This is a very interesting video showing off a new omnidirectional treadmill which allows you actually take steps and walk around in virtual reality experiences! Apparently, this treadmill actually appears in the movie Ready Player One. According to the description in the YouTube video from Adam Savage’s Tested channel:
We step onto the Infinadeck, the omnidirectional treadmill seen in the movie Ready Player One. This treadmill lets you walk freely in virtual reality, in any direction. We learn about how it works and give our impressions on the state of the technology today
They actually talk about using this 500-lb. rig for fitness applications and firefighter training. Very cool—and probably also very expensive! (No price for this product has been announced yet.)
It would be so cool to be able to walk around inside Sansar experiences or High Fidelity domains, though!
One of the problems in virtual reality is that the current level of hardware is still somewhat bulky and uncomfortable to wear for long periods of time. I get tangled up in the cable, on warm days sometimes it gets sweaty inside the headset, etc. My personal limit when I wear my Oculus Rift VR headset is about two hours, then I definitely need to take it off and rejoin the real world! Most people probably wouldn’t (or shouldn’t) use a VR headset for more than an hour a day.
So, how would you feel if you spent all day, every day in VR for a whole month? Someone in Italy is doing just that. His name is Enea Le Fons and he is a VR developer.
And he loves VR, he loves experimenting and he also loves opensource and free software. He has this idea of making the world better, of letting people live freely and exchanging their expertise. He has this idea of a VR ecosystem that is completely free of chains. So he proposed to HTC to live 30 days in VR in a way that in these 30 days he could develop very cool things like AI bots and VR locomotion systems while being inside virtual reality with other people helping him remotely… and then share everything developed there to the community as open source software. Isn’t it cool? Yes, it is. That’s why HTC couldn’t do anything but accepting his proposal. This way has born the #30DaysInVR project.
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Of course he won’t stay 24h a day in VR for 30 days, this would be potentially too extreme for his health at this point of the technology (even if he actually told me that he would really love to stay for a month completely in VR). He has started with five hours of immersion each day and has incremented the duration of his immersions until he has arrived to many hours a day. That’s impressive.
It looks like he is going to document his 30-day journey on YouTube. Here is the video from Day 1:
And you can follow him on various social media:
Website (although there don’t seem to be a lot of active links on it)
Sinespace has launched their virtual reality beta. As I wrote about earlier, the last time I tried out their VR client using my Oculus Rift, it was still too buggy for me. But maybe you’ll have better luck. If you do, please let me know.
You can download their OpenVR viewer for Windows here.
David Hall shared the following YouTube video on the official Sansar Discord server. Destin, the creator of this video, was able to try out a new haptic glove in virtual reality. He admits he’s a VR skeptic, but the sensory feedback of this haptic glove was so realistic that he was won over. He could actually feel each of the feet of a virtual spider as it crawled over his palm!
Obviously, it’s a prototype, and not yet available for consumers. (Check out the giant size of the cable connecting the glove to the PC!) But it’s still very, very cool. Something to look forward to in future, perhaps within the next decade!
Here’s the company blurb, taken from the YouTube video description:
HaptX is a multidisciplinary team of engineers based in San Luis Obispo, CA and Seattle, WA that builds advanced haptic technology. Their first product, HaptX Gloves, brings touch feedback to VR with unprecedented realism, enabling a new category of industrial training simulations. Founded by Jake Rubin and Dr. Bob Crockett in 2012, HaptX won’t stop until you can’t tell what’s real from what’s virtual. Learn more at haptx.com.
