Simple and effective movement system in virtuality: controller in pants

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    In connection with the release of several virtual reality helmets at once, users and developers were actively engaged in exploring the possibility of new systems. One of the big problems was the task of moving in virtual space. But programmer Ryan Sullivan [Ryan Sullivan] may have come up with a beautiful, simple - albeit an unusual solution.

    If you directly transfer the position of the player's body to virtuality, then his movements there will be limited to the size of his game room. Early development tried to give devices that allowed to emulate walking and running over long distances - but they were all big, inconvenient and expensive.


    Omnidirectional treadmill for BP

    Therefore, the original game developers for Oculus and HTC chose the methods of least resistance - either moving the game character to the direction they are looking at by pressing a button on the controller (which causes a sharp dissonance of feelings) or “teleportation” to the specified point (which looks unrealistic).

    Sullivan struggled with this problem when he suddenly realized that his hip joint was always directed in the direction he was going — this is required by the structure of the human body. Consequently, it is necessary to track the position of the lower body, not the head. At the same time, the head can be turned freely, as in the real world.

    Ryan developed the RIPmotion test program .for walking and shooting. He used a HTC Vive helmet with controllers. The easiest way was to push the controller-wand into the belt so that its round part jutted out and the system could track it.



    Just start to run lightly in place, pinching the control button on the controller that was in your hands - and Ryan's program interprets your movements as running in virtual reality. Frequency of movement affects the speed of movement of the character. In this case, you can freely turn your head - the character of the game continues to run where the body is pointing. With the help of the second controller, you can "shoot" in different directions.

    The correspondent of Ars, who tried the game demo on himself , noted the realism of the character's behavior and the absence of unpleasant sensations. It is possible that manufacturers will be interested in such mechanics and will release, for example, special running belts - for those who like to play without pants.

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