CyberWalk: a giant omni-directional walking platform for virtual reality

Erico says: "Put on your VR goggles and walk on this thing without fear of hitting a wall. Built by Italian and German researchers, it's the largest VR platform in the world."

CyberWalker: A Giant Omni-Directional Treadmill for Virtual Reality

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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Anonymous

So, after having finished the VR-Game – how does the guy leave the platform? Walk off? :P
Anonymous

Wow. It’s a conveyor belt made up of smaller conveyor belts. Complicated simplicity.
K. A. Scott

The U.S. Army has had a few of these for quite awhile now (~8 years). I think the initial R&D work was funded by the Army/PEO-STRI, but I have yet to see one in the private sector. I had the opportunity to ride on a similar platform for about 15 minutes and it was absolutely awesome. Stopping, starting, and turning can take a while to become accustomed to as the system takes a few hundred milliseconds to respond (hence the safety harness). I think the system is made of one set of belts that move back and forth in one direction, that are then linked to a set of rollers that move the belts in the perpendicular direction. Kinda like a bunch of rubber bands connected along the edges to form a loop. I believe that the original patent is #6123647 http://bit.ly/caABqw .
robulus

Hey, want to test out state of the art VR tech on the largest omni-directional platform on the planet?

OK! Follow the red disc!

WORST. GAME. EVER.
echolocate chocolate

Man whatever, Jamiroquai had this technology like a decade and a half ago… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REfDCPhPQQ4
- holtt
  
  His VR hat looks a lot cooler
- Anonymous
  
  His music video doesn’t use a moving floor. The whole room moves. It’s an illusion. Google it.
- JasonsRobot
  
  I assume you’re being snarky but in case you weren’t: In the Jamiroquai video, the floor is the only thing that IS stationary. The camera is attached to the ‘room’, the ‘room’ is slightly above the floor and is moved back and forth/side to side over the floor which is much wider and longer than the ‘room’. It’s far lower tech but still quite fancy to watch.
monstrinho_do_biscoito

you could set it up as an ironic punishment cell. No matter how long or fast you run you can’t escape the square, it always returns you to the center.

/evils
eyemyth

How the hell does that floor work mechanically?
- Anonymous
  
  Um, you could RTFA. It even has pictures for the dim.
  - arkizzle / Moderator
    
    Anon10 and Keenan Pepper..
    
    Be nicer.
planettom

Finally, progress made on technology that can trap us on the holodeck…
henderthing

I want to use one of these:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PENSEenxRQo&feature=player_embedded
On that floor. Two omnidirectional toroid belt thingies interacting for double the awesomeness!
{Guerrilla Futures | Jason Tester}

Ever since I read this thought piece in SEED, I now see everything like this as amusing ourselves to extinction. At least he’s getting exercise…

http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/why_we_havent_met_any_aliens/
Anonymous

Holodeck in 3… 2… 1….
Richard Kirk

How does it work?

The dull solution would be a giant sphere on the floor below so big that it appears flat. However, there is a more practical solution using a flattened torus.

Get a sausage balloon – the sort used for making balloon animals. Cut the ends off. Tuck one end inside, and push it through to the other end. Fold the bit peeking out the other end back over the end it is peeking out, and glue it down.

You can roll this one way by pushing the material down the middle and out the other end. You can roll it in the perpendicular direction as your loop of balloon looks like a regular rubber belt.

I am not sure if this is how it works, but I think I can see the seam on the thing. The inside of the torus would have to side over itself, or whatever you put inside it. You could even stick something like a square plate inside it, so the surface feels more solid.

As for the physics – this would not feel quite the same as actually running. The acceleration would have to be different. Think of getting on the treadmill with a performance motorbike. It would make a lot of noise but you wouldn’t actually pull any G’s if the moving floor was up to it. However, unless you are good at sprinting with your head in a VR bucket, the differences in acceleration could be small enough to ignore if the square is big enough. If you had a tiny square, then you would have to stop on the spot, and that would probably thow you.

First one to make one for their hamster wins!
collapsibletank

I think it works by an array of synchronous linear belts…
MarkM

Not sure what the significance of the “leg crossing”
“no leg crossing” is… i guess “leg crossing” is a
harder technical problem to take care of (?)
berpi

It’s brilliant!

Now, if you build the whole rig on pneumatic actuators, you can tilt the floor in any direction, and simulate any shape of terrain.
GammaBlog

Can someone explain how this belt works? It seems physically impossible, magical to me.
KurtMac

Its a real trip to convince yourself that the floor is stationary, and it is actually the room that is moving around on top of it.
- godisafiction
  
  That makes my stomach feel funny! That said, it makes more sense to me to see the room as moving over a stationary floor than trying to figure out how that belt he’s walking on rolls up or folds or whatever.
- jackie31337
  
  Which is exactly how Jamiroquai’s video was done: the floor didn’t move. The set moved around him.
GammaBlog

Ah I missed the helpful link below the video. I wonder how much noise that machine makes, it looks like it could swallow you like a shoelace on an escalator and strangle you with its belts.
Cazmonster

I wanna walk this thing with those weta-legs. Oh, OH, and then wear that “I’m in a MMO rig that guy was wearing in Japan about eighteen months ago”

That would rock in ways I can only imagine now.
Richard Kirk

If you stick to walking or running, you could have a steerable set of motorized roller skates that move you in the opposite direction. This would work on an ordinary floor.

Not so easy for a hamster, though…
jeligula

Soon to be available for $250 from Nintendo. Wait for a while before you make a purchase.
retropc

If it means I need to have those huge needles stuck into my brain, I’m not interested!
Tritty

who saw the haptic floor article too? seems like if you could combine this and that, (assuming the floor tiles can make it around the edges) you would have the best VR setup ever
DogStarMan

I always thought it would be a good idea to create some type of multi-directional elliptical machine that you could strap your legs into. It would be compact, at least. I don’t see this thing being very popular when you need dedicate an entire room to create the simulated feel of walking.
Keenan Pepper

holtt: You fail at understanding physics. You can’t sense absolute motion, only acceleration, so the surface NEEDS to take a moment to slow down in order to feel natural.
Sceadugenga

Horror scenario: the inventor walks onto his improved 2D treadmill to test it, and quickly finds he can’t ever escape from it no matter how fast he runs…the lab is closed for a 3 day weekend, no one comes in to check, and he dies of exhaustion..

Anyway, yes I want one.
DJBudSonic

Love it! And to think I was going to get an Endless Pool.
DJBudSonic

Love it! And to think I was going to get an Endless Pool…

The first thing my son asks is “I wonder how fast it can go?”
Anonymous

ahh, but can an airplane take off on that thing?
Brainspore

My brother is an engineer who designed another version of this device for an American company. He used a picture of me on the patent application diagram to represent the guy standing in the middle- no joke! I hope I can try one out for real someday soon.
Anonymous

I’m with eyemyth. The more fascinating thing is figuring out how the floor, the conveyor belt works mechanically.

I would imagine a ball would provide the ideal easy solution to imagining how this works, so mayne the belt is in the shape of a flattened ball? Held taut over a ring shape of ball bearings Mm how? Since the surface has to be closed what keeps that flattend ball in place?

I can imagine something akin to an escalator belt where the pieces are reassembled into a plane as neededm but as a sphere shape?

It would make more sense perhaps if the floor,(as a belt) was turning, or on a turntable itself, but that doesn’t seem to be happening.
jackie31337

A thought: when we will see a miniaturized version of this as a mousepad? Having to pick the mouse up and move it when it reaches the end of the mousepad gets distracting. Of course, now that optical mice are pretty much the only kind of mice on the market, it’s not as much of an issue, since any flat surface can be your mousepad.
holtt

Interesting.

That continued bit of motion after you stop walking could be a bit disturbing, though I imagine refinement will fix that. I also wonder if one couldn’t negate the perception of that extra motion. I’ve done a VR goggle exercise at GATECH where they have you walk on a warped 2×6 that looks like it’s over a big pit. It’s unbelievably effective, which makes me wonder if you couldn’t do something with the visuals to tweak the users perspective.