This is very cool, thanks for sharing! In my opinion rotating the user on the spot seems like a cool trick but probably more complicated than it needs to be. I would stick with strafing, although heavier, the performance ceiling would be much higher once the tech is refined. Rotating on the spot could be nausea inducing unless done quite slowly which would limit its usefulness, a couple of these in a row and you will have used up all your headroom while the system takes its time to adjust.
I would suggest trying Gorn if you want to torture test your system. Something you’re probably aware of is the maximum acceleration should be consistent at any speed. Given a bigger area you could in theory reach a higher top speed without adding any extra acceleration / deceleration forces. A lot of people have at least an 8’x8’ or 10’x10’ empty area to play in.
One other thing to consider is, if an object like clothing falls into the path of the shoe, will the person take a tumble? If selling to consumers having a harness system “just in case” might be worth thinking about.
There’s some good points you make. Ideally, I wouldn’t want to use a harness, stand or barrier, these all add cost, and bulk to the solution. But for safety, I might need to provide something, but it really depends how reliable the VR shoes are.
If an object came in the path, (hopefully not a baby or pet), you would step on it like any other shoe, and the motors would not move, the other shoe would become stationary. Like any real life situation, if you step on a football while walking, yeah you might fall over, but if it goes on to be developed as a commercial product, a lot of consideration will go into safety and regulations might influence the solution.
I wanted to avoid a harness, firstly I think they can be uncomfortable which to me breaks immersion and needing a weight bearing structure/stand or drilling into the ceiling kind of defeats the purpose of having compact & easily storeable VR shoes.
My intention was to investigate a circular stand/barrier that folds away. I always plan to have a battery option, but another solution is to have a cable for power that always stays behind the users back regardless of orientation, which is built into the stand. This might be better for VR arcades etc where they need it always On and don’t want to bother with constantly charging battery packs.
I’m learning a lot doing this, I suppose it’s something that kept me busy during lock-down, I’m not sure it’s fun yet… I’m not an expert on everything, I’ll be interested in getting some help from someone to set up the controller drivers for steam/openvr. I can probably get a simple analogue stick input working for testing with games that are compatible.
I need something similar to what cybershoes implemented, a way to input motion and scale speed, etc
I was more talking about if the shoe rolled into something that interrupted its motion. That jarring would almost certainly be enough to throw someone off their balance.
Well im sure you heard of this guy, he seems to be doing the same thing, and he’s got strafing working
im certain that you guys are onto something and just need the right people to come together. Kind of like VR and Palmer Luckey meeting Brendan Iribe, and Antonov.
Is there a VR Locomotion convention somewhere where you giys can collorate?
I have been talking to Alexander on his discord… nice guy, we might collaborate or at least help each other out with technical stuff.
I intend to build a prototype with full strafing (which would add some cost and weight), I have a CAD model for the design, but it’s not a huge priority for me. I would like to see how far I get with my current design, which should be able to correct for 1-2 side steps, if that doesn’t work or I see a strong demand for strafing, I will branch-off and build the strafing version.
i think you can create some kind of roller specially adapted for this purpose.
the base principle would have to build wheel that rectract when they are not in the right direction.
for this you can use a very simple mechanism like this one
the magnet is here to recall the wheel in place and to move it faster
so if your movement is in the direction of the wheel, there is no pressure side pressure, the wheel stays in place.
if the direction is oblique enough to exerce a sufficient force, the wheel shift to the left or right and goes a little bit up. since you will have other wheels arranged in others directions, they will get the weight instead.
the transition should not be noticeable.
the mechanism can be very flat since you need a very small movement up to disable a wheel (one millimeter should be enough)
The mechanism idea is cool, sorry I’m not OP so take it with a grain of salt, but depending on how a person is standing the weight could already be oblique while not in motion, or the weight could be vertical immediately after stepping. If I’m understanding your idea correctly both scenarios would cause the strafing wheels to not operate correctly.
I’m currently working on OpenVR Driver Integration and Bluetooth link between the VR shoes and the PC.
The next version will have no wires, a small battery pack will be mounted on the rear of each VR Shoe.
In the future, I will continue to explore the option of having a wired battery pack on the waist (as in the Video) because this will allow for many hours of play time, whereas the shoe mounted battery will last around 1 hr.
There is still a lot of work to do on refining the motion and tracking algorithms for true ‘return to zero’ functionality so the user doesn’t drift out of a play space.
I’m working on this on my own in spare time and a lot of technical disciplies are needed so it’s challenging, recently I’m teaching myself C++ and Object oriented, and my back ground is electronics so learning new things also takes time.
