VR Haptics for room-scale floors
Feeling where you’re standing in VR will give a competitive edge.
My VR space is a 6x9 yoga/workout mat in a 10x13 area in a concrete basement. I have space to walk off of the mat but use that as a safety margin so I’m not running into concrete basement walls.
The yoga mat is comfortable and allows for multiple hours of gameplay barefoot. I might get a slightly thicker mat next time, but so far I am happy with the lack of foot pain.
I am a fan of teleportation locomotion, prefering moving around VR naturally with my body, versus sliding with a joystick(or god forbid a track pad). Everytime I teleport to a new position, my room-scale space is aligned to the virtual world visually. Provided my room-scale space is large enough, I am able to step, dodge, and duck around virtual objects as I would in reality. But there’s one problem: I can’t feel the objects.
Pneumatics as an interim solution for immersive room-scale haptics.
While full body haptics are a dream for anyone interested in XR technologies, today I’m wondering about a system of haptics just for the floor. As a competitive VR player, feeling my footing would help immensely with quick body movements such as dodging left to right
Lucky for us, there are many haptics companies out there working on full body solutions. HaptX currently has a prototype glove that utilizes pneumatic “pixels” to simulate physical touch to the hand and fingertips. My question today is: could the same pneumatic pixels be used on an entire room-scale floor space?
Imagine a system of air bladders, the size of dimes, arranged in a honeycomb shape underneath a large exercise mat VR area. These bladders would fill with air, pneumatics, in accordance with the texture of the ground in game, raising/lowering the mat by upwards of a centimeter, giving the feet an idea of where they are in relation to the virtual world. Via feeling, not just visuals.
Let’s say you’re duking it out in a virtual paintball match and you’ve climbed on top of a pile of tractor tires for better sight of the field. Your real world play space is a little bigger than the tire you’re standing on, meaning you can step to the edge of your playspace and “cheat” by floating in midair nearby the tire. Given the ability of your real world body to lean, most games are forgiving here, but if you lean too far the game will let you know you’re “Out of bounds”.
What if, the pneumatic VR Play mat would spring into action and an area representing the curves of the tire you’re standing on would inflate and give your feet the sense of where you’re standing. You could adjust your feet to be placed on either side of the tire, even using the slight slope created by the bladders to leverage faster movement. The edges of the tires slope inward. By wedging your feet into that slope you could dodge in place a bit easier with less chance of slipping.
A classic VR experience is that of The Plank walk.
Richie’s Plank Experience took this to a whole other level. Now imagine these small bladders aligning to the shape of a plank. Sure, they would only be a half centimeter taller than the surrounding mat, but you would feel the raise, and as far as your brain is concerned you’d be up on that plank.
An in-game effect will have to be made for the transition. The time it takes to fill these bladders with air in accordance with the digital world may not be instantaneous. But teleporting is rarely instantaneous in games for sake of comfort. Having a slight animation effect eases the strain on users instantly moving their viewpoint. There should be plenty of time here to add the movement of the mat’s inflated areas to match the texture of the digital world you’re teleporting in.
Future versions of this play mat could sync with full body tracking to update their texture only where the foot is stepping when it is stepping there. Perhaps the omni-treadmills like Infinideck will use strips of pneumatic material to texturize the entire omni-treadmill experience.
The question is, what is the market size for such a device?
Right now? The market is not very large. Tens of thousands of peoole today might be interested in the best possible experience for room-scale movement. Competitive players would use haptic flooring for its advantages in gameplay, but alas this market is still quite small.
Inevitably VR sports will grow and the market for haptics will grow too, but a question comes to mind. By time the market size is large enough to sustain a business of VR rigs, will we be able to create something more substantial than pneumatic flooring?
Imagine a full body suit using pneumatics to simulate haptics, and to stiffen joints to stop players from pressing into digital objects. Entire sections of the suit spanning over many limbs could go rigid to simulate the leaning on a wall. These are the dreams of VR players and designers alike. The technology all seems possible, the money and time need to be spent to build it.
So the market must be developed and grown. But the market may not exist until the innovations are made. This is the constant battle of any new technology. Innovation versus profit. Who out there will be the Apple iPhone of VR? The all in one solution no one knew they needed and now everyone has?
