Can I make hand walking accessible to more people?

So, as you should know by now, I really like hand walking mechanics for VR. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, read about it here and here.) But some people seem to have a hard time with them. After the last time that I got feedback from a friend who said that they didn't work for him, I started thinking about ways to make them more accessible. Could I alter the visuals to make the experience feel better? Below, I'll describe some options that I've implemented to try to help.

I was going to write all about my thought process that lead up to these experiments, but the post turned out kind of long, so I decided to start with a short(er) post about my results so far. I'll follow up with the background story soon.

Grounding

It's not obvious what problem we are trying to solve or how to approach it, but here's what I've I tried so far. The idea I came upon is to add a visual component that provides a stationary frame of reference even when the VR world is moving relative to your physical room. Let's call this grounding. One caveat: whatever stationary thing that we add needs to be pretty much always visible, but it shouldn't obstruct the view or be too distracting.

So far, I've implemented four alternatives in Biped Blocks. You can switch between them during play by pressing the circle pad, and you can vary the intensity by sliding up and down on it.

My own favorite is option #1 (that's why I put it first). It's not the first one that I tried, but you can read more about that in the follow up post. I think that reflections turned out to be a pretty good way to sneak in a visual component without disturbing the scene too much. These are the options in the order that you cycle through them:

Option #1: Reflection of a plane

Each surface shows the reflection of a plane that is fixed to the room:


Notice how the reflections stay (more or less) still as you move around.

Option #2: Reflection of a room

There is a (bigger) virtual room fixed to the physical room. All surfaces inside it show reflections of it:

Option #3: 2d textures

Each surface has a 2d texture that is fixed to the room:

Option #4: 3d texture

There is a 3d texture fixed to the room that is applied to all surfaces:

Does it help?

Personally, I like option #1 the best, and so did my wife when she tried them. I feel that it helps provide a bit of grounding, but I'm not really the right person to ask if it does its job, since the whole thing works pretty well for me anyway. Do you have a Vive/Rift/similar headset and want to try it out? Then please find Biped Blocks in the downloads section, and try it with the different kinds of grounding, and without. I would be really interested to know
  1. How well does it work for you without grounding?
  2. Which version of the grounding worked best for you?
  3. How did it change your experience?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Climbing outside the box

Image
Now we're finally getting to the thing that made me want to start to blog about all this in the first place. Ever since I made my  Biped Box experiment, I'd fantasized about what it would be like to move around in a similar way through a world that was more than the inside of a box. I did some more experiments inside, but they left me frustrated at how limiting it is to be stuck in a box, so in May I finally decided try to build a bigger world. Building my first VR World I decided to start simple: Everything would be made out of boxes. It's a pretty simple shape to work with, and it's solid. The boxes wouldn't have to be axis aligned though, that felt too limiting. I wrote a small editor to place the boxes, which I will try to write about soon. But first I want to tell you about my experiences with the result. I built a small world to jump around in, with a big box for ground, and some kind of big vine stretching up into the air, to some boxes that w
Read more

Walking (and jumping) on your hands in VR

Image
Last December, I decided to get myself an early Christmas present in the form of an HTC Vive VR headset. After a while, I started getting all kinds of ideas for things that might be fun to try to implement in VR (mostly games), so I thought I'd see if I could actually code something for it. I downloaded OpenVR and got the samples to compile. On New Year's Eve, I did my first hand-walking test (by changing not so many lines in OpenVR's hellovr_opengl sample). The experiment eventually lead to a lot of other exciting things that I also want to write about. But I want to start start from the beginning, so today I'll talk about the original hand-walking test. So, why did I want to experiment with ways to get around in VR? Getting around in VR The Vive is built for room scale VR, which means that it can track the position of your headset as you walk around in your room. Pretty much all Vive applications that I've tried let you walk to cover short distances. When
Read more