Any idea about price and availability in Europe?
Also, would the Lighthouses have to be connected to the frame to avoid relative rotation?
That looks awesome but current VR outside in tracking would never work with it. Maybe Pimax basic gyro tracking could but I still doubt it would be very accurate. I know for certain Oculus cameras wouldn’t as I’ve tried in a moving vehicle already and it drifts like crazy. Lighthouse tracking has spinning motors which I’m sure wouldn’t like all that spinning.
You could buy a new car for the same price I’m sure.
I think you might need inside out tracking. If you search the forums there is a couple of users with motion sims.
@Pimax-Support @Doman.Chen would also be an excellent source.
I remember looking up some solutions on xsimulator.net back in 2014 when I had the dk2, the consensus was mounting the camera on the frame itself to avoid rotation relative to the room, but as Evol points out I had completely forgotten the Lighthouses use rotors that could be compromised with the platform rotation :-/
Inside out without external markers (ALA Microsoft new HMDs for example) would be difficult to I’m afraid in that model, you’d have to black out all the panels otherwise the depth cameras would pick the external walls as a point of ref.
That’s funny it was simpler when back in 1995 I wanted to buy a Sega 360 to use with a Forte VFX-1 for playing DID’s Ef2000, no positional tracking but cool for the time!
But then again, now that I think about it, due to safety it would be even wiser to strap in the seat with a neck brace to avoid injuries, so the postrack would be really limited anyways…
Ok then, if I get the funding the next issue is to find a room with a high enough ceiling, I don’t think my current home/office would be capable of containing it.
There is no reason to have that much movement to be immersive. A small jerk to simulate g forces would do the trick and be way more practical.
That’s been debated for years in the flight-sim community, to simulate g-forces at least decently you’d need this:
It has 5 issues though:
1)it would cost 100 times more than a simple model like the one in the original post
2)it would take an insane amount of space
3)it would sometimes reach the space limits anyways and be forced to re-center
4)it can’t rotate 360°
5)in case of postrack it would be even more expensive and difficult to handle
The one I’ve posted doesn’t offer translational g-forces, but at least when DCS F-14 comes out you’ll be able to do constant inverted flight realistically, maintaining diplomatic eye-contact with the enemy ahah
For cars absolutely, for combat flight far from it
I attempted to run a full PC/VR setup in a large vehicle during a trip. I thought maybe Oculus Rift CV1 would work. So I mounted two CV1 sensors to the headrests of the front seats and played VR in the back while the vehicle was in motion. As long as we were going straight it worked okay but anytime a corner was taken tracking would drift. I would have to recenter after every corner… It was not the success I had hoped but I think this trip did wonders for my VR legs. Valve tracking may work but I doubt it. I cannot say for inside out tracking I don’t have the hardware to test.
Read about the g-seat. It uses plates on the bottom,sides and back that move on an axis to push against you according to forces in game along with seat belts that tighten/relax. add a 2DOF motion platform for more serious bumps and bass shakers for fine detail and In VR you have an almost perfect setup at anything from 1/10 to 1/100 the price of those insane factory robot arms and you don’t need maintence crews and a huge space to use it.
Just buy an old Afterburner arcade simulator lol
Sexy time simulator anybody ?
Evol: strange, you shouldn’t have had drifting with the cameras
Helio: that’s what I said in the post a couple lines up, this was the version I was eyeing
Having fun on a SEGA R360 filmed on my NOKIA 808 - YouTube
Unfortunately they’re extremely rare and possibly more expensive (and less adaptable to our VR needs obviously) than the new motion platforms on the market today
I’ve actually helped setup a motion-sim VR experience at my work, for a driving simulator. The simulator (which doesn’t do 360 degrees) cost around $65,000. What we did for VR was setup Vive sensors in the room around the simulator, then attach a Vive controller to the frame (a Vive Tracker would be better, but they weren’t widely available yet), and use software to cancel out the controller’s detected motion from the headset orientation. It works perfectly, with no drift.
I would think that inside-out tracking, like the Pimax also supports, might avoid the drift problem. That is assuming that the simulator would be a closed box, not an open frame (so the room outside of the simulator doesn’t confuse the tracking).
Vesaro right? I assume this should be implemented in every simulator by the developer, or could it be integrated in SteamVr plugin form to work universally?
You don’t need Inside Out tracking!
Check GitHub - matzman666/OpenVR-InputEmulator: An OpenVR driver that allows to create virtual controllers, emulate controller input, manipulate poses of existing controllers and remap buttons. A client-side library that communicates with the driver via shared-memory is also included. out.
He uses Motion cancellation. You just attach a Controller to your motion platform as reference.
The guys over at VR Motion Cancellation - Time to test! are saying it works very well, with minor issues.
I would like to see a officially supported version of this!
I would love to get into an R360 to try it out someday. I can only imagine a VR headset added on to a similar device for the ultimate experience.
I’m totally biased though, I love Sega’s old taikan arcade games and am especially fond of the development studio AM2.
Here is another option lol