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Forget VR treadmills—Google patents motorized, omnidirectional VR sneakers
If virtual reality is ever going to become the immersive, holodeck-style platform that we all dream of, someone is going to have to figure out locomotion. Today, you can strap on a Vive or Oculus headset and more or less be visually transported to a virtual world, but the reality of, well, reality, means you can usually only take a few steps before you bump into your coffee table.
So far, we've seen a few solutions that take aim at VR's "limited space" problem. On the simpler side of the spectrum, one option has you stick a motion tracker in your pants and jog in place. On the more complicated end, there's the "VR treadmill" solution, which has you strap into a big plastic platform that keeps you in place with slippery footwear and a waist harness. Neither option is quite the same as natural walking, but a new patent from Google puts forth an interesting idea: what about motorized VR shoes?
The Virtuix Omni VR treadmill made us all hot and sweatyGoogle's patent describes what are essentially motorized VR roller skates that will let the user walk normally while the motors and wheels work to negate your natural locomotion and keep you inside the VR safe zone. As the patent puts it, Google's new kicks will let you walk "seemingly endlessly in the virtual environment" while keeping you in one spot in real life. Google's shoe solution would track the user's feet, just like how VR controllers are tracked today. The tracking would know when you're too close to the virtual walls of your VR area, and the system would wheel you back into place.
[...] This is just a patent and not a product, but we're still curious if Google can do this without the user falling over. Walking around in VR, where you are blind to the real world, is already a strange sensation that can mess with your balance. All the VR treadmills out there have a rigid waist support, in part to keep users upright if they stumble. Adding a set of wheels to the bottom of your shoes, which could start and stop unpredictably, may make staying upright a challenge. That said, if Google gets everything right, strapping on a pair of compact VR shoes sounds a lot easier than having to store a giant treadmill somewhere.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday November 29 2018, @04:21PM
Motion is irrelevant - only acceleration matters. And on a treadmill the connection between motion and acceleration is different than on land. Figure - you're on an inclined treadmill, so that your body has the same angle with respect to the "path" as it would on a real path. You're using inclination to fake the balancing of torques you'd experience traveling across level ground. But you can't fake the actual acceleration - instead of feet+gravity, you've only got gravity to work with. The orientation of the gravity vector may be perfect, but the magnitude is too low.
And that's while walking in a straight line at perfectly constant speed. As soon as you throw speed variation into the mix, everything goes out the window. Let's assume you have an ideal adaptive treadmill that adjusts instantly to your change in gait. So you're standing still, and then you start walking. Your head *should* accelerate forward - but it doesn't, because the treadmill is keeping you in place. That's a major "kick in the reflexes to avoid falling down" discrepancy. And the disorientation will potentially be even worse if your eyes are seeing the acceleration that your inner ear is not feeling.
Alternately, you could let the user actually move around a bit, so that they can feel the expected acceleration when they start and stop, and then return them to "center" later. In which case the return to center motion will be rightfully perceived as the ground moving underneath them. If you've ever walked across a suspension bridge in a high wind, or in a train or bus that was moving in a straight line, then you've experienced that effect at accelerations well below what a reasonably sized treadmill would have to impose.