One of the hurdles that virtual reality designers face, in trying to bring their Ready Player One immersive worlds to fruition, isn't virtual; it's physical. It's to do with the fact that VR headsets currently require a physical tether, and that the wearer cannot stray far from that tether. Even if the tether eventually disappears, there is the larger problem of mobility: How can someone walk around limitlessly in a virtual world, when in reality they're in an arcade?

The designers of Hologate, a VR shoot-'em-up game I played at the World's Fair Nano, solved this by placing you in a relatively small fortified position--imagine standing atop a circular castle battlement--while virtual enemies came in from all sides. You could physically circle and sidestep in real life within this limited space and it was convincing in the game. However, I can see it getting boring over time.

Another developer of a horror game in Japan tackled the mobility problem by placing the gameplayer in an actual wheelchair. Within the game, your character is correspondingly confined to one that is motorized, providing the illusion of rolling around within this world while not actually moving in real life. Clever, but still a band-aid.

The answer would be to create an omnidirectional treadmill. A company called Infinadeck is working on one, and their approach is interesting:

Howevery, you can undoubtedly see the problems. The two-axis approach they have taken, and a series of motion-sensing challenges, provide significant obstacles to perfecting their device.

Take a look at this existing product, "ball transfer"-style outfeed rollers.

Each of those spheres are captured within a housing and can rotate.

Imagine covering a surface with them.

You'd have to experiment with the diameter of the spheres, their spacing and certainly their coating (something rubbery, I imagine?) but it's not a stretch to imagine them all being individually motorized.

As you took a step and placed your foot down, sensors could deduce which direction you meant to travel in and the motors would instantly activate all of the immediately local rollers, sending your foot backwards, as if moving it down a conveyor belt, while your stride carried you forwards.

You would remain in place but feel like you were walking, and could conceivably do it in every direction.

Now if one of you could put in the hard work to actually make this happen, then credit me, that'd be great. We should probably work out some kind of royalty thing too.

"but it's not a stretch to imagine them all being individually motorized." LOL. I guess this is coming from the guy who thought the tethered airplane train was a plausible idea so I shouldn't be surprised. That image you showed has 180 balls and it doesn't look nearly big enough to be usable as a treadmill. Each ball would need 2 motors, one for x and one for the y axis, as well as sensors. To make this work we're talking ~800 balls and 1600 motors that need to be individually controlled, that's quite a stretch. I think Infinideck's approach makes a little more sense... maybe you should stick to sewing machine repair, rain.

Rain, I hate to say it, but that sounds like a more complicated version of what they already made - except now you've got highly sensitive, polished balls driven by motors in an upside-down, quasi-inverted, trackball mouse configuration, and it's being walked on by someone's shoes, tracking all kinds of dust, dirt, and debris onto and into said sensitive trackball configuration, and none of it solves the inertia delay issue. Sorry, I didn't mean to rant at you. I just think a better solution needs to be one that can get dirty without it ruining the mechanicals.

Lets take it and simplify, then simplify again:The balls dont have to be on the floor, they can be on your foot, now u need just a few. The floor can be shaped as a bowl. So you always roll to the middle. Now the balls dont need to be motorized. Use a slippery sole such as uhmwpe. Now you dont need balls at all.  In fact this has been around for years:http://www.virtuix.com/ It works, has good reviews, its relatively popular. But despite the work of many vr companies including oculus, vr has yet to go mainstream. The problem is not the hardware. Not anymore anyways. The market is not there. A few full articles can written about why isnt it there...

Y'all know this is tongue-in-cheek, yeah?

Really? How many "tongue-in-cheek" articles do we need here? What value does it add? There's nothing substantially constructive or reflective in this piece.

How about a giant hamster ball? Make the diameter about 20 feet and you could probably get used to running on the curved floor. Lift the whole thing on some omnidirectional bearings and add an X and a Y motor. I guess you'd need some pretty high ceilings.

Large circular deck like a turn table where in the table rotated to change direction as you change direction. As you move to the opposite side there is another disk spinning in opposite direction so you and run backwards or change direction and speed up quickly. You need to train your brain, but you need to do this in video games anyway.

I’m a lapsed industrial designer. I was born in NYC and figured I’d die there, but a few years ago I abandoned New York to live on a farm in the countryside with my wife. We have six dogs.

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