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CirculaFloor simulates 360° of movement in VR — and now goes up, too
The CirculaFloor is a series of autonomous tiles that reposition themselves quickly so that whoever is walking above can move in any direction across them, without going anywhere at all. It's designed to make virtual reality more immersive — rather than watching a video on rails or moving around with a controller, you'd actually be walking through the environment on a dynamic plane. It's all thanks to holonomics, which have the tiles moving every-which-way without having to turn, and they can even lift, too, to simulate walking up stairs. It needs about five square meters of space to operate continuously.
VR is one of those technologies that still hasn't really found its stride, and yet it's worked on pretty heavily. A system such as the CirculaFloor looks pretty promising, though it'd either need more tiles or be able to work a little faster for more intense games. Check out the video to see it in action.
Robot Watch, via BotJunkie
By TEC at 5:19 PM ON 02/24/09
That's all good but what happens if their foot comes back down and accidentally goes underneath of the tile while it goes back down. 10 bucks says that would hurt.
By bob at 8:34 PM ON 02/24/09
With more tiles your feet would never be close to an open seem. A circular grid could be maintained around the user and only tiles that are several feet behind the direction of travel would need to move to several feet in front of the direction of travel. In a scenario like that there is little chance the user could reach an edge unless there was a malfunction (could even run, roll, jump, etc. given enough tiles).
The bigger concern for me is how much power these things are sucking up... these are far more power hungry than wireless keyboards or something. Motors use a lot of power and I'd like to see a wired version (perhaps through a special floor with momentary contacts or something [not an actual wire])
By Lexomatic at 8:45 AM ON 02/25/09
Vernor Vinge's novel _Rainbows End_ (2006) applied a similar concept to haptics: small robots would skitter around and provide force feedback, constituting a virtual surface overlay to transform, say, a library stack into a dungeon wall. This complemented the images from VR contact lenses.
CirculaFloor is a physical version of the
technobabble forcefield-based treadmills in a ST:TNG holodeck. An alternative would be "vector-field robotics" in which a tight grid of robotic cilia support your feet, like a mobile bed of nails.
BTW, "holonomic" indicates the full-freedom mobility of the robots, and is unrelated to "holodecks" as you might surmise. (The BotJunkie blog pointed to a Wikipedia definition.) I can't tell from the small photos on the Japanese site exactly what form of wheel is used by the tiles.
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Lexomatic:
Vernor Vinge's novel _Rainbows End_ (2006) applied a similar concept to haptics: small robots would skitter around ...More »