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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Ah. He just tried a VR headset in an environment where you can move around. If you haven't seen that before, it's impressive.

You need a lot of floor space to get the real effect of movement. You also need reliable motion tracking and a display image solidly aligned with the real world, or users will fall down, or, in a non-flat environment, fall off things.

This could bring back laser tag.

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IIRC there are some algorithms that can subtly alter headset feedback vs actual motion to make a VR user walk in circles instead of into a wall.

Yeah, that's a pretty cool concept. Here's an example: http://phys.org/news/2013-04-virtual-reality-team-infinite-e...

edit: Actually, that doesn't seem to be what I was thinking of. Here are some examples of redirected walking:

http://eprints.utas.edu.au/109/1/AISAT-Redirected.pdf

http://vrguy.blogspot.com/2013/07/redirected-walking-can-sav...

http://cb.nowan.net/blog/2008/12/02/redirected-walking-playi...

That's a good idea. People can't tell very accurately through what angle they turned. People are good at walking straight without visual cues, though. They have to force the users to make a lot of turns to keep them in the workspace.

This probably requires a gym-sized space to work well. You could have multiple people in it, if the game kept them bunched up and on the same illusory axes, so their relative positions matched in the real world and VR.

This could bring back something like LAN parties. You need a big empty space, and everybody brings their headgear.

I dispute your second claim, based on personal experience, as well as the Mythbusters episode on same.

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t...

Perhaps you can find the segment online somewhere, Discovery has the after show online but not the segment itself.

Doesn't that require a very large empty space to begin with? I'd day it's more of a "space amplifier", it seems you can't get away from problems with open spaces and straight lines.

Redirected walking is really neat -- though sadly it seems like the current 15' by 15' area of the Vive is too small for it to really work.

It is funny seeing this concept beginning to gain legs. A buddy and I were working on a concept for VR/AR laser-tag style locations for a college entrepreneurship class about 5 years ago. However, every entrepreneur they brought in to critique our ideas flat out told us this was a moronic idea that could never work and that nobody would ever be interested in. We were told we had to change to a new idea or we'd fail the class. Oh, academics...

It would seem unfair to criticizes academics for your experience, at least based on the description you gave.

If they were bringing in entrepreneurs, what does that have to do with academics?

You say they were entrepreneurs, not academics.

Also, THEY WERE RIGHT!!. 5 years ago you'd have failed miserably in the market with this.

The OLED screens alone had required billions of dollars in investment. Same with the inertial sensors, or small digital cameras and SSDs. All this tech has improved thanks to the smartphone boom in the last 5 years.

Obviously some day we will have flying cars, when we dominate all the anti gravity and the rest of the anti particles, and antimatter.

But if you try to make a business out of flying cars today, you will most likely fail because you got too early.

When did the laser tag go away?

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