends in that, and it needs to be "alive enough" to feel like actual social interaction. Pretty much a very big MMORPG.
Several games actually have most of that (including Meta Horizon), except that the games inside are very crude, that the transition from one world to another is clunky, and it's obviously completely lacking emotion (which Meta is trying to solve, I don't know whether they will).
There are indeed other stuff in Ready Player One: - walkpads: That's definitely cool, but they already do exist. They are costly, but same in Ready Player One: Only few people have it. But yes movement in VR is a bit of an issue. I sadly don't expect any progress on that matter (give me a trackball under the hand!), until we can connect to our brain (which I think could be possible 5-10 years from now for simple move forward/backward commands?) - stunts: There are a lot of stunts made in game. I don't think there is any reasonable way to implement that realistically. That being said, stuff like EchoVR are already very immersive imo. - haptic gloves: Okay everyone has it in Ready Player One, and even though we have some stuff, it's nowhere near mass-market. So yes I'll agree this is missing compared to Ready Player One.
VR is not immersive. The people in the movie (or book) are IN THE WORLD. They teeter over ledges, and jump over things. They touch things. They move around. They fiddle with small objects.
Our VR isn’t anything like that. If your foot is half off a ledge you are not off balance. You don’t jump, not really. When you do it tends to feel gross. You don’t touch things. Objects feel very fake up close. Most stuff is basically immutable. And it has to be because the game engines aren’t capable of more. It’s all clearly fake.
I need to play with stuff with my hands (and I mean random stuff, not just always the same toy. Like right now I'm busying my hands with mounting/dismounting some lego that requires putting a bit of force in it, not really something you can do with a controller). I need to look at my smartphone. I might do interruptible stuff which would require corner vision (say I'm playing on TV, waiting for my build to finish that I can see in the corner of my eye). I'm chewing through gums (k I could probably do that with headset on)
Possibly all of those stuff could be fixed with better hw and sw. But. BUT. One of the feature I really like about current day VR, is that I am disconnected from everything. Which would pretty much contradict fixing every issue I have mentioned.
It's more annoying to setup, but I also like playing Euro Truck Simulator 2 in VR with a 1080 wheel. As someone who doesn't have a driving license, that makes me see why some people like to drive to clear their mind.
I also got my pilot's license a few years ago after developing a love of flying from the Microsoft Flight Sim 95 era and beyond. In VR, while I've never had the "full controls," in higher-end aircraft software I could very accurately (literally to just about 100%) recreate my IRL flights with the exception of the feel of the yoke and whatnot. Again, awesome gaming experience.
Lastly, I've played quite a bit of poker in PokerstarsVR. The thing that surprises me the most about THOSE experiences is that this attempt to create a pretty simple and at first-glance unexciting experience in VR to me revealed just how incredible VR actually CAN be. Like, yes, I get the value-add that the videogame can have for something like flying an airliner or a formula car, but wouldn't you always rather play poker with your friends IRL? Well, to me, VR showed me that that answer is a resounding 'no.' IRL poker is slow (just from shuffling and dealing, to say nothing of folks fumbling with chips), if you play poker well you'll be sitting out a lot of hands, so that can get boring, etc. In VR, however, I could see many, many more hands/hr, I could pin a TV to the virtual room and watch whatever I wanted as I'm talking with folks all over the world, could engage in side-games with the person next to me if I wasn't in a hand, etc. Just... unbelievably compelling. It made me a believer that I could EASILY see how in the near future even if I had 8 friends at home who really wanted to play poker, that I'd rather have each of us reaching out for our personal VR devices to do that in rather than reaching for a deck of cards.
Oh lord. Even going back to being a kid I had nightmares about being in a car as it goes over a cliff and starts tumbling down. Years later, I got my Rift and gave Dirt: Rally a try. Misjudging a turn and careening off the road into thin air, all in glorious first person VR, triggered that primal fear in me. It was too much.
Meanwhile, I fuckin love VR flight sims and can pull barrel rolls all day no problem.
It sounds like a much more space- and funds-efficient solution, but I can also see how it could potentially create bad habits.
It does sound like an outstandingly good idea to get pilot seat time for familiarity with controls, procedures, etc.!
When I started my flight training, my flight instructor's chief complaint was that I was so used to looking INSIDE the cockpit rather than out. Conversely, picking up instrument flying definitely came very easy (I was used to reading plates, ATC phrasing, etc.), but
I also tried other things, but gaming, and especially the first three games, are what I come back to at least semi-regularly.
Hardware: Valve Index on a Linux desktop with RTX 3080
Currently building a realtime scripting API for it: https://docs.openbrush.app/alternate-and-experimental-builds...
Although I do have a reason since we are developing our own game VRWorkout (hand tracking based full body exercises and mixed reality for safety), I still get a regular crowd of people joining me in our multiplayer workouts
VR to many increasingly means full on HMDs, haptics, and full on sensory immersion. People tend to only use parts of these from sounds to visuals at a time because when used in conjunction, current degrees of shortcomings make the experiences less than ideal.
I use a lot of VR aspects regularly in general data exploration, though I tend not to need so much in the form of HMD and stereoscopic rendering. Usually something semi-immersive visually gets me most of what I want.
To me, the science and engineering for most the hardware just isn't there yet to make a fully enjoyable experience but I think that means we should continue pushing on those developments because someday they will be and highly immersive VR will be fantastic (and perhaps dystopian depending on how it's used).
That's certainly cool, but I don't think most folks would call it VR. Not even 10-20 years ago.
It's just my personal tastes, but there are tons of games I want to play that don't make me sick or require that I put something on my face (or a mechanical backpack now lol).
Used to play almost every night when I got Cosmodread, but managed to complete it.
I couldn't do it myself, I have trouble reading anything in VR.
I read this every few months for a certain kind of amusement. I remain utterly unconvinced of any merits…
I’ve always found it incredibly uncanny navigating through 3D environments in VR without any kind of force feedback, or any sensation of weight or touch.
It's a big weakness of proposed VR applications for training, e.g. for any manual skill where lifting and manipulating (heavy) objects is important, or different materials have very different mechanical properties. E.g. training paramedics where moving patients is important and where skin, fat, bone, muscle, etc have different 'feels'.
And yes, it was a lot more fun than I should admit
Is that a thing people want? It seems to me when I jump in a VR headset the feeling of jumping is just as intense as it needs to me. Walking in VR is such an enormously more pressing issue.
Regardless, just because "outside" is available doesn't mean we can't have things inside as well. Going a bit further, AR was getting people outside en masse during the Pokemon GO craze, so these two things are in no way antithetical.
and what are people doing now that this fad is over?