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Comment by shocks | Hacker News Reader

Great, until you walk into a wall!

You could walk around the perimeter of the wall to 'calibrate' your safe environment, although thats dependent on the sensor drift (they say its very accurate).

I'm assuming with the combination of all the (multiple) inertial sensor data they could probably account for that to a pretty accurate degree.

Thats cool but still, what do you when you hit a wall in real life but could still go on in the direction in the virtual world ? That would need some confusing repositioning i would guess

I would expect the game itself to modify its virtual world to account for my physical boundaries.

360 degree treadmill: http://www.virtuix.com/about/

This does mean kicking is out of the question.

That and (realistic) jumping seem to be the main limitations of the omni at this stage.

I wonder if the omni harness was more like a baby bouncer than a fixed support if this would solve those issues:

http://static.toysrus.co.uk//medias/sys_master/8609611006271...

Could have sensors warning you.

...breaking the immersion that you have tried so very hard to produce once or twice a minute so you can pause and reposition yourself in the real world room.

This seems like the biggest remaining problem for creating realistic VR games.

The end goal is of course to combine this system with a headset like the Rift and a treadmill like the Omni to offer fully immersive VR with boundless movement.

That being said, I still think PrioVR on its own has a lot to offer to games that hasn't been offered before. Imagine a fighting game where you dodge punches by actually ducking down, or a dancing game that can actually capture the full extent of your motion and respond accurately. Both of these concepts could be implemented without any fear of running into a wall, and should present a whole new way to interact with games.

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