Ready for a CyberWalk?

Roland Piquepaille writes "Even with recent improvements in virtual reality technology, it's still almost impossible to physically walk through virtual environments. Now, European researchers have started a project named CyberWalk and they'll demonstrate next week their omni-directional treadmill, named CyberCarpet. According to ICT Results, the researchers 'had to address five key issues: providing a surface to walk on, controlling the surface in a way that minimized forces on the user, developing a non-intrusive tracking system, displaying a high-quality visualization, and ensuring a natural human perception of the virtual environment.' The researchers think that their new virtual environments would be used by architects and the gaming industry." Additional details are also available via the project website.

Re:sphere = infinite plane

[roscivs]

While this is definitely cool, I prefer the simple and elegant solution of walking inside a sphere.

And there are actual implementations, e.g.:
http://www.virtusphere.com/ [virtusphere.com]
http://youtube.com/watch?v=qTnnJR-hS7k [youtube.com]

Re:CyberCarpet is small spheres?

[luder]

There are videos of prototypes in youtube:

Omni-Directional Treadmill, June 28, 2007 [youtube.com] (not sure if it is from the same project)
Cyberwalk Project, December 20, 2007 [youtube.com]