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VirtuSphere Immersive Virtual Reality

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wed Sep 21, 2005 02:04 PM
from the gerbil-ball-of-doom dept.
Hardware Technology
mhzse writes "VirtuSphere provides a mechanical basis for truly immersive virtual reality environments, permitting the user to move about in virtual space by simply walking. The device consists of a large hollow sphere which is mounted on a specially designed platform that allows the sphere to rotate freely as the user walks in any direction. The user wears a head-mounted display, which provides the virtual environment.
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VirtuSphere Immersive Virtual Reality 25 Comments More /

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  • Anyone else (Score:5, Funny)

    by Liquorman (691815) on Wednesday September 21 2005, @02:06PM (#13615908)
    think of hamsters?

  • Moo (Score:5, Funny)

    by Chacham (981) * on Wednesday September 21 2005, @02:06PM (#13615915) Homepage Journal
    Behold the room of circle square,
    Wherever it be, no matter where,
    For when we enter it hollow space,
    The real is gone, without a trace.

    Oh, to enter that seductive wheel
    Virtual entities are so surreal,
    The actual, but, imperfections corrected,
    We can blindly forget that they are projected.

    And where the triangles are a bit too outright,
    We'll turn a blind eye, enjoying the site,
    And when the framerate and just doesn't make it,
    We'll cry for a bit, but then mitigate it.

    The call of the future, the holodeck cometh!
    The hail of technology, there's no hiding from it.
    As the real is so useless, it reeks with banality,
    We don't want it at all, we want virtual reality.

  • I've always wondered how the holodeck worked. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Silverlancer (786390) on Wednesday September 21 2005, @02:07PM (#13615923)
    You know, how they could move an unlimited distance in any direction in a room under 10 meters wide. While they don't seem to have explained it in Star Trek, I guess now they've found a solution.

  • Bon Scott Tribute Karma Burn (Score:5, Funny)

    by alephnull42 (202254) on Wednesday September 21 2005, @02:08PM (#13615933) Homepage Journal
    Let me be the first to say.... ...Balls!

  • Not great for VR Gaming (Score:5, Informative)

    by Kainaw (676073) on Wednesday September 21 2005, @02:08PM (#13615936) Homepage Journal
    I've tried this setup twice in the past. It always feels like you are walking up an incline. To make it feel flat, the sphere has to be huge. As it is, the weight of the sphere is difficult to start moving and difficult to stop moving. What is required for a real-life VR environment is a flexible sphere that allows a flat surface for the user to walk on and power-assisted rotation to make it start and stop easily.

    • Re:Not great for VR Gaming (Score:5, Funny)

      by Peldor (639336) on Wednesday September 21 2005, @02:23PM (#13616084)
      But it's perfect for reliving the 'old' days when you had to walk uphill both ways to everything!
    • Its been a while, but when I was younger (like 20, i'm 29 now ;)) I pondered on a "real life Doom" technique. The way I saw it, after countless hours of Doom level editing, is to make it just the way Doom made it. With heightmaps.

      I know it would be hard and probably not pratical but... You take a big warehouse, rig the floor and ceiling with 6' high wooden or plastic rod. Each rod is controlled by pneumatic (or whatever) to raise (in the case of the floor rod) or lower (for the ceiling one) and they meet

  • 5 bucks... (Score:5, Funny)

    by omnispace (792135) on Wednesday September 21 2005, @02:09PM (#13615949)
    says this will be the controller for the next Nintendo console.

  • Sgi Cave (Score:3, Insightful)

    by delirium of disorder (701392) on Wednesday September 21 2005, @02:10PM (#13615956) Homepage Journal
    Hasn't similar technology been available for years? Like this:
    http://www.sgi.com/products/appsdirectory.dir/irix /products/c/957266.html [sgi.com]
    • You can't walk around in the cave. In fact, you'd have to sit in exactly the right spot in the cave, or else the perspective would be out-of-whack at the edges of each of the screens.

  • Wireless? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Digital_Quartz (75366) on Wednesday September 21 2005, @02:16PM (#13616013) Homepage
    I wonder how they're getting the video signal to the HMD? Any decent resolution is going to require a fair ammount of bandwidth. It's obviously not going to be a cabled connection (where would the cables go?).
  • "Users can even ineract with objects in virtual space using a special manipulator."

    This sounds like it could be fun, depending on how big the special manipulator is.

  • Hmm... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MaestroSartori (146297) on Wednesday September 21 2005, @02:32PM (#13616169) Homepage
    ...kinda cool I suppose. Does limit the sorts of thing you can walk on - pretty difficult to simulate stairs, for example.

    I always though that some sort of moving tile [trnmag.com] system with lots of small, tilting variable height tiles would work pretty well for simulating walking on undulating terrain, as well as being able to cover stairs etc.

    Maybe a large spherical room with walls covered in shifting variable tiles of this sort, that way you could have overhangs etc as well. Go rock climbing up a virtual Eiger, with only a few feet to fall if you slip :)

  • HAHA yeah right. (Score:3, Informative)

    by oGMo (379) on Wednesday September 21 2005, @03:45PM (#13616754)

    They had one of these at PAX. Plastic sphere, fairly heavy construction, on some wheels and sensors that allow fairly free rotation. You wore a head-mounted display and had a "gun" peripheral that you could point and shoot. Play time was about 5 minutes and lines were about an hour long.

    Guess what? It sucked. Everyone who has considered how to make an immersive VR environment has, at one time, considered sticking someone in a sphere so they can walk around like this. Within 5 minutes, they've also come up with a number of problems with this setup: inertia keeps the sphere going, walking isn't really "flat", you can't run cords into it, and it's expensive and bulky.

    I stood in line, figuring they'd come up with solutions to some, or most, of these problems, making it actually usable. They didn't. Stopping and turning was terrible, walking normally took serious focus, and and to top it off, the demo game was unplayably bad: PSX graphics at best, the "which direction is up" calibration was constantly off, it didn't track motion very well, and things just seemed to pop up randomly. And the actual view window was really small. "Immersive" my ass.

    This technology isn't worth further investigation until they can prove the above problems are fixable.

    • Re:1992 Called... (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Thus begins the saga of Zero Horse!

      In A.D. 1301, the Siege was beginning...
      King: What happen?
      Lookout: Someone set up us a trebuchet.
      Lookout: We get hail.
      King: What?
      King: Tell me the message.
      King: It's Eric von Bunghole!
      Eric von Bunghole: How art thee good gentlemen?
      Eric von Bunghole: All thy castle art belong to my court.
      Eric von Bunghole: Thou art on the way to plunder.
      King: What he say?
      Eric von Bunghole: Thou hast no chance to survive make thy days.
      Eric von Bunghole: Ha ha ha ha!
      King: Move Horse!
      King: For

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