[HN Gopher] Disney unveils the HoloTile floor
___________________________________________________________________
Disney unveils the HoloTile floor
Author : wallflower
Score : 453 points
Date : 2024-01-27 15:41 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ign.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ign.com)
| metadat wrote:
| Direct link to the goods: https://youtu.be/68YMEmaF0rs?t=203
| danmaz74 wrote:
| For the lazy, from minute 3:28
| bawolff wrote:
| Everyone in the video looks like they are walking funny, which
| kind of makes me wonder if it works if you walk normally?
| huhtenberg wrote:
| It's a tech demo. It's not quite there yet.
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| It is impressive tech, but you are right, it looks like the
| person has sh*t their pants and are gingerly trying to get to
| the bathroom.
| mastersummoner wrote:
| Burst out laughing so hard I startled my baby, thanks for
| that
| colordrops wrote:
| It looks like it's limited in speed.
| hgs3 wrote:
| It looks like their shuffling not walking.
| smegger001 wrote:
| Quiet possible a balance issue. When walking you are moving
| you mass forward this pushes your feet backwards I would
| imagine that if not carful it could cause you to fall
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| Walking normally would probably result in you falling
| forward.
|
| This is basically like walking on ice, except you slip more
| slowly, and you also un-slip (your feet are actively moved)
| occasionally to recenter.
|
| That limits both the speed you can pretend to walk, and the
| speed at which you can be moved back to center; because both
| relative movements are working against your natural balance.
|
| You will never be able to work with or against the inertia of
| your body weight. That is the core limitation of any
| treadmill.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| If you walked at normal pace and stride I bet you'd just walk
| straight off the mat
| huytersd wrote:
| Oh that's nice. Would love to see someone put it through its
| paces though. Like really try to run. It would be amazing to see
| something like this that you can't physically get off of no
| matter how hard you try. That would be the pinnacle of what this
| thing can be.
| rahkiin wrote:
| I wanted to see the same but I think it might bring havoc to
| your balance control without training.
| judge2020 wrote:
| While the walking demos show slow, methodical movement, the one
| demo with the chair ( https://youtu.be/68YMEmaF0rs?t=269 ) is
| definitely much faster. Maybe it can't handle automatically
| moving the human if they walk too fast and suddenly change
| direction (improvable with better software), maybe they don't
| want to overpromise what it can do.
| gimmeThaBeet wrote:
| Yeah the 'force' movement was really cool. Maybe this is the
| other way you could do the Jamiroquai video for Virtual
| Insanuty?
|
| I've never really used VR stuff but I wonder what does it
| feel like in your head when your legs move and your view
| moves but your body doesn't?
|
| And then the edge case is extreme but topologically, can
| something like this work for running where you can lose
| contact with the ground and your body is sort of compensating
| for momentum?
|
| I guess treadmills work without people flying off them, so is
| it just a matter of getting the impulse right?
| Nevermark wrote:
| > what does it feel like in your head when your legs move
| and your view moves but your body doesn't?
|
| That could be fixed with some active tilting of the whole
| platform to create dynamic lateral forces.
|
| Those little wheels will need to be strongly controlled &
| grippy to avoid real and perceived slippage.
| djhope99 wrote:
| John Carmack pointed out on X that there is a fatal flaw in this
| design:
|
| "I am skeptical of something like this making an impact for
| consumer VR, but it should be possible to integrate the sensor
| input at the OpenXR level, allowing it to work with all apps
| without needing per-app specialization.
|
| However, it probably doesn't "solve" motion sickness, because the
| vestibular system still won't think you are going forward. The
| bouncing around motion of walking does have a masking effect that
| will help some."
|
| I personally could not get over the awful bout of motion sickness
| after I played my first "walking around" game on VR.
| mlyle wrote:
| Calling this a fatal flaw is silly.
|
| It may not fix everything with movement wearing a HMD, but one
| can imagine a whole lot of use cases without HMDs, and it might
| improve a lot of HMD use cases.
| djhope99 wrote:
| Sure but I think that Disney is likely to be presenting this
| as a potential consumer use case and if it can't make
| traction there it seems pretty fatal if they can't find a way
| to make money from it.
|
| We see a lot of POCs like this that never make it anywhere.
| hibikir wrote:
| I think it's far more likely that this will be used in the
| parks division: Selling to consumers involves far more
| variables than creating a VR enhanced ride. Only if it's
| successful as a ride, with time to get the problems figured
| out and the prices low enough, they will consider retail.
| djhope99 wrote:
| As it stands though VR motion sickness is an even bigger
| problem for a park ride, sometimes you can get used to
| the sickness but if you're doing it for a one off ride.
| easton wrote:
| The video mentioned stage shows as an application, which
| makes total sense. It's like the turning platform from
| Hamilton x1000.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Motion sickness in VR is not universal. Many do just fine
| playing unoptimized, stuttering games/apps at 50fps including
| when using smooth locomotion.
| kranke155 wrote:
| It's a problem most people experience, having worked in VR
| for years, I am still very sensitive.
| bilsbie wrote:
| I don't know why he's saying that. Treadmills solve motion, why
| wouldn't this?
| djhope99 wrote:
| Have you tried a treadmill with a VR headset on? It's not the
| movement that's the problem it's combining it with a VR
| headset.
| bilsbie wrote:
| Even if it didn't solve motion sickness, I think it would
| dramatically help with immersion for me.
|
| Artificial movement brings me out of it more than anything.
| xg15 wrote:
| I think it depends how it's supposed to be used. If you try to
| use it like a treadmill in a tiny room then no - and I'm
| sceptical it would work at all, because the motors would
| probably be overpowered by any kind of decent sprint or jump.
|
| However I could imagine this to be able to expand the abilities
| of venues that already have enough space to let you walk
| around: You could have people move on their own as long as
| there is space, but then "stealthily" move them around when
| they think they're standing still, allowing either much larger
| geometries than would even fit in a hall or let you play around
| with non-euclidean geometries, etc.
|
| But yeah, in general I agree, I don't see how this will enable
| some kind of VR breakthrough or even just move us in the
| direction on one: Even with this tech working perfectly, you'd
| be restricted to scenarios where you walk on flat ground and
| never touch anything. Even a basic hike in the woods has more
| complex interactions than that, not even starting with the kind
| of over-the-top acrobatics that we're used to from non-VR
| videogames.
|
| So yeah, you could probably do the Stanley Parable in VR with
| this (without the staircases and the drops), but I don't see
| much else.
| Nevermark wrote:
| > you'd be restricted to scenarios where you walk on flat
| ground
|
| I don't think it's either surprising or discouraging that
| flat walking surfaces get worked out before dynamic surfaces.
|
| It might take a while, but it is inevitable.
|
| A rolling wave, with a grippy active surface, could keep you
| centered while you perceived an upward slope. Seeing and
| feeling a vista of uneven slopes in VR would be fantastic. I
| would love Skyrim as a health app!
|
| Also, simple tilting could provide the force feedback of
| changing speeds.
| thfuran wrote:
| I wonder how quickly you can spin someone while they're
| walking without it being perceptible. If you have a large
| area, you could use sneaky rotation to constrain movement
| while minimizing the amount of sliding people around you have
| to do. Though I'm not actually sure that'd be less noticeable
| at practical sizes.
| hanniabu wrote:
| But how does it work?
| mlyle wrote:
| Little rolling elements that have a wheel in them. It knows
| where you are, and treadmills you back to a starting point as
| you move.
|
| The idea is simple, but the details to make it usable, safe,
| work well, etc, are tricky.
|
| edit: Reading more, it looks like it's mostly tilting, with
| perhaps high frequency vibration being used to modulate the
| amount of friction on each tile.
| willcipriano wrote:
| Wouldn't that feel like you are about to fall on your face
| the entire time?
| airstrike wrote:
| Isn't that the same as walking?
| Nevermark wrote:
| > Wouldn't that feel like you are about to fall on your
| face the entire time?
|
| > Isn't that the same as walking?
|
| You feel like you are falling on your face when you walk?
| I think you are referring to snowboarding!
|
| Can't wait for all of that, but I think really really
| impressive tech demos are going to be all we get for some
| time.
| willcipriano wrote:
| Walking on a sheet of oil perhaps. Walking typically
| moves you forward, not backwards.
| pxmpxm wrote:
| There are no rolling elements / wheels that I can see - it
| looks like low friction pucks that angle and raise/lower to
| push the objects laterally by having them slide to towards
| the lower pucks
| Roritharr wrote:
| So, from looking at the video, it looks like these are wheels
| that can be angled so they make contact with whatever is on top
| of them more than the wheels next to them, applying a tiny bit of
| momentum in the desired direction to then angle out of the way
| while another wheel takes over. This is a really cool solution,
| but I can't imagine it not feeling very weird while walking since
| it's not you being moved with your entire contact surface area
| instead of some parts of your shoe getting dragged somewhere. In
| general the unexpected inertia must also feel really weird.
| bsza wrote:
| The same is true for a treadmill, and that doesn't feel really
| weird to walk on. Though omni-directional treadmills for VR
| have been tested before, and IIRC it's the starting and
| stopping that feels weird.
| rafaelmn wrote:
| > and that doesn't feel really weird.
|
| Seeing people step on a treadmill for the first time I'd say
| it definitely does. You get used to it but the feeling is
| very different from regular walking/running.
| bsza wrote:
| If it's running at a constant speed, it shouldn't be _any_
| different according to Newtonian mechanics. Perhaps seeing
| the environment stand still is weird, but in VR (which I
| understand would be the main application here) that's a
| non-issue.
| tshaddox wrote:
| It also needs to be sufficiently low-latency in its
| reactions to your change in speed. That's not an issue
| when you're walking or running outside. I think the need
| to maintain a very consistent speed is one of the
| difficulties in using a treadmill for the first time.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| My issues with a treadmill is that there's this wall
| right in front of me I run into if I run too fast, so
| it's hard to run fast (even if I don't run into the
| wall); the tread is narrow so I can't move too far to the
| side (which makes it harder to run even if I don't move
| to the side, I also find it a bit harder to run on a
| narrow sidewalk than a wide one); and of course I can't
| run too slow or I'll fall off. Seeing everything around
| me completely still as I run makes me nauseous, but
| that's much less of an issue. The main issue, having to
| consciously constrain how I run (even if I actually run
| at a constant speed in a very straight line outside, so
| in theory it wouldn't be necessary), makes running
| outside significantly easier and faster.
|
| VR should stick to bike trainers. Making an immersive
| bike that can simulate hills and turns and feel natural
| seems achievable today and is relatively a piece of cake.
| malfist wrote:
| It's weird, but it's not "learning a bike" weird
| jayd16 wrote:
| > IIRC it's the starting and stopping that feels weird.
|
| Well sure. You can't feel absolute velocity, you only feel
| acceleration.
| bsza wrote:
| Oh, right. Feeling no force feedback when you stop. Yikes.
| Must feel like trying to walk on ice.
| hgomersall wrote:
| Just reverse the inertial dampers to simulate the
| sensation.
| btbuildem wrote:
| I wonder how that interacts with being visually immersed in a
| VR environment. The walker will have no momentum, but still go
| through the motions of walking -- the visual feedback won't
| align with that of the inner ear.
|
| Maybe the next step is to put the rolly floor on a platform
| that can be dynamically angled away from horizontal,
| effectively creating a pitch that makes the person feel like
| they're leaning (well, they would be leaning) and that might be
| enough to fool the inner ear? Gravity and acceleration are
| pretty interchangeable after all.
| c0pium wrote:
| If you actually read the article you will see it works in an
| entirely different manner.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| oddly it's vibration and tilting rather than wheels, it reduces
| the friction using this method so it might be more like walking
| in place on ice
| mfwit wrote:
| Over my head, but heres the patent (pdf): https://image-
| ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloa...
| sebastianconcpt wrote:
| And how does it perform when rotating, starting or stopping fast?
| bilsbie wrote:
| Does anyone know how it actually works? I can't tell on the
| video.
|
| They don't look like wheels.
| cma wrote:
| Tilted cylinders that rotate around the main cylinder axis to
| push you along the tangent of the outer lip of the raised
| portion, and rotate along global up axis to change where the
| raised portion is, changing direction.
|
| It acts like a roller on its side that can be rotated to change
| direction, but probably has advantages mechanically or with not
| crushing your toes or sucking in your shoelaces or something,
| or just less friction from the direction rotation change.
| jasonjmcghee wrote:
| Top comment lists the patent, you can read it. Many comments
| are making up answers and adding a bunch of technical jargon to
| sound legit
| nytesky wrote:
| Community did it first.
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=z4FGzE4endQ
|
| (Fixed link)
| jasonjmcghee wrote:
| VR treadmills were a thing long before they did it
| bilsbie wrote:
| One idea for VR is to hold these static and let you walk around
| normally but anytime you stop walking they move you back to the
| center.
| huhtenberg wrote:
| You'd feel that.
| dymk wrote:
| Maybe not if you do it slowly. One hack that room-scale VR
| systems do to make you feel like you're in a larger space is
| subtly curve the direction you're walking, so you end up
| walking in a large arc but you "see" you're walking in a
| straight line. It's subtle enough for most people to not
| notice.
| pi-e-sigma wrote:
| Can you link to a pic of such a room? The idea seems
| interesting
| mistersquid wrote:
| This is totally a bit of speculation, but given Disney is one of
| the majors (only major?) with an app for the launch of Apple
| Vision Pro, [0] I can't help but wonder what is coming from the
| NDA discussions between the teams working on HMD technology.
|
| If the dais/stage/platform of the HoloTile product Lanny Smoot
| demos is a true prototype, it's likely miniaturizable (as well as
| scaled up) for implementation in both court-sized and
| entertainment room-sized versions.
|
| The future gets closer and closer.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jy94Ezsj9NE
| tommoor wrote:
| It's the human-scale version of these parcel sorting devices
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRS0Uj2WdpA
| xg15 wrote:
| That was the first thing that came to my mind as well.
|
| Given that those things already exist for some time, I wonder
| if Disney actually used them as a base and then made their own
| version of them or something.
| mtillman wrote:
| Used to be a ride at Coney Island:
| https://youtu.be/9Wz5vZmU8Dc?t=221
| ethbr1 wrote:
| See some comments up top -- the patent is for a fundamentally
| different source of friction control. Ultrasonic, not
| mechanical/directional.
|
| Which should make it more amenable to higher-frequency control
| than mechanical systems would be able to shift at (given
| they're limited by mass).
|
| That said, having seen high-throughput parcel sorting, the
| modern tech is amazing and the reason we have flow-through
| logistics and 1-2 day delivery.
|
| They've got it slowed _way_ down in that video.
|
| Here's a system at closer to full-speed:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nPWTfT9sO2Y&t=26s
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JzURbt0qlqk&t=1m52s
| thfuran wrote:
| It may also make pets hate it.
| dylan604 wrote:
| purrfect. they won't be trying to get under foot while you
| can't see them in your VR set up.
| mickdarling wrote:
| The patent folks are pointing to is not what this Holotile is
| made of. The Holotiles are slanted disks that can both rotate
| around the vertical axis and the slanted axis, with control
| motors for each tile. The Ultrasonic stuff is for a different
| use case, though could be integrated into this, it is not the
| primary motive mechanism.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| I usually shit on VR but this looks kind of cool. I can't help
| but notice the people are basically shuffling around on it so I
| doubt it will scale effectively, but it's cool.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| It's very cool, but the guy answer sounds so corporaty that the
| only thing I hear is: patent, proprietary platforms, restricted
| use cases, we'll make lots of money and sue anybody even drawing
| it. Have fun! We mandate it!
| steve1977 wrote:
| So, a typical Disney product then?
| Towaway69 wrote:
| Typical capitalistic product?
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| Better then the alternative (no product, starvation)
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Typical capitalistic product?
|
| Quite the opposite: patents are artificial monopolies
| issued by the country - thus the actual opposite of free
| markets.
| rpmisms wrote:
| They are nice for a reason, though. They're a temporary
| monopoly in exchange for open access to the patented
| mechanism. They're far better than copyright, basically.
| felipeko wrote:
| Yet most patented inventions are pretty obvious on how to
| copy without the need to look at the patent, same with
| this case.
|
| So we have no benefit of "open access to the mechanism"
| but with the deleterious effect of the "temporary (1/5 of
| a long human life) monopoly".
| Towaway69 wrote:
| Are we speaking of patents or the product made from those
| patents? Are we speaking of how capitalism enforces
| permanent growth and profit requirements upon us so that
| most anything that can be monetised will be monetised.
|
| Even feeding the homeless is monetised by the state[1] -
| in the form of fines.
|
| I for one can no longer distinguish between capitalistic
| greed and profiteering via patents, food, housing,
| warmth, freedoms, user data, ....
|
| [1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-
| news/2023/aug/04/texas-volunt...
| orwin wrote:
| Free market = liberalism.
|
| Capitalism is about owning the means of exchange and
| production, and how to distribute the generated capital.
|
| [edit] which is fine, but rely a bit much on the
| 'benevolent dictator' trope recently.
| theK wrote:
| I think the problems with IP rights startend when the law
| allowed companies to be treated as persons, from there on
| it was just downhill. Instead of protecting the inventor
| we started weaponising IP rights.
| throwaway-blaze wrote:
| You know the latin root for the word 'corporation' is
| 'corpus' meaning 'body'. A corporation in English common
| law is literally a fictitious person created for the
| purpose of performing business activities independent of
| its shareholders.
|
| The fact that corporations inherit many of the legal
| abilities of people in our system (including property
| rights like intellectual property) is a good thing.
| theK wrote:
| > The fact that corporations inherit many of the legal
| abilities of people in our system is a good thing
|
| In general I agree with this. But on the specific case of
| intellectual property I do not.
| elmomle wrote:
| It is worthwhile to distinguish between capitalism and a
| free market. A free market engenders capitalism, which
| (with sufficient accumulation of wealth and creeping
| market and regulatory capture) creates forces that oppose
| the free market.
| jdksmdbtbdnmsm wrote:
| Capitalism is literally defined by the ability to
| exercise capital to accumulate more of it, which is
| literally the only way for a monopoly to exist. By
| definition, capitalism has nothing to do with so-called
| "free markets".
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| And "free markets" are the results of showing up with a
| Navy to help negotiate a trade deal.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Patents solve the first mover disadvantage in game
| theory. If you come up with a better solution, please
| share.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| I don't claim that I have an easy solution for this
| problem (at best, I have some fragmentary ideas). I just
| claim that patents (and copyright) are actually quite the
| opposite of free markets.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| They are like stop signs and stop lights. It prevents you
| from driving like you want, but makes everyone more free
| to get to where they want to go.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Today's Disney.
|
| If you looked at the video from the studio showing off tech
| decades ago, you could hear, see and feel the passion.
| CharlesW wrote:
| You can definitely hear, see, and feel the passion of Larry
| Smoot in the video on that page.
|
| Also, Disney has patented their inventions since the
| beginning: https://patentyogi.com/technology/celebrity-
| patent-walt-disn...
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| That's a good example.
|
| Look at the video showing off this exact tech:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdHTlUGN1zw
|
| You feel like you are part of the family while watching
| this.
|
| It's a completely different vibe.
|
| Honestly, I feel vaguely threatened by the HoloTile Floor
| demo tone. The way he answers the question about what's
| it's going to be used for feels like a parent that
| doesn't want to reveal something to a child.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _You feel like you are part of the family while
| watching this._
|
| Fair enough! I'd just note that Walt was pioneer of
| content marketing, and I'm sure that was the goal. (This
| segment was broadcast in the television series
| _Disneyland_ (1954-1959) in the episode, "Tricks of Our
| Trade".)
|
| > _Honestly, I feel vaguely threatened by the HoloTile
| Floor demo tone. The way he answers the question about
| what 's it's going to be used for feels like a parent
| that doesn't want to reveal something to a child._
|
| This one? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68YMEmaF0rs
| Agreed, it's terrible -- overscripted, artificial,
| inauthentic -- and a failed simulacrum of what Walt's
| Disney did above. The only honest part is 2:15-3:00,
| marred only by the terrible reading of the pretend guest.
| daniel_reetz wrote:
| I worked in that very lab, side by side with Lanny Smoot
| for four years straight.
|
| The man is 100% passion and 110% invention.
| nytesky wrote:
| Read his Wikipedia, wow he is amazing. Can you post a
| thread about his inventions and what it was like working
| with him?
| daniel_reetz wrote:
| I'm not in a position to discuss, unfortunately. For now,
| I'll just say he's the real deal, and I'm proud of him
| and Disney Research.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Oh I don't doubt the man, the invention itself is so
| amazing anybody working on it must be incredible.
|
| I'm saying the message format sucks, which for a company
| specialized in medias, is ironic.
|
| When I watch the video, I don't see the Disney family
| friendly that I used to love.
|
| I see the corporation that seems to be uncomfortable to
| invite me to the party they are trying to sell me entries
| to.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Yeah what a piece of shit for inventing something completely
| new and novel and wanting to make money off of it. He should
| create a bullshit AI startup instead.
| jimmydddd wrote:
| Best comment! He's almost as bad as that jerk who was paying
| for surgeries to cure people's blindness. :-)
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Valve makes plenty of money out of a proprietary platform,
| and still manages to be the good guys.
|
| It's possible.
|
| But disney has lost the friendly vibes for a long time.
|
| They still got talent, and that's not nothing.
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| fish stinks from the top, doesn't it?
| endisneigh wrote:
| Would you prefer if this didn't exist at all, like before this
| things creation?
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| No, hence the "this is cool".
|
| I just have the reflex of clinching my butthole now every
| time I hear that kind of speech.
|
| It's not the speech of the people that invented the machines,
| it's a speech written by the lawyers, sellers and executives.
|
| Even Nintendo, which is one of the worst offender in
| obsessive legal actions manage to actually have creators
| sharing their vision in their voices about their games.
|
| This video is the opposite of that.
| makk wrote:
| This feels shortsighted. The patent holder gets exclusive
| rights for a limited amount of time in exchange for publishing
| how the thing works. Eventually, and not long from now,
| everyone can make use of it without restriction. And maybe
| after reading how they do it someone has a better idea.
| thfuran wrote:
| >and not long from now
|
| That's not quite how I'd describe the terms of patents
| dylan604 wrote:
| Especially with Disney. They'll figure out how to redraw it
| and extend the patents for another 75 years. (of course I
| understand the diff between copyright & patent)
| luke-stanley wrote:
| Considering how Disney extended copyright law for so long, I
| can't blame the person you're replying to for suggesting it.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| While I'm not a fan of patents in general, it's more about
| how you manage your IP that matters.
|
| And honestly, this videos feels like they show it off because
| they have to, but have so many restrictions to do so that
| they must weight every single word.
|
| It doesn't look like they want us to have fun with it.
|
| It looks like it's something they hope to sell us.
|
| If I enter a restaurant, I know they want to sell me food,
| but I want to think about the food, not the bill. And I
| appreciate a passionate chef.
| dylan604 wrote:
| They won't sell very many of them if people are not having
| fun with it. That's such a twisted bit of logic on your
| part. They don't have an actual retail type product, so
| it's just a tech demo for now. But it's Disney, so once
| there is a reatail product, you think their PR department
| will be showing people _not_ having fun with it?
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| See the other comment about older tech videos by Disney.
|
| You'll see they used to know how to make you feel excited
| and happy about it.
| derefr wrote:
| > It doesn't look like they want us to have fun with it. It
| looks like it's something they hope to sell us.
|
| Well, yeah; they (Disney Research) are a tech company, not
| a product company, and this is -- essentially -- a B2B
| presentation for those big partner companies of theirs who
| might want to license this technology. They're not talking
| to consumers; they're talking to businesses who could build
| this thing _into_ a product of theirs that is then sold to
| consumers.
|
| When this is in an actual _product_ , they won't be talking
| about the _tech_ of it at all. Disney Imagineering (the
| department that builds Disney 's theme park rides) tries to
| make the tech as invisible to the experience as possible. A
| PR piece about a new Disney ride that used this system,
| likely wouldn't even mention the floor. It'd just mention
| that they have "high-fidelity VR immersion" or something
| like that -- and would let guests explain what that
| _entails_ in their reviews of it.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| See the other comment on old tech videos by disney.
| eggdaft wrote:
| For a long time I thought we were on a solid track to full VR,
| which would be indiscernible from reality. Recently I've realised
| that I was very wrong, and this is why. The visual element of VR
| is pretty much solved. Audio no problem. But the movement in
| space is intractable I now believe, and it is an absolutely
| critical issue that scuppers the whole idea.
|
| Tricks like this can give you a better approximation but I don't
| think it'll ever be good enough. You want to jump, spin, crouch,
| crawl, lie down. And interact with others.
|
| I think AR is going to be massive and Apple Vision Pro will be a
| big hit by gen 3 or 4, but VR is something likely to be "Human-
| Brain-Interface complete".
|
| Given HBI success will likely arrive on or after the time we
| reach AGI, I don't really know how that's going to work out. I
| think headsets will be really fun for a while, but we're not
| going to get the full experience.
|
| Unless we can suspend people in some kind of viscous fluid with
| respirators, and ummm people think that's acceptable... suspend
| them on cables and blow compressed air at them? Google glass no
| longer looks so embarrassing...
| holmesworcester wrote:
| One thing I was thinking recently is that if we get
| sufficiently good at humanoid robots, perhaps it will be within
| reach to build a robot around a human that can put arbitrary
| pressure on different parts of the body sufficient to create
| the feeling of soccer, jujitsu, or even sex. This is probably a
| 10-100x harder robot to make than a humanoid robot. But it
| seems more straightforward than a HBI capable of full VR.
| lanewinfield wrote:
| Feels like it might be easier to get direct access to the
| brain and simulate those feelings at the source
| imiric wrote:
| You mean like a suit?
|
| I find current HMDs strapped to my head very uncomfortable,
| and that they're a major hurdle for mass VR adoption. In
| general, people want to be _less_ physically absorbed by
| technology, not more. I can't imagine anyone would want to
| use an exoskeleton robot suit for increased VR immersion. If
| anything, you would be less immersed because of the suit
| itself.
|
| I think this level of physical immersion is not feasible.
| It's likely that we'll prefer brain-computer interfaces
| instead, and the stimulation would be done directly on our
| nervous system.
| Jcowell wrote:
| > In general, people want to be _less_ physically absorbed
| by technology, not more.
|
| I've found this to not be true. If you were to give people
| the ability to get mantis blades, they would probably get
| mantis blades
| coryrc wrote:
| You can't physically stimulate inner-ear response without
| actually accelerating and moving. You'd need to find some way
| to mask those signals so you actually feel like you're
| moving. Would also be the only way I could use VR due to
| awful motion sickness.
| xgkickt wrote:
| So back to Aerotrims?
| Swizec wrote:
| > You want to jump, spin, crouch, crawl, lie down
|
| I played Squid Game VR at one of those whole room VR places
| recently. It was great! We could run, crouch, jump, spin, and
| interact with others. It all worked. It was even part of the
| games to do these things.
|
| Felt surprisingly immersive. You forgot you were in some dark
| room in the basement.
| armada651 wrote:
| I'm surprised something like The Void never caught on. We've
| had laser tag arenas for decades, just rent a warehouse and
| construct an arena where any wall in VR is represented in
| real life. For hygiene you mandate people buy a face gasket
| from you or bring the one they've used previously.
|
| No treadmills needed and you can actually touch and lean on
| surfaces in VR.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| it's not a great business model because it's a big space
| with a small number of people at a time... and the games
| are fun but more arcade like due to needing to get people
| in and out of there
|
| with laser tag (also not a huge money maker) you can have
| many more people in the space, like 5x easily
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| With a sufficiently large version of this, why couldn't you
| jump, crouch, crawl, and lie down? The system would move you
| back towards the center between jumps.
|
| A remaining missing piece is possibly some type of Galvanic
| Vestibular Stimulation system. Tell me if I'm totally off-base
| on this, but this seems like a technological achievable
| problem.
|
| I'm not saying it's perfect (you can't simulate scrambling over
| a rock, for example), but it would enable a pretty wide range
| of movements.
| bear141 wrote:
| Yeah it seems like people are assuming the person engaging
| with the floor would be kept completely stationary. It seems
| to me if the floor were covering a larger area and therefore
| required less manipulation to keep you stationary then it
| could use minimal inputs to keep you within the borders and
| still allow your inner ear to receive most of the inertial
| inputs required to feel realistic.
| kthejoker2 wrote:
| Yeah it seems like it will be much easier to create an AR
| environment that uses pneumatics, robotics, lighting, AI, maybe
| technology like this to manipulate the environment around you
| into an actual physical "playscape" (e.g. creating virtual
| landscapes with real physical obstacles, hiding spots, ladders,
| sportsball, etc) while you still retain your sense of balance,
| motion.
|
| Maybe you'll even get an exoskeleton so you can Hulk out :)
|
| But yeah AR has a much brighter "active" feature, and VR will
| be relegated to "passive" reality.
| smusamashah wrote:
| A tile with ultrasonic array of transducers are provided as in
| the assembly to provide instantaneous friction control for any
| objects contacting or supported on the contact/upper surface. [1]
|
| So that's what these tiny tiles are, something ultrasonic, not
| tiny wheels.
|
| EDIT: Found some more explanation in a reddit comment. [2]
| Ultrasound vibration makes it slippery, then it has an X-Y
| pistons underneath. So it makes itself slippery when it wants to
| reset position, then makes itself sticky again when it wants to
| move you back into position. Now repeat this process to fast for
| you to tell anything is happening.
|
| [1]: https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-
| public/print/downloa...
|
| [2]:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/BeAmazed/comments/19eef29/comment/k...
| pxmpxm wrote:
| They must be vibrating the surface of those picks with
| ultrasound to modulate the friction. Pretty clever.
| eastbound wrote:
| Sorry but if I input energy into the system by walking, and the
| holotiles input energy by producing ultrasound... how is this
| energy dissipated?
| fizx wrote:
| heat
| dymk wrote:
| Heat, and not very much
| mrtksn wrote:
| Interestingly, on the video it appears as rotating wheels that
| change inclination:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68YMEmaF0rs&t=203s
|
| From the close-up shots, you can clearly see them rotating and
| changing inclination.
|
| By changing inclination they can control the contact surface of
| the rotating wheels and as a result control the direction of
| your movement. Very clever and simple but might be
| dangerous(you wouldn't want to have your pinky stuck between
| load bearing rotating wheels) and prone to tear and wear due to
| the high dynamic friction.
|
| However, if there's actually a way to make it sticky or
| slippery with ultrasound then you can get away with a partial
| rotation back and forth while turning it sticky in one
| direction to push the objects in that direction and turn it
| slippery to reset its own position and get ready for another
| push. This probably will make it quite safe.
| smusamashah wrote:
| That's what I am still confused on how these discs look like
| wheels to people because lots of comments are saying that.
| All I see is discs changing angles and can't see them
| rotating like rotating wheels.
| mrtksn wrote:
| At 3:33 there's a close up and you can see dirt stuck on
| the edge of some wheels and it clearly goes around.
|
| Maybe, the part that goes from slippery to sticky with
| ultrasound is beneath the rubber disks and when there's no
| load they just rotate freely?
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| It looks to me that they're spinning than rotating; in
| other words, rotate around an axis that is perpendicular
| to the ground, instead of parallel to the ground.
|
| And because of this, the person above is stepping on the
| "spinning surface" (the "base" surface of a cylinder) of
| these tiny disks, instead of the curved surface like a
| normal wheel or some industrial conveyor wheels (as
| someone linked below,
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRS0Uj2WdpA ).
|
| So in a sense, they're not "rotating like rotating
| wheels" despite being wheels/disks.
|
| BTW, it looks like they also can adjust its axis angle
| slightly (less than 30 degree), which I imagine is also
| crucial to how it works.
| mrtksn wrote:
| That's what I mean. Rotating around their axis, which is
| spinning. Like the world rotates or spins. And by wheels
| I also mean disk, probably disks is more precise just as
| the spinning but really don't see why anyone would be
| confused when there's a video.
|
| But anyway, thanks for improving my English.
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| (Text here is removed due to bad wording.)
|
| To mrtksn: yeah I think your original post is pretty
| clear. But there are indeed other comments in this thread
| that are confusing the two.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Yeah probably but there's a minutes long video with close
| ups.
|
| In my mental model its wheels attached in different way
| that rotate around an axis perpendicular to the ground. I
| call in wheels because moves the things around.
|
| I'm really confused by the confusion. Isn't it obvious on
| the video that its cylindrical objects that can be
| considered thick disks and wouldn't all disks rotate on
| the round surface around the axis?
| bear141 wrote:
| I also found the close up video to be self explanatory
| but I understand the confusion. People are thinking of it
| as multiple tiny treadmills that change direction rather
| than the spinning disc it actually is.
| smusamashah wrote:
| English isn't my first language but if it people were
| referring the motion as spinning instead of rotating and
| discs instead of wheels it wouldn't be confusing.
| spyder wrote:
| Yep, and by tilting the spinning discs/cylinders you can
| have omnidirectional control by changing which part of
| the edge of the rotating cylinder is in contact with the
| surface above it. You don't need the ultrasound thing
| posted in the other comment, that patent may be a
| different path they've also tried.
| gimmeThaBeet wrote:
| That's pretty gnarly. So the discs are basically doing little
| inchworming steps back and forth but never has to break contact
| by modulating the friction? Very much a bit of cleverness
| turned magic.
|
| The one thing that I notice is item 726/Fig 7./PDF pg 10, it
| has "with the soles and attached/embedded ultrasonic
| transducers". Is that maybe a different or older envisioning of
| this system? His shoes seemed totally normal.
|
| Just trying to wrap my head around how much the friction can be
| changed by vibration, like a solid-ish state fluidized bed.
| Don't know it both contact surfaces need to be vibrating.
| Animats wrote:
| That's a cute system.
|
| Moving stuff around with controlled vibration is known.
| There's a cute trick where you drive a flat horizontal plate
| in three axes (X, Y, and rotate about Z). Sawtooth waveforms
| will move things around; the slow part of the sawtooth
| produces motion, and the fast part yanks the plate back to
| the starting point, breaking from static friction to weaker
| sliding friction. It's even possible, by using combinations
| of translation and rotation, to move multiple objects in
| different directions. The original research was funded by
| United Parcel Service. They wanted to take a table full of
| boxes, separate them, align them, and send them to a
| conveyor. Didn't work well enough, although someone did a
| chessboard demo where multiple pieces were moved around
| separately.
|
| This is a similar idea, but at a finer scale.
|
| > "with the soles and attached/embedded ultrasonic
| transducers"
|
| That suggests doing this in the shoe, instead of in the
| floor. Different system. Disney might license that to Nike.
|
| I can't see it for theme park customers. This system can make
| people fall down.
|
| Performers, though...
| gimmeThaBeet wrote:
| Oh, okay, I see, in that alternative system, the tiles
| still move, but your shoe with transducers is used to
| adjust the friction.
| baerrie wrote:
| Until there is tech that makes a 3D feeling surface that can
| create corners, people, anything, vr will feel hollow. At this
| point, a full body suit that creates haptic responses to simulate
| feeling an object seems more feasible than a static exterior
| surface like this that fulfills the other half of the vr
| illusion.
| thfuran wrote:
| This is basically the opposite of haptics. It's trying not to
| be noticeable while solving a problem essentially unrelated to
| perception.
| ARandomerDude wrote:
| It's a treadmill that attaches to a phone you can strap to your
| face. Neat, I guess.
| graiz wrote:
| You can read the patent here:
| https://patents.google.com/patent/US20180217662A1/en
| akamoonknight wrote:
| One thing my mom (an occupational therapist) brought up when
| seeing this was the potential applications for therapy. I'm not
| sure of the nuances, but one concept that comes to mind is that
| you could increase force on a user such that you can get a
| persons strength increasing without them even noticing it.
|
| I'm not really sure what types of solutions currently exist in
| these spaces, and I'm sure that this would be a very expensive
| solution for this topic, but future thinking possibilities of
| this type of thing seem like they could have applications outside
| of just VR.
| kevindamm wrote:
| "inching" being the key term here
| dymk wrote:
| The demo of him sitting on a chair and being moved around shows
| IMO impressive acceleration. It's probably dependent on how
| much surface area is contacting the floor, but it certainly
| looks responsive enough for real usecases.
| jdksmdbtbdnmsm wrote:
| Is there a contest for the most stuffy and uncomfortable product
| reveal?
| BryanLegend wrote:
| John Carmacks take:
|
| I am skeptical of something like this making an impact for
| consumer VR, but it should be possible to integrate the sensor
| input at the OpenXR level, allowing it to work with all apps
| without needing per-app specialization.
|
| However, it probably doesn't "solve" motion sickness, because the
| vestibular system still won't think you are going forward. The
| bouncing around motion of walking does have a masking effect that
| will help some.
|
| Source:
| https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1750557236798148613
| lttlrck wrote:
| Perhaps headsets that manipulate the vestibular system via
| ultrasonic are in our future.
|
| (a entirely uneducated conjecture)
| modeless wrote:
| Unfortunately physics can't be fooled. Your limbs will still
| move according to the laws of inertia, and when that motion
| doesn't match your sense of balance your brain will likely be
| just as confused. But more importantly, you will
| _immediately_ fall over if your sense of balance doesn 't
| match reality exactly. Then you'd have to be supported by a
| harness. Obviously constantly being prevented from falling
| over by leaning on a harness is not going to feel like the
| natural movement that people want these systems to achieve.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I don't know, humans are pretty adaptable. I'm imagining
| spending a day "running" around in VR and then running in
| IRL and having all of this unexpected momentum causing me
| to fall over whenever I want to stop.
| Izkata wrote:
| > Then you'd have to be supported by a harness.
|
| Single-person omnidirectional treadmills for VR already
| exist, and as far as I know all of them use just such a
| harness: https://www.virtuix.com/
| modeless wrote:
| Yes, I know and I've used several types. They remain
| extremely niche exactly because they _don 't_ achieve
| anything like the natural walking feel people imagine
| these systems would provide.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Or perhaps it can be solved the same way as going from
| teleporting-only nonsense to normal joystick movement was -
| people just got used to it. We can adapt to just about
| anything if we do it for long enough.
| derefr wrote:
| The majority of people did _not_ adapt; and instead are
| currently assiduously avoiding VR for simulation-sickness
| reasons until it solves these problems.
|
| (My hypothesis is that the minority of people who _did_
| manage to "adapt" to movement in VR, are people who have
| lived for years with inner-ear problems that have
| essentially made their vestibular sense deaf.)
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > the vestibular system still won't think you are going forward
|
| Why not? Movement is relative, of course, and I'm moving
| relative to the floor and relative to what I see. What does the
| vestibular system detect that isn't happening?
| jschlesser wrote:
| Your legs are moving but your head / vestibular system isn't
| experiencing acceleration that it expects with those leg
| movements. Think of it this way, if you are holding a
| pendulum and take a normal step forward, the pendulum will
| start to swing. If you take a step forward on the magic floor
| tiles, your legs move normally but since your body stays in
| the same place, the pendulum is motionless.
| leereeves wrote:
| > Your legs are moving but your head / vestibular system
| isn't experiencing acceleration that it expects with those
| leg movements
|
| That's also true on a treadmill. I think the bigger problem
| would be that the world appears to be moving (unlike a
| treadmill) and you don't feel any acceleration.
| Ringz wrote:
| So can I use the Disney system to simulate running on a
| treadmill?
| maximus-decimus wrote:
| But on a threadmill you're going in a straight line and
| usually at constant speed. A constant speed, you don't
| have acceleration.
| leereeves wrote:
| Exactly, you don't have acceleration, and the world
| around you isn't moving relative to you, so there's no
| mismatch.
|
| The treadmill shows that performing the walking movements
| without acceleration doesn't generally cause motion
| sickness.
| c0pium wrote:
| > you don't have acceleration
|
| If you actually use a treadmill, or watch motion capture,
| you'll see that this isn't the case. It's a lot of slight
| accelerations and decelerations. The variation change
| from person to person, and more experienced runners are
| able to minimize them, but they're still present.
|
| Edit: this study is peripherally related
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8160945/
| leereeves wrote:
| > It's a lot of slight accelerations and decelerations
|
| Isn't that always true? If I pay attention to it, I
| notice a lot of tiny movements of my head, as I just sit
| here typing.
|
| "You don't have acceleration" is just talking about the
| big accelerations from 0 mph to roughly 3 mph to 0 mph,
| not implying that you're completely motionless as if
| frozen in ice.
| 93po wrote:
| You don't get motion sick on a treadmill because you're
| not wearing a VR headset. There's no forward motion of
| your head captured with your eyes to mismatch what your
| vestibular system is feeling.
| dr_kiszonka wrote:
| To add to your point, there is a somewhat unpleasant
| sensation once you get off the treadmill, i.e., even if
| you are standing in place, it feels like you are moving
| forward.
| c0pium wrote:
| This is incorrect. You don't get motion sick on a
| treadmill because the small accelerations and
| decelerations match what your eyes are seeing. There is
| motion.
| derefr wrote:
| The simplest thing is air resistance / drag -- you can feel
| yourself moving _through_ air (or any other fluid.)
|
| But a sufficiently-clever mechanical VR system could blow air
| at you as you move, so let's ignore that one.
|
| Your inner ear is literally an accelerometer. When you
| accelerate (or rotate your body around relative to a
| gravitational pull), the liquid in your cochlea sloshes
| around, and the hairs in it (which aren't just on the bottom
| surface, but all around the sides and top as well) feel the
| liquid as it passes by them and build an image of your
| position and acceleration in space. (It's oddly similar to
| how the wires in an old-school mercury tilt-switch
| accelerometer interpret the mercury sloshing around. Just
| with a lot more pairs of wires!)
|
| Also, you've got an _interoceptive_ sense: your organs are
| somewhat free to move inside your body; and so, as you
| experience g-forces, your internal organs continue to move a
| bit after your body is stopped -- and you experience this
| relative displacement of your organs as a _familiar and
| intuitive_ "lurching" sensation.
|
| When your inner-ear accelerometer signal fails to cohere with
| your overall computed sense of motion, you get the feverish-
| dizzy, lacking-air, mentally-induced-nausea feeling of
| carsickness.
|
| When your interoceptive signal fails to cohere with your
| overall computed sense of motion, you get the _bad_ kind of
| "lurching sensation" -- which, if it happens enough times,
| causes a unique kind of acute "body load" nausea purely
| localized within the gut (something common among riders of
| rollercoasters with negative-g-force moments.)
| nickthegreek wrote:
| I almost always put a fan on me in in VR. It helps keep me
| cool and I use it to know which direction I'm facing.
| chungus wrote:
| +1, honestly essential. Allows me to go for hours playing
| Jet Island
| crazygringo wrote:
| So here's the first thing I thought of: remember those
| "spaceship" amusement park rides that sat about a dozen
| people, with the space adventure playing on the front
| "window", and it tilted front/back and side/side to
| simulate the effects of acceleration and deceleration.
|
| And I don't think there's any way of actually telling
| whether you're accelerating or tilting, as long as you keep
| the forces within a certain limited range?
|
| Which immediately makes me wonder -- what if you put this
| HoloTile floor on top of a platform that can tilt on both
| axes? What if the moment it starts to detect you walking
| forwards, it tilts "uphill" in the direction you're
| walking? When you suddenly stop walking, it tilts backwards
| slightly for a split second, then resets to level.
|
| Because this actually matches what our body experiences on
| a sidewalk -- when we walk forwards we actually tilt our
| body slightly forwards as we accelerate, and tilt it
| backwards briefly to stop. (Same as a Segway does, if
| that's easier to picture.)
|
| So if the floor tilts... would that be good enough to
| complete the illusion, and send the right signals to the
| inner ear? Because the liquid in your cochlea is now
| sloshing around in the right way? The interoception is
| matching as well?
| codexb wrote:
| Movement is relative, momentum is not. Run as fast as you can
| and then come to a screeching halt where you lean backwards.
| You can't do that on treadmill. You might be able to simulate
| the screech and the lean by moving you on the treadmill, but
| the rest of your body can feel that relative motion.
| namuol wrote:
| When it comes to VR, for theme park use it's hard to see how this
| would be more cost effective than a large open space, maybe with
| many floors stacked to maximize throughput. For home use this
| seems like it will never be cheap enough to be worth it. It's
| very cool tech, though.
| alex_young wrote:
| The videos make this floor look slick as ice. I wouldn't want to
| walk around on something like that with a vr headset on. Sounds
| like a recipe for a broken arm.
| mellosouls wrote:
| This really doesn't seem that new, just a neater implementation
| of prior competitor products like KatWalk and Virtuix Omni
| samstave wrote:
| What would happen if the interior of a tube was lined with these,
| could they move an object cylinder through the tube?
|
| What if you have the exterior covered in these, could they move
| (easily) a donut surrounding it?
|
| What happens if you have these face each other?
|
| can these be use for super slippery loading sled-tracks in ships,
| planes, trains? Whats the weight limits?
|
| Can they be scaled down really small and basically put around a
| cable-line to slide things along like a zipline?
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| Its nice to see Disney doing something other than destroying the
| movies, cartoons, and comics I loved as a kid.
| derefr wrote:
| This is neat and all, but it seems to be yet another attempt to
| solve the (to me less-interesting) problem of how to have people
| use their feet as _input_ for navigation in VR, while keeping
| them stationary; rather than an attempt at actually creating any
| high-fidelity sensation of _moving through space_ in VR,
| according to your own human "internal accelerometer". (I.e. the
| sense you have that combines inputs from your inner ear, wind
| against your skin, interoception as g-forces smush your organs
| around, etc.)
|
| I presume that doing the latter would necessarily involve
| allowing you to _actually move away from center_ within a bounded
| space -- and then subtly re-centering you whenever you 're _not_
| moving.
|
| Has any company ever put effort into developing a VR floor
| technology that works more like that? One that allows you to
| actually feel like you're moving?
|
| I bring this up, because it seems like the technology on display
| here _could_ actually be made to do something akin to this, with
| a few more tweaks:
|
| 1. build a large room covered in this surface;
|
| 2. configure the surface to _not_ actively slide you around while
| you 're moving, but instead, to only begin "re-centering" you
| when you stay still (or when you are walking slowly enough that
| your "internal accelerometer" isn't receiving much input anyway);
|
| 3a. design the VR experiences consumed through such a platform,
| so that you'd _mostly_ only have reason to walk, with "free-
| roam" areas where running would _make sense_ only lasting a few
| seconds at a time, broken up with dialogue / interactions / etc.
| to give the floor time to re-center you.
|
| 3b. Or, if these are VR _games_ , then as another option, use a
| stamina system in the game that depletes as you run in real life
| (bonus if your character's stamina drains exponentially the
| further you get from the center of the floor); and have the
| player wear a force-feedback resistance system (i.e. a TENS unit
| on their legs) that effectively cripples you physically from
| doing any more running, for as long as your character is out of
| stamina. (Verisimilitude!)
|
| 4. Either way, you probably still need a fallback if you manage
| to get near the edge of the room somehow. Like if you're
| completely ignoring what's happening on-screen and just running
| in a scene where your character is supposed to be stationary +
| talking to someone. So have the floor _actively_ re-center you,
| like is shown here, only when you get near the edge -- and
| hyperbolically, with more force as you get closer to the edge.
|
| 5. Some impetuous people will run full-tilt just to see if they
| can overcome the floor. So make sure to pad the walls. :)
|
| That being said, while I think that kind of set-up might
| _work_... the real trouble with it is that a passive system doesn
| 't prevent people from bumping into one-another. Which is fine if
| players' real-world positions are meant to correlate 1:1 with
| their in-game positions (or if, like in the demo video, there's
| no true per-individual "VR", just a shared wraparound screen in
| the room.) But it probably means that for true "immersive VR
| worlds" (i.e. a hypothetical VRMMO), you'd need one huge room
| _per player_. And that 's a bit impractical, price- and space-
| wise!
| furstenheim wrote:
| So annoying, it detects where I'm connecting from and redirects
| changing the language
| jnsie wrote:
| Super cool but I'm guessing a long way to go. Notice that nobody
| lifts their feet when walking on this. I'm not sure if it's fear
| (those small careful steps conjure images of people ice skating
| for the first time) or if the tech doesn't work well in that
| scenario.
| pmcf wrote:
| Beyond the VR thing. I keep thinking this could have more
| immediate impact on manufacturing and logistics. Imagine a
| delivery truck with this on the floor that could optimally
| organize packages dynamically.
| Ringz wrote:
| What if I could now tilt the platform - on which the HoloTiles
| are mounted - in all directions?
| crystaldecanter wrote:
| now do climate change
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| This is really neat.
|
| Although in Star Trek, holodecks never had such a feature.
| Instead the simulation would use trickery to make sure you're
| never lead into the wall. E.g it would use illusions to trick you
| into thinking you're walking straight, but you're actually
| walking in a circle.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| In Star Trek holo decks used whatever convenient plot device
| that was necessary for the story.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| That explanation totally falls apart when you have a bunch of
| people in the holodeck at once, unless each person was being
| shown something different.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| True, but I also don't get why you'd want multiple people in
| the same holotiled room if they're just wearing headsets and
| staying in the same spot(due to the holotiles) anyway.
| tempestn wrote:
| Something like this could be considered such an illusion,
| explained in layman's terms.
| searealist wrote:
| Nobody walks like that. I guess it only works if walk like a
| teenager sneaking out of the house late at night.
| dubeye wrote:
| Control immersion is massively overated. WASD won for a reason
| jedberg wrote:
| In the video they ask, "where do you see this tech being used"
| and then seconds later show us someone moving a file cabinet with
| their mind.
|
| I'm guessing the first place we will see this is in some live
| action Star Wars show to make things move with the Force.
| jorvi wrote:
| Disney researches / develops some really cool stuff. Their Disney
| Research Hub channel is a goldmine.
|
| One of my favorites is Touche. The world becomes your
| touchscreen: https://youtu.be/E4tYpXVTjxA?si=Sbh97JURR9NGdeiS
| Etheryte wrote:
| This is really cool tech, but the first application concept is
| hilarious [0]. If you hook a cereal bowl up to this device, you
| can have it make a loud sound if your child puts their hand in
| the bowl as opposed to using a spoon? That's simultaneously
| funny and utterly dystopian.
|
| [0] https://youtu.be/E4tYpXVTjxA?si=5XEqcynBDerfpQ6P&t=173
| thih9 wrote:
| But what about inertia? Is there a way to eliminate that?
| darepublic wrote:
| Very cool but the killer app, watching someone sprint in place
| with a blindfold on is not seen
| imwillofficial wrote:
| When did IGN become a ad riddled hell hole?
| undotoday wrote:
| Outside of VR, there's some other future uses (with the big
| assumption it will be easy & cheap to implement some years in the
| future) that are interesting if you have a floor that can direct
| people/objects.
|
| Somewhere of course like a Disney theme park or an airport where
| you choose your destination and you're shuttled to your gate with
| your luggage following.
|
| Or perhaps a secure room/floor in a building that if you don't
| have authorization to you simply cannot walk into without being
| pushed out of it.
|
| If we go dystopian, imagine a business suspects you of
| shoplifting and simply doesn't let you leave, or shuttles you to
| security automatically.
| golemotron wrote:
| Nice but Teamlab put Disney behind a while ago. They have no
| answer yet.
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