Disney unveils the HoloTile floor
ign.com
ign.com
A tile with ultrasonic array of transducers are provided as in the assembly to provide instantaneous friction control for any objects contacting or supported on the contact/upper surface. [1]
EDIT: Found some more explanation in a reddit comment. [2]
Ultrasound vibration makes it slippery, then it has an X-Y pistons underneath. So it makes itself slippery when it wants to reset position, then makes itself sticky again when it wants to move you back into position. Now repeat this process to fast for you to tell anything is happening.
[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/BeAmazed/comments/19eef29/comment/k...
From the close-up shots, you can clearly see them rotating and changing inclination.
By changing inclination they can control the contact surface of the rotating wheels and as a result control the direction of your movement. Very clever and simple but might be dangerous(you wouldn't want to have your pinky stuck between load bearing rotating wheels) and prone to tear and wear due to the high dynamic friction.
However, if there's actually a way to make it sticky or slippery with ultrasound then you can get away with a partial rotation back and forth while turning it sticky in one direction to push the objects in that direction and turn it slippery to reset its own position and get ready for another push. This probably will make it quite safe.
Maybe, the part that goes from slippery to sticky with ultrasound is beneath the rubber disks and when there's no load they just rotate freely?
And because of this, the person above is stepping on the "spinning surface" (the "base" surface of a cylinder) of these tiny disks, instead of the curved surface like a normal wheel or some industrial conveyor wheels (as someone linked below, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRS0Uj2WdpA ).
So in a sense, they're not "rotating like rotating wheels" despite being wheels/disks.
BTW, it looks like they also can adjust its axis angle slightly (less than 30 degree), which I imagine is also crucial to how it works.
But anyway, thanks for improving my English.
To mrtksn: yeah I think your original post is pretty clear. But there are indeed other comments in this thread that are confusing the two.
In my mental model its wheels attached in different way that rotate around an axis perpendicular to the ground. I call in wheels because moves the things around.
I'm really confused by the confusion. Isn't it obvious on the video that its cylindrical objects that can be considered thick disks and wouldn't all disks rotate on the round surface around the axis?
Feels like a very mechanically-simple strategy, but hard to make durable / safe from fingers (and detecting "skin" vs "shoe" doesn't seem like something you can make foolproof) / that would hurt to fall onto.
The drawback of this is that it requires a firm contact point like shoes to work. You wouldn't want to walk in socks on this. You also couldn't have a performer lay directly on the surface and transport them across the stage, nor allow them to have baggy clothing near it. Running would be difficult from a balance perspective, not to mention holding a wheel at a particular tilt would require quite a bit of force if someone runs on it. It's going to have a very particular use case for Disney.
The one thing that I notice is item 726/Fig 7./PDF pg 10, it has "with the soles and attached/embedded ultrasonic transducers". Is that maybe a different or older envisioning of this system? His shoes seemed totally normal.
Just trying to wrap my head around how much the friction can be changed by vibration, like a solid-ish state fluidized bed. Don't know it both contact surfaces need to be vibrating.
Moving stuff around with controlled vibration is known. There's a cute trick where you drive a flat horizontal plate in three axes (X, Y, and rotate about Z). Sawtooth waveforms will move things around; the slow part of the sawtooth produces motion, and the fast part yanks the plate back to the starting point, breaking from static friction to weaker sliding friction. It's even possible, by using combinations of translation and rotation, to move multiple objects in different directions. The original research was funded by United Parcel Service. They wanted to take a table full of boxes, separate them, align them, and send them to a conveyor. Didn't work well enough, although someone did a chessboard demo where multiple pieces were moved around separately.
This is a similar idea, but at a finer scale.
> "with the soles and attached/embedded ultrasonic transducers"
That suggests doing this in the shoe, instead of in the floor. Different system. Disney might license that to Nike.
I can't see it for theme park customers. This system can make people fall down.
Performers, though...
https://youtu.be/HV2zh6ZDgUs https://youtu.be/XAokGOEjAFs
Companies tend to shotgun out a bunch of patent soup unrelated to actual working prototypes during R&D. The media latches on to the most interesting sounding thing they can find relating to a demo so you end up with “ai controlled space lasers” describing something that’s actually much more mundane.
I am skeptical of something like this making an impact for consumer VR, but it should be possible to integrate the sensor input at the OpenXR level, allowing it to work with all apps without needing per-app specialization.
However, it probably doesn’t “solve” motion sickness, because the vestibular system still won’t think you are going forward. The bouncing around motion of walking does have a masking effect that will help some.
Source: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1750557236798148613
(a entirely uneducated conjecture)
Single-person omnidirectional treadmills for VR already exist, and as far as I know all of them use just such a harness: https://www.virtuix.com/
Useful advice from the VR native: get on platform, harness up, then put on headgear.
(My hypothesis is that the minority of people who did manage to "adapt" to movement in VR, are people who have lived for years with inner-ear problems that have essentially made their vestibular sense deaf.)
Why not? Movement is relative, of course, and I'm moving relative to the floor and relative to what I see. What does the vestibular system detect that isn't happening?
That's also true on a treadmill. I think the bigger problem would be that the world appears to be moving (unlike a treadmill) and you don't feel any acceleration.
The treadmill shows that performing the walking movements without acceleration doesn't generally cause motion sickness.
If you actually use a treadmill, or watch motion capture, you’ll see that this isn’t the case. It’s a lot of slight accelerations and decelerations. The variation change from person to person, and more experienced runners are able to minimize them, but they’re still present.
Edit: this study is peripherally related https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8160945/
Isn't that always true? If I pay attention to it, I notice a lot of tiny movements of my head, as I just sit here typing.
"You don't have acceleration" is just talking about the big accelerations from 0 mph to roughly 3 mph to 0 mph, not implying that you're completely motionless as if frozen in ice.
But a sufficiently-clever mechanical VR system could blow air at you as you move, so let's ignore that one.
Your inner ear is literally an accelerometer. When you accelerate (or rotate your body around relative to a gravitational pull), the liquid in your cochlea sloshes around, and the hairs in it (which aren't just on the bottom surface, but all around the sides and top as well) feel the liquid as it passes by them and build an image of your position and acceleration in space. (It's oddly similar to how the wires in an old-school mercury tilt-switch accelerometer interpret the mercury sloshing around. Just with a lot more pairs of wires!)
Also, you've got an interoceptive sense: your organs are somewhat free to move inside your body; and so, as you experience g-forces, your internal organs continue to move a bit after your body is stopped — and you experience this relative displacement of your organs as a familiar and intuitive "lurching" sensation.
When your inner-ear accelerometer signal fails to cohere with your overall computed sense of motion, you get the feverish-dizzy, lacking-air, mentally-induced-nausea feeling of carsickness.
When your interoceptive signal fails to cohere with your overall computed sense of motion, you get the bad kind of "lurching sensation" — which, if it happens enough times, causes a unique kind of acute "body load" nausea purely localized within the gut (something common among riders of rollercoasters with negative-g-force moments.)
And I don't think there's any way of actually telling whether you're accelerating or tilting, as long as you keep the forces within a certain limited range?
Which immediately makes me wonder -- what if you put this HoloTile floor on top of a platform that can tilt on both axes? What if the moment it starts to detect you walking forwards, it tilts "uphill" in the direction you're walking? When you suddenly stop walking, it tilts backwards slightly for a split second, then resets to level.
Because this actually matches what our body experiences on a sidewalk -- when we walk forwards we actually tilt our body slightly forwards as we accelerate, and tilt it backwards briefly to stop. (Same as a Segway does, if that's easier to picture.)
So if the floor tilts... would that be good enough to complete the illusion, and send the right signals to the inner ear? Because the liquid in your cochlea is now sloshing around in the right way? The interoception is matching as well?
The part that makes Star Tour work is that your entire body is moved around when the ship is tilted (because you're strapped to your seat). That wouldn't work with a tilting floor, I think.
> the liquid in your cochlea sloshes around
The vestibules are not the cochlea. The cochlea is responsible for sound. The vestibules are just about the sensation of movement, the structures are called Semicircular canals. You have one is each axis of rotation, more or less (x-y-z)
> feel the liquid as it passes by them
The hair cells are embedded in a crystal matrix, the otolith. The inertia of the 'heavy' crystal pulls the hair cells (which only look like hair and are not actually hair) and that sends a signal to the brain. Not the liquid. The Spins from drunkenness are due to the change in the density of the liquid in the vestibules (from the additional alcohol) causing a different buoyancy of the otoliths and thereby making the hair cells change resting position.
> build an image of your position and acceleration
Only the acceleration, not the position. You can only feel, via these organs, the 2nd derivative of position (0th derivative - position, 1st derivative - velocity, 2nd derivative - acceleration)
> When your inner-ear accelerometer signal fails to cohere with your overall computed sense of motion, you get the feverish-dizzy, lacking-air, mentally-induced-nausea feeling of carsickness.
This feeling is very unique to people and their lived experiences. Seasickness will subside for most people, and sailors/figure skaters/ballerinas/skateboarders/etc generally have a higher tolerance to motion sickness.
Overall, very good overview! Thank you!
> You can only feel, via these organs, the 2nd derivative of position (0th derivative - position, 1st derivative - velocity, 2nd derivative - acceleration)
Well, sure, but the thing that I meant by "builds a picture" isn't just what you're feeling (which, indeed, is acceleration, not position), but also the information the brain has available to predict with.
IIRC, I've read about "hardwired neural logic" (i.e. a brain function outside of our conscious awareness that we have from birth) for flow-state obstacle avoidance in known environments, which involves the brain doing internal dead reckoning based on integrating over its acceleration-picture of the body — thus allowing a person to e.g. make their way home through a forest they've walked through a million times, with their eyes closed, yet stepping over tree roots at just the right time.
Dead reckoning over an integration of the acceleration-picture also seems to come into play with proprioception. Thus why people who are given a local nerve block in an arm, might end up smacking themselves in the face with said arm when trying to e.g. adjust their glasses. They're missing the feedback signals† from the arm that would allow them to compute the acceleration of the arm, and therefore the moment-to-moment position of the arm.
---
† I'd love to know how the brain figures out what the acceleration forces being applied to the extremities are. I'm guessing you'd probably be almost the right person to know the answer to that question! (The perfect person would be one of those "prosthetic arm you can feel" researchers.)
I know the brain is getting signals back from the muscles in the extremity — how flexed they are, how much work they're having to do to keep in position — and that's probably a majority of the information needed... presuming you are flexing the muscle.
But we still know where our limbs are in space even when we have them "loose." So there's likely an additional component — the one that allows people without numbness in their extremities, to avoid being smacked in the face by their own hand when someone picks their arm up and drops it above their face while they're asleep.
My naive guess for what that data source could be: pressure on blood vessels. As you move the extremity, the blood drags behind the limb, and so some blood vessels feel an temporary increase in pressure, and others a temporary decrease in pressure. The brain then takes the derivative of the blood pressure data; builds a map of blood pressure deltas; and then "recognizes", in each extremity's picture, the accelerations upon the extremity.
The propioceptive positioning does occur in muscles, but, as far as I remember, it's mostly in the tendons. In that, your brain/spine knows the stretch of all the tendons and then back calculates that to a position based on experience. So, people with very recent tendon injuries or differential loads on the muscles will have a somewhat hard time knowing the position of their body (by very recent, I mean within a few minutes/seconds). Blood pressure would be an interesting way to do the math, but as blood pressure changes a lot, it would be doing a lot of work here. Also, most of these systems are inherited from very ancient times when blood was a bit different and before hearts like ours. Animals want to know where they are more than they care to have much of a heartbeat.
'Fun' little ways that we have discovered these things are mostly when someone has a disease that causes them to do wacky stuff. Phantom limb diseases are a bit like that. There are some other ones, but I can't remember then, sorry!
If you'd like to learn more about propioception and all the little biological fun times, I'd suggest just about any intro neuroscience textbook. They're kinda fun once you get into them. For grad level learning, Kandel's Principals of Neural Science is the go-to book. Lots of case studies in there.
Something like this would happen to me sometimes when I was intoxicated on alcohol and cannabis together (getting crunk, the kids used to say). After achieving a substantial buzz, if I closed my eyes and leaned back deeply in a chair or lay down on my back, I could get this vivid sensation of falling rapidly. Just like going down a steep rollercoaster. As long as I stayed in the sweet spot intoxication-wise, it was a thrilling and pleasurable sensation.
From what I recall, after a few brief moments of exhilaration (that I could maybe relax and focus into in order to prolong), a subconscious awareness that I'm not actually moving takes over, which turns the sensation into pure nausea. Right in the pit of my stomach, like you describe. Sometimes if the nausea passed quickly enough I could open my eyes and sit up, re-center myself, and then induce the effect again. Anyway, kind of relevant in a weird way. The things we do for cheap thrills...
And on that note, I could see potential for some people to get acclimated to this effect of the technology and actually enjoy it as part of the experience.
What you can and should do is to tilt it a bit just to make it more like running, but its still far from regular experience. You body knows, and trust me its not 1 or 2 things that are out of place, its everything.
You can and will get used to it, but never ever it will feel like regular running.
(change in momentum, however, is another story.)
Think of it like a plumb bob hung inside your skull. Would it be canted forward or back? I don’t think relative to floor matters for that kind of mechanical detection of movement.
I wonder if it makes you puke if you don't quite move as far as you expected... like each step counts for 3/4ths of a step or something... and then you imperceptibly move backward.
I get motion sick easy, but this option doesn’t make me sick.
https://youtu.be/uWWn0fPbcRs?feature=shared&t=192
B'elanna Torres (and many other characters, mostly Klingon) are notorious for disabling the holodeck safety protocols, because the experience is not "real enough" unless one can actually get hurt:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30TXMZ_TSjk
The awareness of the holodeck experience being fake is so pervasive, that Odo actually believes the real Kira Nerys is a holodeck character:
https://youtu.be/8_nfZGFEm5k?feature=shared&t=82
I think this is the correct direction for AR/XR development (and why I'm a fan of AR as a concept, but not necessarily of VR): rather than trying to imitate a real experience as closely as possible (and then inevitably nose-diving into the uncanny valley), work with the medium and its inherent limitations and just let it be its own thing. We might discover applications we wouldn't dream of, just like the EMH from Voyager eventually rediscovers himself as a real person.
Maybe you could make the speed of the floor slower as long as the person stays in the middle, but as they reach the edge, it increases to keep them on it? I imagine it would feel strange to have a varying floor speed like that though.
Most other VR walking systems, you're strapped in an safe from falling.
and anyway, it probably won't be the final iteration of this. it's just a prototype, a proof-of-concept. people are looking at this like you can go down and buy it today and are writing it off.
My cynical view is that an exec was looking at the share price and thought “ahh crap let’s go film some stuff in R&D to reassure people we’ve got the future in hand”. Didn’t matter they hadn’t scaled the thing up, we’re still all talking about it in the top post of HN.
This is basically like walking on ice, except you slip more slowly, and you also un-slip (your feet are actively moved) occasionally to recenter.
That limits both the speed you can pretend to walk, and the speed at which you can be moved back to center; because both relative movements are working against your natural balance.
You will never be able to work with or against the inertia of your body weight. That is the core limitation of any treadmill.
Seeing people step on a treadmill for the first time I'd say it definitely does. You get used to it but the feeling is very different from regular walking/running.
VR should stick to bike trainers. Making an immersive bike that can simulate hills and turns and feel natural seems achievable today and is relatively a piece of cake.
Well sure. You can't feel absolute velocity, you only feel acceleration.
Maybe the next step is to put the rolly floor on a platform that can be dynamically angled away from horizontal, effectively creating a pitch that makes the person feel like they're leaning (well, they would be leaning) and that might be enough to fool the inner ear? Gravity and acceleration are pretty interchangeable after all.
Given that those things already exist for some time, I wonder if Disney actually used them as a base and then made their own version of them or something.
Which should make it more amenable to higher-frequency control than mechanical systems would be able to shift at (given they're limited by mass).
That said, having seen high-throughput parcel sorting, the modern tech is amazing and the reason we have flow-through logistics and 1-2 day delivery.
They've got it slowed way down in that video.
Here's a system at closer to full-speed: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nPWTfT9sO2Y&t=26s https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JzURbt0qlqk&t=1m52s
Tricks like this can give you a better approximation but I don’t think it’ll ever be good enough. You want to jump, spin, crouch, crawl, lie down. And interact with others.
I think AR is going to be massive and Apple Vision Pro will be a big hit by gen 3 or 4, but VR is something likely to be “Human-Brain-Interface complete”.
Given HBI success will likely arrive on or after the time we reach AGI, I don’t really know how that’s going to work out. I think headsets will be really fun for a while, but we’re not going to get the full experience.
Unless we can suspend people in some kind of viscous fluid with respirators, and ummm people think that’s acceptable… suspend them on cables and blow compressed air at them? Google glass no longer looks so embarrassing…
I find current HMDs strapped to my head very uncomfortable, and that they're a major hurdle for mass VR adoption. In general, people want to be _less_ physically absorbed by technology, not more. I can't imagine anyone would want to use an exoskeleton robot suit for increased VR immersion. If anything, you would be less immersed because of the suit itself.
I think this level of physical immersion is not feasible. It's likely that we'll prefer brain-computer interfaces instead, and the stimulation would be done directly on our nervous system.
I’ve found this to not be true. If you were to give people the ability to get mantis blades, they would probably get mantis blades
I played Squid Game VR at one of those whole room VR places recently. It was great! We could run, crouch, jump, spin, and interact with others. It all worked. It was even part of the games to do these things.
Felt surprisingly immersive. You forgot you were in some dark room in the basement.
No treadmills needed and you can actually touch and lean on surfaces in VR.
with laser tag (also not a huge money maker) you can have many more people in the space, like 5x easily
A remaining missing piece is possibly some type of Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation system. Tell me if I'm totally off-base on this, but this seems like a technological achievable problem.
I'm not saying it's perfect (you can't simulate scrambling over a rock, for example), but it would enable a pretty wide range of movements.
That's kind of like saying the missing piece for antigravity is the ability to control gravitons, though.
I say this because early forms of the technology appear to already exist, e.g. https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/capabilities/research-l...
Maybe you'll even get an exoskeleton so you can Hulk out :)
But yeah AR has a much brighter "active" feature, and VR will be relegated to "passive" reality.
One random idea out of ocean of ideas - we might realize with a bit of training our brain will smooth out the difference and we shall be well immersed even with these mild moves.
Maybe 100% immersion is a stupid yardstick, and say 85% is the sweet spot where you feel like you are having tons of fun without actually getting heart attacks. Think about it a bit - action games, shooters etc. put you consistently in situations that would be pure survival. Body goes into fuck-it-all mode where immediate survival is the only goal, side effects are ignored. But if you keep exposing yourself to such experiences regularly without actually having decades of brutal training and experience that real life requires from such a situation, over time you mess up your untrained heart, burn out forever various receptors and fear managing systems in our brains, and you just wreck yourself badly. There is a term 'adrenaline junkies' for a reason, its dependence just like the rest.
Maybe... who cares. Good invention, smart approach. Bring more, iterate, thumbs up.
“I am skeptical of something like this making an impact for consumer VR, but it should be possible to integrate the sensor input at the OpenXR level, allowing it to work with all apps without needing per-app specialization.
However, it probably doesn’t “solve” motion sickness, because the vestibular system still won’t think you are going forward. The bouncing around motion of walking does have a masking effect that will help some.“
I personally could not get over the awful bout of motion sickness after I played my first “walking around” game on VR.
It may not fix everything with movement wearing a HMD, but one can imagine a whole lot of use cases without HMDs, and it might improve a lot of HMD use cases.
We see a lot of POCs like this that never make it anywhere.
The fact that this invention perhaps doesn't solve the immersion/sickness problem perfectly doesn't mean it is fatally flawed.
Artificial movement brings me out of it more than anything.
However I could imagine this to be able to expand the abilities of venues that already have enough space to let you walk around: You could have people move on their own as long as there is space, but then "stealthily" move them around when they think they're standing still, allowing either much larger geometries than would even fit in a hall or let you play around with non-euclidean geometries, etc.
But yeah, in general I agree, I don't see how this will enable some kind of VR breakthrough or even just move us in the direction on one: Even with this tech working perfectly, you'd be restricted to scenarios where you walk on flat ground and never touch anything. Even a basic hike in the woods has more complex interactions than that, not even starting with the kind of over-the-top acrobatics that we're used to from non-VR videogames.
So yeah, you could probably do the Stanley Parable in VR with this (without the staircases and the drops), but I don't see much else.
I don’t think it’s either surprising or discouraging that flat walking surfaces get worked out before dynamic surfaces.
It might take a while, but it is inevitable.
A rolling wave, with a grippy active surface, could keep you centered while you perceived an upward slope. Seeing and feeling a vista of uneven slopes in VR would be fantastic. I would love Skyrim as a health app!
Also, simple tilting could provide the force feedback of changing speeds.
If you looked at the video from the studio showing off tech decades ago, you could hear, see and feel the passion.
Also, Disney has patented their inventions since the beginning: https://patentyogi.com/technology/celebrity-patent-walt-disn...
Look at the video showing off this exact tech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdHTlUGN1zw
You feel like you are part of the family while watching this.
It's a completely different vibe.
Honestly, I feel vaguely threatened by the HoloTile Floor demo tone. The way he answers the question about what's it's going to be used for feels like a parent that doesn't want to reveal something to a child.
Fair enough! I'd just note that Walt was pioneer of content marketing, and I'm sure that was the goal. (This segment was broadcast in the television series Disneyland (1954–1959) in the episode, "Tricks of Our Trade".)
> Honestly, I feel vaguely threatened by the HoloTile Floor demo tone. The way he answers the question about what's it's going to be used for feels like a parent that doesn't want to reveal something to a child.
This one? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68YMEmaF0rs Agreed, it's terrible — overscripted, artificial, inauthentic — and a failed simulacrum of what Walt's Disney did above. The only honest part is 2:15-3:00, marred only by the terrible reading of the pretend guest.
Sure, but everyone shouldn't be expected to have the charisma and salesmanship of Walt Disney.
The man is 100% passion and 110% invention.
I've never seen so distant as an adult from a company I used to feel close as a kid.
I'm saying the message format sucks, which for a company specialized in medias, is ironic.
When I watch the video, I don't see the Disney family friendly that I used to love.
I see the corporation that seems to be uncomfortable to invite me to the party they are trying to sell me entries to.
It's possible.
But disney has lost the friendly vibes for a long time.
They still got talent, and that's not nothing.
I just have the reflex of clinching my butthole now every time I hear that kind of speech.
It's not the speech of the people that invented the machines, it's a speech written by the lawyers, sellers and executives.
Even Nintendo, which is one of the worst offender in obsessive legal actions manage to actually have creators sharing their vision in their voices about their games.
This video is the opposite of that.
That's not quite how I'd describe the terms of patents
And honestly, this videos feels like they show it off because they have to, but have so many restrictions to do so that they must weight every single word.
It doesn't look like they want us to have fun with it.
It looks like it's something they hope to sell us.
If I enter a restaurant, I know they want to sell me food, but I want to think about the food, not the bill. And I appreciate a passionate chef.
You'll see they used to know how to make you feel excited and happy about it.
Well, yeah; they (Disney Research) are a tech company, not a product company, and this is — essentially — a B2B presentation for those big partner companies of theirs who might want to license this technology. They're not talking to consumers; they're talking to businesses who could build this thing into a product of theirs that is then sold to consumers.
When this is in an actual product, they won't be talking about the tech of it at all. Disney Imagineering (the department that builds Disney's theme park rides) tries to make the tech as invisible to the experience as possible. A PR piece about a new Disney ride that used this system, likely wouldn't even mention the floor. It'd just mention that they have "high-fidelity VR immersion" or something like that — and would let guests explain what that entails in their reviews of it.
Sometimes I just want to buy half a kilo of butter, and not caring much about the craftsmanship of Swiss diary producers and whole chain of experts and distributors and their skills and tricks a bit.
I've never really used VR stuff but I wonder what does it feel like in your head when your legs move and your view moves but your body doesn't?
And then the edge case is extreme but topologically, can something like this work for running where you can lose contact with the ground and your body is sort of compensating for momentum?
I guess treadmills work without people flying off them, so is it just a matter of getting the impulse right?
That could be fixed with some active tilting of the whole platform to create dynamic lateral forces.
Those little wheels will need to be strongly controlled & grippy to avoid real and perceived slippage.
If the dais/stage/platform of the HoloTile product Lanny Smoot demos is a true prototype, it's likely miniaturizable (as well as scaled up) for implementation in both court-sized and entertainment room-sized versions.
The future gets closer and closer.
I'm guessing the first place we will see this is in some live action Star Wars show to make things move with the Force.
In its belly you will find a new definition of pain and suffering, as you are subjected to new iterations of Star Wars over a thousand years.
I'm not really sure what types of solutions currently exist in these spaces, and I'm sure that this would be a very expensive solution for this topic, but future thinking possibilities of this type of thing seem like they could have applications outside of just VR.
That's a great idea.
Unfortunately for the Sunshine State, Disney’s two research labs are located in Los Angeles and Zürich.
| W |
| A | S | D |Somewhere of course like a Disney theme park or an airport where you choose your destination and you're shuttled to your gate with your luggage following.
Or perhaps a secure room/floor in a building that if you don't have authorization to you simply cannot walk into without being pushed out of it.
If we go dystopian, imagine a business suspects you of shoplifting and simply doesn't let you leave, or shuttles you to security automatically.
What if you have the exterior covered in these, could they move (easily) a donut surrounding it?
What happens if you have these face each other?
can these be use for super slippery loading sled-tracks in ships, planes, trains? Whats the weight limits?
Can they be scaled down really small and basically put around a cable-line to slide things along like a zipline?
One of my favorites is Touché. The world becomes your touchscreen: https://youtu.be/E4tYpXVTjxA?si=Sbh97JURR9NGdeiS
Although in Star Trek, holodecks never had such a feature. Instead the simulation would use trickery to make sure you're never lead into the wall. E.g it would use illusions to trick you into thinking you're walking straight, but you're actually walking in a circle.
There's a lot of neat ideas in the manual that I read about on memory alpha, that I wish they explored more in the show. Like the fact that they have dolphin crewmembers. They're only mentioned off hand in one episode, never shown, and never involved in the plot.
(which may well, in some ways, be akin to the question "would you prefer to stand on a conveyor belt, or roller skates?" - but the errant thought occurs regardless..)
This setup should be able to impart the motion in any direction.
Is that how this works?
He's not wrong about dancers learning to do amazing moves on this surface tho.
This is better news for VR than facebook could ever manage.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=z4FGzE4endQ
(Fixed link)
The keyword is "redirected motion/walking".
They don’t look like wheels.
It acts like a roller on its side that can be rotated to change direction, but probably has advantages mechanically or with not crushing your toes or sucking in your shoelaces or something, or just less friction from the direction rotation change.
The idea is simple, but the details to make it usable, safe, work well, etc, are tricky.
edit: Reading more, it looks like it's mostly tilting, with perhaps high frequency vibration being used to modulate the amount of friction on each tile.
> Isn't that the same as walking?
You feel like you are falling on your face when you walk? I think you are referring to snowboarding!
Can’t wait for all of that, but I think really really impressive tech demos are going to be all we get for some time.
I presume that doing the latter would necessarily involve allowing you to actually move away from center within a bounded space — and then subtly re-centering you whenever you're not moving.
Has any company ever put effort into developing a VR floor technology that works more like that? One that allows you to actually feel like you're moving?
I bring this up, because it seems like the technology on display here could actually be made to do something akin to this, with a few more tweaks:
1. build a large room covered in this surface;
2. configure the surface to not actively slide you around while you're moving, but instead, to only begin "re-centering" you when you stay still (or when you are walking slowly enough that your "internal accelerometer" isn't receiving much input anyway);
3a. design the VR experiences consumed through such a platform, so that you'd mostly only have reason to walk, with "free-roam" areas where running would make sense only lasting a few seconds at a time, broken up with dialogue / interactions / etc. to give the floor time to re-center you.
3b. Or, if these are VR games, then as another option, use a stamina system in the game that depletes as you run in real life (bonus if your character's stamina drains exponentially the further you get from the center of the floor); and have the player wear a force-feedback resistance system (i.e. a TENS unit on their legs) that effectively cripples you physically from doing any more running, for as long as your character is out of stamina. (Verisimilitude!)
4. Either way, you probably still need a fallback if you manage to get near the edge of the room somehow. Like if you're completely ignoring what's happening on-screen and just running in a scene where your character is supposed to be stationary + talking to someone. So have the floor actively re-center you, like is shown here, only when you get near the edge — and hyperbolically, with more force as you get closer to the edge.
5. Some impetuous people will run full-tilt just to see if they can overcome the floor. So make sure to pad the walls. :)
That being said, while I think that kind of set-up might work... the real trouble with it is that a passive system doesn't prevent people from bumping into one-another. Which is fine if players' real-world positions are meant to correlate 1:1 with their in-game positions (or if, like in the demo video, there's no true per-individual "VR", just a shared wraparound screen in the room.) But it probably means that for true "immersive VR worlds" (i.e. a hypothetical VRMMO), you'd need one huge room per player. And that's a bit impractical, price- and space-wise!