The Winding Road to Full VR Immersion
The VR industry is becoming increasingly mature. Much of the hype has been replaced with incremental innovation and the occasional hardware breakthrough.
The road is long and has many winding bends before VR will become an obvious part of our lives. But pragmatic progress is being made.
As an example, let’s have a look at one of the most important aspects of VR: movement.
Three Degrees of Freedom Explained
“Degrees of freedom” means the ability of a static object to move around in 3D space. Three degrees of freedom (3DoF) is the ability to look around.
More specifically, 3DoF means rotational movement. You can look up or down (pitch), left or right (yaw), or side to side (roll, as if peeking around a corner).
3DoF is relatively easy to track. The accelerometer and gyroscope in your smartphone can easily track the movement of your head. This is why all phone-based VR headsets (Oculus Go, Samsung Gear VR) are 3DoF.
But It Makes Me Feel Dizzy
Anyone who tested one of the earlier versions of the Oculus Rift, where you would fly around while sitting on a chair, knows what an unpleasant experience it could be. You would often feel dizzy or nauseous.
This is because of something called visual vestibular mismatch. The perception of moving through a virtual world while sitting still in the real world causes something alike to car sickness. It leads to dizziness, nausea, and just general discomfort. The fact that 3DoF allows you to look around, but not move around, is a major factor in this.
Game developers work around this problem by changing game mechanics. One of the most common workarounds is in-game teleportation. You would click on an area and teleport there. Or you would sit still in a in a mech or on rails that would move on their own.
But even such in-game workarounds aren’t perfect, because a human’s centre of rotation is inside the head, not right in front of the eyes. In the real world, our eyes move in space. For longer sessions in particular, this means 3DoF will cause a degree of dizziness or eye fatigue for many people.
And let’s not forget that, in an ideal situation, game mechanics wouldn’t have to be adjusted and people would be able to freely move around in VR without feeling sick.
Six Degrees of Freedom Explained
Six degrees of freedom (6DoF) is the natural step up from 3DoF. Here, you can both look around and move around. It has rotational movement, but also translation movement.
This mean you can move up or down (elevation, picking something up), move left or right (strafing) or move forwards and backwards (surging).
It’s the VR experience as intended. Move around as you please. But here as well, the industry faces difficult problems.
There’s a Cable and My Room is Tiny
First of all, tracking translation movement is very difficult. It’s not something your phone can do. Currently, there are two different ways to track your position in a room: outside-in tracking and inside-out tracking.
Outside-in means that you set up external sensors that detect where you are in a certain space (e.g. Oculus Rift). Inside-out means there are sensors attached to the headset itself that relay the position of your headset (and controllers) back to the computer or console.
Secondly, at the point of this writing, there is no standalone headset that can provide you with 6DoF. You’re tethered to your computer or console with one or more cables.
So if you hear a yelp and a curse from the room of your friend or partner who’s a VR-aficionado, he’s probably yanked a cable out of his USB port because he took a step too far.
Thirdly, I’m writing this from a room that’s an inconvenient rectangle, with a desk right behind me, several pairs of shoes close by, and a bed (because I write in the guest room, it’s a quiet part of the house, this is entirely normal, leave me alone).
Several creative solutions, such as Infinadeck’s treadmill or Cybershoes, will work around the fact that you’re tethered to an expensive device and that most people’s rooms aren’t big enough for VR. hese might be excellent workarounds, but they don’t solve the fundamental problem of not being able to move freely.
Freedom Comes Untethered
The recently revealed Oculus Quest is a 6DoF, stand-alone VR headset with inside-out tracking.
That sentence requires some unpacking. Here’s why this device is a big breakthrough: firstly, it’s 6DoF inside-out. There’s no need to set up external base stations and you can move and look around as you please.
Secondly, it’s stand-alone. This means you won’t be tethered to a PC or console with a cable. In fact, you won’t need an expensive PC or console at all. This is also how it differs from the HTC Vive Wireless, which still requires a PC to connect to (albeit wirelessly).
Hands-on previews of the Oculus Quest have been promising. The device is set to be released in Spring 2019 and will retail for $399.
Of course, this doesn’t change the fact that most people’s rooms aren’t too small for VR. But even here, promising developments are being made.
My Room is Big After All
Researchers are trying to create the illusion that you’re moving through a larger VR space than your physical space actually allows.
The technique that does this best is called redirected walking. It moves the VR scene a few angles more than you actually do in real life. Our brain doesn’t notice the difference.
Recent developments in redirected walking have made it much more efficient and versatile.
Here’s how it works: we’re blind for about 10% of the time we look around. This is because of eye blinks and something called saccades, or rapid eye movement between two points.
Researchers have developed eye tracking technology and software that moves the VR scene during these eye blinks and saccades.
Not only does this make a VR scene feel even bigger than with normal redirected walking, but the technology can detect static and dynamic objects in your physical room and move the VR scene so you’d avoid bumping into them.
Steady Progress
The Oculus Quest and significant improvements in redirected walking will make VR a much more useful technology for entertainment and business purposes.
The VR hype might have waned, but we’ve moved on to developing pragmatic solutions to real problems instead. Progress on the road.
Did you enjoy reading this article? Give it a few claps👏.
This article was written in collaboration with OneBonsai. OneBonsai is a VR/AR provider that focuses on building business solutions to improve health and safety, lower costs and increase sales. Their solutions are typically custom-made and built together in close cooperation with their clients.
Find out more here:
Website : onebonsai.com
Twitter : https://twitter.com/One_Bonsai
Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/onebonzai
Linkedin : https://www.linkedin.com/company/onebonsai
Youtube : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaibxtMmO4fvXr7S9h0TufQ
Blog : https://lab.onebonsai.com
