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Comment by ehsankia | Hacker News Reader

From the video it kinda seemed like to people had to walk quite carefully, and it seemed a little awkward. I can't imagine it working well with a headset on your head in a virtual world not being able to see the real world.

Most other VR walking systems, you're strapped in an safe from falling.

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its a tiny setup, too small for normal steps. it may be just fine if it were bigger.

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.

That's another thing that I found strange. Why make the version you show the public so tiny, especially if you want to show off multiple people on it. I understand it's a prototype, but surely they can scale it up a bit more to a reasonable size before showing it?

You might as well ask “why show it at all”. If you’re a small research outfit you do demos like this to attract potential clients but Disney has more than enough internal applications for this thing to keep them occupied for a long time.

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.

I believe that these sorts of demos/disclosures are intended to be soft job adverts-- They're cultivating a reputation of being not only an innovative R&D lab, but one that allows researchers to (sometimes) share results without being buried under a pile of NDAs. These are both things that potential new hires will likely care about a great deal.

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