Disney unveils the HoloTile floor

Quiet possible a balance issue. When walking you are moving you mass forward this pushes your feet backwards I would imagine that if not carful it could cause you to fall

thomastjeffery• 2 years ago

Walking normally would probably result in you falling forward.

This is basically like walking on ice, except you slip more slowly, and you also un-slip (your feet are actively moved) occasionally to recenter.

That limits both the speed you can pretend to walk, and the speed at which you can be moved back to center; because both relative movements are working against your natural balance.

You will never be able to work with or against the inertia of your body weight. That is the core limitation of any treadmill.

coffeebeqn3• 2 years ago

If you walked at normal pace and stride I bet you’d just walk straight off the mat

throwaway765123• 2 years ago

Pretty sure it's because this demo floor is so small - in the clips of two people on the mat at once you can see if they took larger steps they'd physically step off the mat. I hesitate to assume what it feels like, but I imagine larger area mats may allow more natural steps

huytersd• 2 years ago

Oh that’s nice. Would love to see someone put it through its paces though. Like really try to run. It would be amazing to see something like this that you can’t physically get off of no matter how hard you try. That would be the pinnacle of what this thing can be.

rahkiin• 2 years ago

I wanted to see the same but I think it might bring havoc to your balance control without training.

judge20202• 2 years ago

While the walking demos show slow, methodical movement, the one demo with the chair ( https://youtu.be/68YMEmaF0rs?t=269 ) is definitely much faster. Maybe it can't handle automatically moving the human if they walk too fast and suddenly change direction (improvable with better software), maybe they don't want to overpromise what it can do.

gimmeThaBeet3• 2 years ago

Yeah the 'force' movement was really cool. Maybe this is the other way you could do the Jamiroquai video for Virtual Insanuty?

I've never really used VR stuff but I wonder what does it feel like in your head when your legs move and your view moves but your body doesn't?

And then the edge case is extreme but topologically, can something like this work for running where you can lose contact with the ground and your body is sort of compensating for momentum?

I guess treadmills work without people flying off them, so is it just a matter of getting the impulse right?

djhope994• 2 years ago

John Carmack pointed out on X that there is a fatal flaw in this design:

“I am skeptical of something like this making an impact for consumer VR, but it should be possible to integrate the sensor input at the OpenXR level, allowing it to work with all apps without needing per-app specialization.

However, it probably doesn’t “solve” motion sickness, because the vestibular system still won’t think you are going forward. The bouncing around motion of walking does have a masking effect that will help some.“

I personally could not get over the awful bout of motion sickness after I played my first “walking around” game on VR.

mlyle2• 2 years ago

Calling this a fatal flaw is silly.

It may not fix everything with movement wearing a HMD, but one can imagine a whole lot of use cases without HMDs, and it might improve a lot of HMD use cases.

djhope994• 2 years ago

Sure but I think that Disney is likely to be presenting this as a potential consumer use case and if it can’t make traction there it seems pretty fatal if they can’t find a way to make money from it.

We see a lot of POCs like this that never make it anywhere.

judge20202• 2 years ago

Motion sickness in VR is not universal. Many do just fine playing unoptimized, stuttering games/apps at 50fps including when using smooth locomotion.

kranke155• 2 years ago

It’s a problem most people experience, having worked in VR for years, I am still very sensitive.

bilsbie4• 2 years ago

I don’t know why he’s saying that. Treadmills solve motion, why wouldn’t this?

djhope994• 2 years ago

Have you tried a treadmill with a VR headset on? It’s not the movement that’s the problem it’s combining it with a VR headset.

bilsbie4• 2 years ago

Even if it didn’t solve motion sickness, I think it would dramatically help with immersion for me.

Artificial movement brings me out of it more than anything.

xg152• 2 years ago

I think it depends how it's supposed to be used. If you try to use it like a treadmill in a tiny room then no - and I'm sceptical it would work at all, because the motors would probably be overpowered by any kind of decent sprint or jump.

However I could imagine this to be able to expand the abilities of venues that already have enough space to let you walk around: You could have people move on their own as long as there is space, but then "stealthily" move them around when they think they're standing still, allowing either much larger geometries than would even fit in a hall or let you play around with non-euclidean geometries, etc.

But yeah, in general I agree, I don't see how this will enable some kind of VR breakthrough or even just move us in the direction on one: Even with this tech working perfectly, you'd be restricted to scenarios where you walk on flat ground and never touch anything. Even a basic hike in the woods has more complex interactions than that, not even starting with the kind of over-the-top acrobatics that we're used to from non-VR videogames.

So yeah, you could probably do the Stanley Parable in VR with this (without the staircases and the drops), but I don't see much else.

Nevermark3• 2 years ago

you'd be restricted to scenarios where you walk on flat ground

I don’t think it’s either surprising or discouraging that flat walking surfaces get worked out before dynamic surfaces.

It might take a while, but it is inevitable.

A rolling wave, with a grippy active surface, could keep you centered while you perceived an upward slope. Seeing and feeling a vista of uneven slopes in VR would be fantastic. I would love Skyrim as a health app!

Also, simple tilting could provide the force feedback of changing speeds.

thfuran4• 2 years ago

I wonder how quickly you can spin someone while they're walking without it being perceptible. If you have a large area, you could use sneaky rotation to constrain movement while minimizing the amount of sliding people around you have to do. Though I'm not actually sure that'd be less noticeable at practical sizes.

IshKebab• 2 years ago

If you make one of these big enough then you wouldn't notice the motion. That would of course be crazy expensive. Cool though.

hanniabu• 2 years ago

But how does it work?

mlyle2• 2 years ago

Little rolling elements that have a wheel in them. It knows where you are, and treadmills you back to a starting point as you move.

The idea is simple, but the details to make it usable, safe, work well, etc, are tricky.

edit: Reading more, it looks like it's mostly tilting, with perhaps high frequency vibration being used to modulate the amount of friction on each tile.

willcipriano2• 2 years ago

Wouldn't that feel like you are about to fall on your face the entire time?

pxmpxm2• 2 years ago

There are no rolling elements / wheels that I can see - it looks like low friction pucks that angle and raise/lower to push the objects laterally by having them slide to towards the lower pucks

Roritharr• 2 years ago

So, from looking at the video, it looks like these are wheels that can be angled so they make contact with whatever is on top of them more than the wheels next to them, applying a tiny bit of momentum in the desired direction to then angle out of the way while another wheel takes over. This is a really cool solution, but I can't imagine it not feeling very weird while walking since it's not you being moved with your entire contact surface area instead of some parts of your shoe getting dragged somewhere. In general the unexpected inertia must also feel really weird.

bsza3• 2 years ago

The same is true for a treadmill, and that doesn’t feel really weird to walk on. Though omni-directional treadmills for VR have been tested before, and IIRC it’s the starting and stopping that feels weird.

rafaelmn• 2 years ago

and that doesn’t feel really weird.

Seeing people step on a treadmill for the first time I'd say it definitely does. You get used to it but the feeling is very different from regular walking/running.

jayd16• 2 years ago

IIRC it’s the starting and stopping that feels weird.

Well sure. You can't feel absolute velocity, you only feel acceleration.

btbuildem2• 2 years ago

I wonder how that interacts with being visually immersed in a VR environment. The walker will have no momentum, but still go through the motions of walking -- the visual feedback won't align with that of the inner ear.

Maybe the next step is to put the rolly floor on a platform that can be dynamically angled away from horizontal, effectively creating a pitch that makes the person feel like they're leaning (well, they would be leaning) and that might be enough to fool the inner ear? Gravity and acceleration are pretty interchangeable after all.

coffeebeqn3• 2 years ago

Also what if you walk into a virtual wall? Is there some collision detection and can it force you to stop somehow

c0pium5• 2 years ago

If you actually read the article you will see it works in an entirely different manner.

micromacrofoot2• 2 years ago

oddly it’s vibration and tilting rather than wheels, it reduces the friction using this method so it might be more like walking in place on ice

mfwit• 2 years ago

Over my head, but heres the patent (pdf): https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloa...

sebastianconcpt• 2 years ago

And how does it perform when rotating, starting or stopping fast?

bilsbie4• 2 years ago

Does anyone know how it actually works? I can’t tell on the video.

They don’t look like wheels.

cma• 2 years ago

Tilted cylinders that rotate around the main cylinder axis to push you along the tangent of the outer lip of the raised portion, and rotate along global up axis to change where the raised portion is, changing direction.

It acts like a roller on its side that can be rotated to change direction, but probably has advantages mechanically or with not crushing your toes or sucking in your shoelaces or something, or just less friction from the direction rotation change.

jasonjmcghee2• 2 years ago

Top comment lists the patent, you can read it. Many comments are making up answers and adding a bunch of technical jargon to sound legit

nytesky3• 2 years ago

Community did it first.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=z4FGzE4endQ

(Fixed link)

jasonjmcghee2• 2 years ago

VR treadmills were a thing long before they did it

nytesky3• 2 years ago

I mean their in story VR rig was from the early 90s, that was part of the gag. I just thought of that clip when I saw the headline, but I will say the Disney one is truly amazing

bilsbie4• 2 years ago

One idea for VR is to hold these static and let you walk around normally but anytime you stop walking they move you back to the center.

huhtenberg2• 2 years ago

You'd feel that.

dymk3• 2 years ago

Maybe not if you do it slowly. One hack that room-scale VR systems do to make you feel like you're in a larger space is subtly curve the direction you're walking, so you end up walking in a large arc but you "see" you're walking in a straight line. It's subtle enough for most people to not notice.

mistersquid• 2 years ago

This is totally a bit of speculation, but given Disney is one of the majors (only major?) with an app for the launch of Apple Vision Pro, [0] I can't help but wonder what is coming from the NDA discussions between the teams working on HMD technology.

If the dais/stage/platform of the HoloTile product Lanny Smoot demos is a true prototype, it's likely miniaturizable (as well as scaled up) for implementation in both court-sized and entertainment room-sized versions.

The future gets closer and closer.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jy94Ezsj9NE

tommoor• 2 years ago

It's the human-scale version of these parcel sorting devices

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRS0Uj2WdpA

xg152• 2 years ago

That was the first thing that came to my mind as well.

Given that those things already exist for some time, I wonder if Disney actually used them as a base and then made their own version of them or something.

mtillman• 2 years ago

Used to be a ride at Coney Island: https://youtu.be/9Wz5vZmU8Dc?t=221

ethbr1• 2 years ago

See some comments up top -- the patent is for a fundamentally different source of friction control. Ultrasonic, not mechanical/directional.

Which should make it more amenable to higher-frequency control than mechanical systems would be able to shift at (given they're limited by mass).

That said, having seen high-throughput parcel sorting, the modern tech is amazing and the reason we have flow-through logistics and 1-2 day delivery.

They've got it slowed way down in that video.

Here's a system at closer to full-speed: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nPWTfT9sO2Y&t=26s https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JzURbt0qlqk&t=1m52s

thfuran4• 2 years ago

It may also make pets hate it.

mickdarling• 2 years ago

The patent folks are pointing to is not what this Holotile is made of. The Holotiles are slanted disks that can both rotate around the vertical axis and the slanted axis, with control motors for each tile. The Ultrasonic stuff is for a different use case, though could be integrated into this, it is not the primary motive mechanism.

jncfhnb• 2 years ago

I usually shit on VR but this looks kind of cool. I can’t help but notice the people are basically shuffling around on it so I doubt it will scale effectively, but it’s cool.

BiteCode_dev10• 2 years ago

It's very cool, but the guy answer sounds so corporaty that the only thing I hear is: patent, proprietary platforms, restricted use cases, we'll make lots of money and sue anybody even drawing it. Have fun! We mandate it!

steve1977• 2 years ago

So, a typical Disney product then?

BiteCode_dev10• 2 years ago

Today's Disney.

If you looked at the video from the studio showing off tech decades ago, you could hear, see and feel the passion.

bongodongobob• 2 years ago

Yeah what a piece of shit for inventing something completely new and novel and wanting to make money off of it. He should create a bullshit AI startup instead.

jimmydddd• 2 years ago

Best comment! He's almost as bad as that jerk who was paying for surgeries to cure people's blindness. :-)

BiteCode_dev10• 2 years ago

Valve makes plenty of money out of a proprietary platform, and still manages to be the good guys.

It's possible.

But disney has lost the friendly vibes for a long time.

They still got talent, and that's not nothing.

endisneigh• 2 years ago

Would you prefer if this didn’t exist at all, like before this things creation?

BiteCode_dev10• 2 years ago

No, hence the "this is cool".

I just have the reflex of clinching my butthole now every time I hear that kind of speech.

It's not the speech of the people that invented the machines, it's a speech written by the lawyers, sellers and executives.

Even Nintendo, which is one of the worst offender in obsessive legal actions manage to actually have creators sharing their vision in their voices about their games.

This video is the opposite of that.

makk• 2 years ago

This feels shortsighted. The patent holder gets exclusive rights for a limited amount of time in exchange for publishing how the thing works. Eventually, and not long from now, everyone can make use of it without restriction. And maybe after reading how they do it someone has a better idea.

thfuran4• 2 years ago

and not long from now

That's not quite how I'd describe the terms of patents

luke-stanley• 2 years ago

Considering how Disney extended copyright law for so long, I can't blame the person you're replying to for suggesting it.

BiteCode_dev10• 2 years ago

While I'm not a fan of patents in general, it's more about how you manage your IP that matters.

And honestly, this videos feels like they show it off because they have to, but have so many restrictions to do so that they must weight every single word.

It doesn't look like they want us to have fun with it.

It looks like it's something they hope to sell us.

If I enter a restaurant, I know they want to sell me food, but I want to think about the food, not the bill. And I appreciate a passionate chef.

eggdaft• 2 years ago

For a long time I thought we were on a solid track to full VR, which would be indiscernible from reality. Recently I’ve realised that I was very wrong, and this is why. The visual element of VR is pretty much solved. Audio no problem. But the movement in space is intractable I now believe, and it is an absolutely critical issue that scuppers the whole idea.

Tricks like this can give you a better approximation but I don’t think it’ll ever be good enough. You want to jump, spin, crouch, crawl, lie down. And interact with others.

I think AR is going to be massive and Apple Vision Pro will be a big hit by gen 3 or 4, but VR is something likely to be “Human-Brain-Interface complete”.

Given HBI success will likely arrive on or after the time we reach AGI, I don’t really know how that’s going to work out. I think headsets will be really fun for a while, but we’re not going to get the full experience.

Unless we can suspend people in some kind of viscous fluid with respirators, and ummm people think that’s acceptable… suspend them on cables and blow compressed air at them? Google glass no longer looks so embarrassing…

holmesworcester• 2 years ago

One thing I was thinking recently is that if we get sufficiently good at humanoid robots, perhaps it will be within reach to build a robot around a human that can put arbitrary pressure on different parts of the body sufficient to create the feeling of soccer, jujitsu, or even sex. This is probably a 10-100x harder robot to make than a humanoid robot. But it seems more straightforward than a HBI capable of full VR.

lanewinfield• 2 years ago

Feels like it might be easier to get direct access to the brain and simulate those feelings at the source

imiric• 2 years ago

You mean like a suit?

I find current HMDs strapped to my head very uncomfortable, and that they're a major hurdle for mass VR adoption. In general, people want to be _less_ physically absorbed by technology, not more. I can't imagine anyone would want to use an exoskeleton robot suit for increased VR immersion. If anything, you would be less immersed because of the suit itself.

I think this level of physical immersion is not feasible. It's likely that we'll prefer brain-computer interfaces instead, and the stimulation would be done directly on our nervous system.

coryrc• 2 years ago

You can't physically stimulate inner-ear response without actually accelerating and moving. You'd need to find some way to mask those signals so you actually feel like you're moving. Would also be the only way I could use VR due to awful motion sickness.

Tao3300• 2 years ago

I am not getting in the VR iron maiden.

Swizec• 2 years ago

You want to jump, spin, crouch, crawl, lie down

I played Squid Game VR at one of those whole room VR places recently. It was great! We could run, crouch, jump, spin, and interact with others. It all worked. It was even part of the games to do these things.

Felt surprisingly immersive. You forgot you were in some dark room in the basement.

armada651• 2 years ago

I'm surprised something like The Void never caught on. We've had laser tag arenas for decades, just rent a warehouse and construct an arena where any wall in VR is represented in real life. For hygiene you mandate people buy a face gasket from you or bring the one they've used previously.

No treadmills needed and you can actually touch and lean on surfaces in VR.

Wowfunhappy2• 2 years ago

With a sufficiently large version of this, why couldn't you jump, crouch, crawl, and lie down? The system would move you back towards the center between jumps.

A remaining missing piece is possibly some type of Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation system. Tell me if I'm totally off-base on this, but this seems like a technological achievable problem.

I'm not saying it's perfect (you can't simulate scrambling over a rock, for example), but it would enable a pretty wide range of movements.

bear1412• 2 years ago

Yeah it seems like people are assuming the person engaging with the floor would be kept completely stationary. It seems to me if the floor were covering a larger area and therefore required less manipulation to keep you stationary then it could use minimal inputs to keep you within the borders and still allow your inner ear to receive most of the inertial inputs required to feel realistic.

redcobra762• 2 years ago

A remaining missing piece is possibly some type of Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation system.

That's kind of like saying the missing piece for antigravity is the ability to control gravitons, though.

kthejoker2• 2 years ago

Yeah it seems like it will be much easier to create an AR environment that uses pneumatics, robotics, lighting, AI, maybe technology like this to manipulate the environment around you into an actual physical "playscape" (e.g. creating virtual landscapes with real physical obstacles, hiding spots, ladders, sportsball, etc) while you still retain your sense of balance, motion.

Maybe you'll even get an exoskeleton so you can Hulk out :)

But yeah AR has a much brighter "active" feature, and VR will be relegated to "passive" reality.

saiya-jin3• 2 years ago

We shall see, no point trying to guess where we will be in few decades.

One random idea out of ocean of ideas - we might realize with a bit of training our brain will smooth out the difference and we shall be well immersed even with these mild moves.

Maybe 100% immersion is a stupid yardstick, and say 85% is the sweet spot where you feel like you are having tons of fun without actually getting heart attacks. Think about it a bit - action games, shooters etc. put you consistently in situations that would be pure survival. Body goes into fuck-it-all mode where immediate survival is the only goal, side effects are ignored. But if you keep exposing yourself to such experiences regularly without actually having decades of brutal training and experience that real life requires from such a situation, over time you mess up your untrained heart, burn out forever various receptors and fear managing systems in our brains, and you just wreck yourself badly. There is a term 'adrenaline junkies' for a reason, its dependence just like the rest.

Maybe... who cares. Good invention, smart approach. Bring more, iterate, thumbs up.

smusamashah3• 2 years ago

    A tile with ultrasonic array of transducers are provided as in the assembly to provide instantaneous friction control for any objects contacting or supported on the contact/upper surface. [1]

So that's what these tiny tiles are, something ultrasonic, not tiny wheels.

EDIT: Found some more explanation in a reddit comment. [2]

    Ultrasound vibration makes it slippery, then it has an X-Y pistons underneath. So it makes itself slippery when it wants to reset position, then makes itself sticky again when it wants to move you back into position. Now repeat this process to fast for you to tell anything is happening.

[1]: https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloa...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/BeAmazed/comments/19eef29/comment/k...

pxmpxm2• 2 years ago

They must be vibrating the surface of those picks with ultrasound to modulate the friction. Pretty clever.

eastbound• 2 years ago

Sorry but if I input energy into the system by walking, and the holotiles input energy by producing ultrasound… how is this energy dissipated?

fizx• 2 years ago

heat

dymk3• 2 years ago

Heat, and not very much

mrtksn4• 2 years ago

Interestingly, on the video it appears as rotating wheels that change inclination: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68YMEmaF0rs&t=203s

From the close-up shots, you can clearly see them rotating and changing inclination.

By changing inclination they can control the contact surface of the rotating wheels and as a result control the direction of your movement. Very clever and simple but might be dangerous(you wouldn't want to have your pinky stuck between load bearing rotating wheels) and prone to tear and wear due to the high dynamic friction.

However, if there's actually a way to make it sticky or slippery with ultrasound then you can get away with a partial rotation back and forth while turning it sticky in one direction to push the objects in that direction and turn it slippery to reset its own position and get ready for another push. This probably will make it quite safe.

smusamashah3• 2 years ago

That's what I am still confused on how these discs look like wheels to people because lots of comments are saying that. All I see is discs changing angles and can't see them rotating like rotating wheels.

gimmeThaBeet3• 2 years ago

That's pretty gnarly. So the discs are basically doing little inchworming steps back and forth but never has to break contact by modulating the friction? Very much a bit of cleverness turned magic.

The one thing that I notice is item 726/Fig 7./PDF pg 10, it has "with the soles and attached/embedded ultrasonic transducers". Is that maybe a different or older envisioning of this system? His shoes seemed totally normal.

Just trying to wrap my head around how much the friction can be changed by vibration, like a solid-ish state fluidized bed. Don't know it both contact surfaces need to be vibrating.

Animats2• 2 years ago

That's a cute system.

Moving stuff around with controlled vibration is known. There's a cute trick where you drive a flat horizontal plate in three axes (X, Y, and rotate about Z). Sawtooth waveforms will move things around; the slow part of the sawtooth produces motion, and the fast part yanks the plate back to the starting point, breaking from static friction to weaker sliding friction. It's even possible, by using combinations of translation and rotation, to move multiple objects in different directions. The original research was funded by United Parcel Service. They wanted to take a table full of boxes, separate them, align them, and send them to a conveyor. Didn't work well enough, although someone did a chessboard demo where multiple pieces were moved around separately.

This is a similar idea, but at a finer scale.

"with the soles and attached/embedded ultrasonic transducers"

That suggests doing this in the shoe, instead of in the floor. Different system. Disney might license that to Nike.

I can't see it for theme park customers. This system can make people fall down.

Performers, though...

blamestross• 2 years ago

The normal model of friction already has static vs moving friction. They just vibrate to switch between them.

ehsankia3• 2 years ago

How does that work for moving the box then?

pyottdes• 2 years ago

Conceptually, the demo is showing a kind of omnidirectional conveyer. It’s a fun implementation of tech that has been used in shipping and fulfillment for a while.

https://youtu.be/HV2zh6ZDgUs https://youtu.be/XAokGOEjAFs

Companies tend to shotgun out a bunch of patent soup unrelated to actual working prototypes during R&D. The media latches on to the most interesting sounding thing they can find relating to a demo so you end up with “ai controlled space lasers” describing something that’s actually much more mundane.

rattray• 2 years ago

That definitely doesn't look like something that could handle a human walking, and seems to be using a very different technique.

baerrie• 2 years ago

Until there is tech that makes a 3D feeling surface that can create corners, people, anything, vr will feel hollow. At this point, a full body suit that creates haptic responses to simulate feeling an object seems more feasible than a static exterior surface like this that fulfills the other half of the vr illusion.

thfuran4• 2 years ago

This is basically the opposite of haptics. It's trying not to be noticeable while solving a problem essentially unrelated to perception.

ARandomerDude• 2 years ago

It’s a treadmill that attaches to a phone you can strap to your face. Neat, I guess.

graiz• 2 years ago

You can read the patent here: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20180217662A1/en

akamoonknight• 2 years ago

One thing my mom (an occupational therapist) brought up when seeing this was the potential applications for therapy. I'm not sure of the nuances, but one concept that comes to mind is that you could increase force on a user such that you can get a persons strength increasing without them even noticing it.

I'm not really sure what types of solutions currently exist in these spaces, and I'm sure that this would be a very expensive solution for this topic, but future thinking possibilities of this type of thing seem like they could have applications outside of just VR.

rglover2• 2 years ago

One thing my mom (an occupational therapist) brought up when seeing this was the potential applications for therapy.

That's a great idea.

kevindamm• 2 years ago

"inching" being the key term here

dymk3• 2 years ago

The demo of him sitting on a chair and being moved around shows IMO impressive acceleration. It's probably dependent on how much surface area is contacting the floor, but it certainly looks responsive enough for real usecases.

jdksmdbtbdnmsm• 2 years ago

Is there a contest for the most stuffy and uncomfortable product reveal?

BryanLegend• 2 years ago

John Carmacks take:

I am skeptical of something like this making an impact for consumer VR, but it should be possible to integrate the sensor input at the OpenXR level, allowing it to work with all apps without needing per-app specialization.

Source: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1750557236798148613

lttlrck• 2 years ago

Perhaps headsets that manipulate the vestibular system via ultrasonic are in our future.

(a entirely uneducated conjecture)

modeless2• 2 years ago

Unfortunately physics can't be fooled. Your limbs will still move according to the laws of inertia, and when that motion doesn't match your sense of balance your brain will likely be just as confused. But more importantly, you will immediately fall over if your sense of balance doesn't match reality exactly. Then you'd have to be supported by a harness. Obviously constantly being prevented from falling over by leaning on a harness is not going to feel like the natural movement that people want these systems to achieve.

moffkalast2• 2 years ago

Or perhaps it can be solved the same way as going from teleporting-only nonsense to normal joystick movement was - people just got used to it. We can adapt to just about anything if we do it for long enough.

wolverine876• 2 years ago

the vestibular system still won’t think you are going forward

Why not? Movement is relative, of course, and I'm moving relative to the floor and relative to what I see. What does the vestibular system detect that isn't happening?

jschlesser• 2 years ago

Your legs are moving but your head / vestibular system isn’t experiencing acceleration that it expects with those leg movements. Think of it this way, if you are holding a pendulum and take a normal step forward, the pendulum will start to swing. If you take a step forward on the magic floor tiles, your legs move normally but since your body stays in the same place, the pendulum is motionless.

derefr5• 2 years ago

The simplest thing is air resistance / drag — you can feel yourself moving through air (or any other fluid.)

But a sufficiently-clever mechanical VR system could blow air at you as you move, so let's ignore that one.

Your inner ear is literally an accelerometer. When you accelerate (or rotate your body around relative to a gravitational pull), the liquid in your cochlea sloshes around, and the hairs in it (which aren't just on the bottom surface, but all around the sides and top as well) feel the liquid as it passes by them and build an image of your position and acceleration in space. (It's oddly similar to how the wires in an old-school mercury tilt-switch accelerometer interpret the mercury sloshing around. Just with a lot more pairs of wires!)

Also, you've got an interoceptive sense: your organs are somewhat free to move inside your body; and so, as you experience g-forces, your internal organs continue to move a bit after your body is stopped — and you experience this relative displacement of your organs as a familiar and intuitive "lurching" sensation.

When your inner-ear accelerometer signal fails to cohere with your overall computed sense of motion, you get the feverish-dizzy, lacking-air, mentally-induced-nausea feeling of carsickness.

When your interoceptive signal fails to cohere with your overall computed sense of motion, you get the bad kind of "lurching sensation" — which, if it happens enough times, causes a unique kind of acute "body load" nausea purely localized within the gut (something common among riders of rollercoasters with negative-g-force moments.)

codexb2• 2 years ago

Movement is relative, momentum is not. Run as fast as you can and then come to a screeching halt where you lean backwards. You can’t do that on treadmill. You might be able to simulate the screech and the lean by moving you on the treadmill, but the rest of your body can feel that relative motion.

brookst• 2 years ago

Inertia from the fluids in your ear being sloshed backwards when you move forward.

Think of it like a plumb bob hung inside your skull. Would it be canted forward or back? I don’t think relative to floor matters for that kind of mechanical detection of movement.

RobCodeSlayer• 2 years ago

You don’t need to fully fool the vestibular system. This could be installed in a large room and move users slowly back to center as they approach the edge

randall• 2 years ago

I think this is the most likely outcome. Then you get unlimited walking distance and no vestibular drama (or light vestibular drama).

I wonder if it makes you puke if you don't quite move as far as you expected... like each step counts for 3/4ths of a step or something... and then you imperceptibly move backward.

marssaxman• 2 years ago

I tried out an experience last night called "SandboxVR" which would be the perfect customer for such a system - you walk into a room equipped with motion-tracker cameras, the staff straps you into VR gear, then you play an immersive video game with your friends. The games are designed so you don't need to move around much, because a flashing red grid appears in your vision if you get too close to the walls; with a moving floor, they could give you a lot more freedom to explore.

Rapzid• 2 years ago

Or even just a medium room. Let the user accelerate faster and then the system accelerate slower to start centering then.

rollcat• 2 years ago

The characters in "Star Trek" are well aware of the holodeck's limitations. Data can "see" the walls:

https://youtu.be/uWWn0fPbcRs?feature=shared&t=192

B'elanna Torres (and many other characters, mostly Klingon) are notorious for disabling the holodeck safety protocols, because the experience is not "real enough" unless one can actually get hurt:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30TXMZ_TSjk

The awareness of the holodeck experience being fake is so pervasive, that Odo actually believes the real Kira Nerys is a holodeck character:

https://youtu.be/8_nfZGFEm5k?feature=shared&t=82

I think this is the correct direction for AR/XR development (and why I'm a fan of AR as a concept, but not necessarily of VR): rather than trying to imitate a real experience as closely as possible (and then inevitably nose-diving into the uncanny valley), work with the medium and its inherent limitations and just let it be its own thing. We might discover applications we wouldn't dream of, just like the EMH from Voyager eventually rediscovers himself as a real person.

nabakin• 2 years ago

I don't think the size of the room matters much. The speed of the floor is determined by the speed of the person walking, otherwise they'll reach the edge of the floor and fall off eventually.

Maybe you could make the speed of the floor slower as long as the person stays in the middle, but as they reach the edge, it increases to keep them on it? I imagine it would feel strange to have a varying floor speed like that though.

ehsankia3• 2 years ago

From the video it kinda seemed like to people had to walk quite carefully, and it seemed a little awkward. I can't imagine it working well with a headset on your head in a virtual world not being able to see the real world.

Most other VR walking systems, you're strapped in an safe from falling.

beowulfey• 2 years ago

its a tiny setup, too small for normal steps. it may be just fine if it were bigger.

and anyway, it probably won't be the final iteration of this. it's just a prototype, a proof-of-concept. people are looking at this like you can go down and buy it today and are writing it off.

ambrop7• 2 years ago

The issue is not motion, the vestibular system cannot measure velocity, only linear acceleration and rotation. The only issue is while you are accelerating in a horizontal direction in VR, but you are not actually acccelerating (remember acceleration is absolute not relative). But I don't expect this will be much of an issue. We don't have a problem speeding up or slowing down on a treadmill.

namuol• 2 years ago

When it comes to VR, for theme park use it’s hard to see how this would be more cost effective than a large open space, maybe with many floors stacked to maximize throughput. For home use this seems like it will never be cheap enough to be worth it. It’s very cool tech, though.

alex_young• 2 years ago

The videos make this floor look slick as ice. I wouldn’t want to walk around on something like that with a vr headset on. Sounds like a recipe for a broken arm.

mellosouls• 2 years ago

This really doesn't seem that new, just a neater implementation of prior competitor products like KatWalk and Virtuix Omni

samstave• 2 years ago

What would happen if the interior of a tube was lined with these, could they move an object cylinder through the tube?

What if you have the exterior covered in these, could they move (easily) a donut surrounding it?

What happens if you have these face each other?

can these be use for super slippery loading sled-tracks in ships, planes, trains? Whats the weight limits?

Can they be scaled down really small and basically put around a cable-line to slide things along like a zipline?

dudeinjapan• 2 years ago

Its nice to see Disney doing something other than destroying the movies, cartoons, and comics I loved as a kid.

derefr5• 2 years ago

This is neat and all, but it seems to be yet another attempt to solve the (to me less-interesting) problem of how to have people use their feet as input for navigation in VR, while keeping them stationary; rather than an attempt at actually creating any high-fidelity sensation of moving through space in VR, according to your own human "internal accelerometer". (I.e. the sense you have that combines inputs from your inner ear, wind against your skin, interoception as g-forces smush your organs around, etc.)

I presume that doing the latter would necessarily involve allowing you to actually move away from center within a bounded space — and then subtly re-centering you whenever you're not moving.

Has any company ever put effort into developing a VR floor technology that works more like that? One that allows you to actually feel like you're moving?

I bring this up, because it seems like the technology on display here could actually be made to do something akin to this, with a few more tweaks:

1. build a large room covered in this surface;

2. configure the surface to not actively slide you around while you're moving, but instead, to only begin "re-centering" you when you stay still (or when you are walking slowly enough that your "internal accelerometer" isn't receiving much input anyway);

3a. design the VR experiences consumed through such a platform, so that you'd mostly only have reason to walk, with "free-roam" areas where running would make sense only lasting a few seconds at a time, broken up with dialogue / interactions / etc. to give the floor time to re-center you.

3b. Or, if these are VR games, then as another option, use a stamina system in the game that depletes as you run in real life (bonus if your character's stamina drains exponentially the further you get from the center of the floor); and have the player wear a force-feedback resistance system (i.e. a TENS unit on their legs) that effectively cripples you physically from doing any more running, for as long as your character is out of stamina. (Verisimilitude!)

4. Either way, you probably still need a fallback if you manage to get near the edge of the room somehow. Like if you're completely ignoring what's happening on-screen and just running in a scene where your character is supposed to be stationary + talking to someone. So have the floor actively re-center you, like is shown here, only when you get near the edge — and hyperbolically, with more force as you get closer to the edge.

5. Some impetuous people will run full-tilt just to see if they can overcome the floor. So make sure to pad the walls. :)

That being said, while I think that kind of set-up might work... the real trouble with it is that a passive system doesn't prevent people from bumping into one-another. Which is fine if players' real-world positions are meant to correlate 1:1 with their in-game positions (or if, like in the demo video, there's no true per-individual "VR", just a shared wraparound screen in the room.) But it probably means that for true "immersive VR worlds" (i.e. a hypothetical VRMMO), you'd need one huge room per player. And that's a bit impractical, price- and space-wise!

furstenheim• 2 years ago

So annoying, it detects where I'm connecting from and redirects changing the language

jnsie• 2 years ago

Super cool but I'm guessing a long way to go. Notice that nobody lifts their feet when walking on this. I'm not sure if it's fear (those small careful steps conjure images of people ice skating for the first time) or if the tech doesn't work well in that scenario.

pmcf• 2 years ago

Beyond the VR thing. I keep thinking this could have more immediate impact on manufacturing and logistics. Imagine a delivery truck with this on the floor that could optimally organize packages dynamically.

skzo• 2 years ago

You mean like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRS0Uj2WdpA

Ringz2• 2 years ago

What if I could now tilt the platform - on which the HoloTiles are mounted - in all directions?

crystaldecanter• 2 years ago

now do climate change

mtlmtlmtlmtl3• 2 years ago

This is really neat.

Although in Star Trek, holodecks never had such a feature. Instead the simulation would use trickery to make sure you're never lead into the wall. E.g it would use illusions to trick you into thinking you're walking straight, but you're actually walking in a circle.

vlovich123• 2 years ago

In Star Trek holo decks used whatever convenient plot device that was necessary for the story.

AuryGlenz• 2 years ago

That explanation totally falls apart when you have a bunch of people in the holodeck at once, unless each person was being shown something different.

mtlmtlmtlmtl3• 2 years ago

True, but I also don't get why you'd want multiple people in the same holotiled room if they're just wearing headsets and staying in the same spot(due to the holotiles) anyway.

tempestn• 2 years ago

Something like this could be considered such an illusion, explained in layman's terms.

easton2• 2 years ago

Depends on the implementation. I remember the TNG tech manual having a description of treadmills on the floor of the holodeck being used for exactly this.

mtlmtlmtlmtl3• 2 years ago

Huh, I did not know that. Never read the tech manual, but I can't remember that being mentioned in show though.

There's a lot of neat ideas in the manual that I read about on memory alpha, that I wish they explored more in the show. Like the fact that they have dolphin crewmembers. They're only mentioned off hand in one episode, never shown, and never involved in the plot.

searealist• 2 years ago

Nobody walks like that. I guess it only works if walk like a teenager sneaking out of the house late at night.

St0n3d• 2 years ago

You’d almost think it’s a prototype!

dubeye• 2 years ago

Control immersion is massively overated. WASD won for a reason

oblio• 2 years ago

WASD?

jmholla• 2 years ago

The keys on the keyboard you press to go forward, left, back, and right in many games. It's an often more ergonomic alternative to the arrow keys.

        | W |
    | A | S | D |

jedberg• 2 years ago

In the video they ask, "where do you see this tech being used" and then seconds later show us someone moving a file cabinet with their mind.

I'm guessing the first place we will see this is in some live action Star Wars show to make things move with the Force.

jorvi• 2 years ago

Disney researches / develops some really cool stuff. Their Disney Research Hub channel is a goldmine.

One of my favorites is Touché. The world becomes your touchscreen: https://youtu.be/E4tYpXVTjxA?si=Sbh97JURR9NGdeiS

Etheryte• 2 years ago

This is really cool tech, but the first application concept is hilarious [0]. If you hook a cereal bowl up to this device, you can have it make a loud sound if your child puts their hand in the bowl as opposed to using a spoon? That's simultaneously funny and utterly dystopian.

[0] https://youtu.be/E4tYpXVTjxA?si=5XEqcynBDerfpQ6P&t=173

thih9• 2 years ago

But what about inertia? Is there a way to eliminate that?

darepublic• 2 years ago

Very cool but the killer app, watching someone sprint in place with a blindfold on is not seen

imwillofficial• 2 years ago

When did IGN become a ad riddled hell hole?

undotoday• 2 years ago

Outside of VR, there's some other future uses (with the big assumption it will be easy & cheap to implement some years in the future) that are interesting if you have a floor that can direct people/objects.

Somewhere of course like a Disney theme park or an airport where you choose your destination and you're shuttled to your gate with your luggage following.

Or perhaps a secure room/floor in a building that if you don't have authorization to you simply cannot walk into without being pushed out of it.

If we go dystopian, imagine a business suspects you of shoplifting and simply doesn't let you leave, or shuttles you to security automatically.

InCityDreams• 2 years ago

But the suspicion is unfounded. Profit!

golemotron• 2 years ago

Nice but Teamlab put Disney behind a while ago. They have no answer yet.

gremlinsinc• 2 years ago

So many questions....If you're in the middle of a room with this floor...... um, how do you get back out? is there an escape hatch? Could this be used in some fancy new prison? Could they add some sort of energy generation, so walking generates energy? Would that create even more incentive to incarcerate more people for longer? Where do I get one?

Agraillo2• 2 years ago

A little idea utilizing a new level of indirection. You might call it "HoloTile meets Segway". A platform is one square meter (or rather circle) capable of moving in any direction (using conventional wheels). It is covered with HoloTile. A person on it just "walks" on it in any direction and the soft/engine just moves him or her in this direction, but much faster. Probably some self-balancing magic is needed in order to keep the person standing firmly

hleszek• 2 years ago

Put it on a drone instead and now we're talking!

Waterluvian• 2 years ago

Call it Disney’s Magic Carpet.

NateEag• 2 years ago

Alternately, just buy some Moonwalkers:

https://shiftrobotics.io/

IggleSniggle• 2 years ago

If we're talking alternatives, why not roller skates?

shortrounddev2• 2 years ago

Boy it's really annoying that videos get embedded from social media sites these days with no player controls on them

odyssey7• 2 years ago

When I saw this, I was wondering whether Florida has a new startup-style VR project -- this time with the “Magic” Kingdom.

Unfortunately for the Sunshine State, Disney’s two research labs are located in Los Angeles and Zürich.

https://la.disneyresearch.com/labs/

alasdair_• 2 years ago

With a large enough version of this, safety could be an issue. Imagine getting trapped in the center and never being able to leave.

crtified2• 2 years ago

21st century version of the pit of Sarlacc.

In its belly you will find a new definition of pain and suffering, as you are subjected to new iterations of Star Wars over a thousand years.

crtified2• 2 years ago

Can we have it in the shoes, instead of the floor? Or, some combination of the two, working together?

(which may well, in some ways, be akin to the question "would you prefer to stand on a conveyor belt, or roller skates?" - but the errant thought occurs regardless..)

baby• 2 years ago

Carmack is skeptical

https://x.com/id_aa_carmack/status/1750557236798148613?s=46

tortoise_in• 2 years ago

What is good here they are trying to do something unusual. Disnep movies and tech and fascinating

FwarkaLark2• 2 years ago

I'm bullish on this! I'll never pay to go to disney world or disney land (can never get these two parks straight) but this is a clear symptom of staying power of a technology.

This is better news for VR than facebook could ever manage.

Andrew_nenakhov• 2 years ago

Hope nobody will die getting trapped on this.

deafpolygon• 2 years ago

I imagine this has uses in more than just flooring for a Holodeck-like uses. I can imagine a smart factory powered by AI using this to move things around, or assisted living where you can help disabled people move around. Some form of it could be used underneath seating to create an advanced type of wheelchair or mobility device.

scotty792• 2 years ago

I wonder if you could get away with two motors per "pixel". One motor spinning the fixed tilt wheel and the other rotating the axis of the spinning wheel around the vertical axis.

This setup should be able to impart the motion in any direction.

Is that how this works?

dpflan• 2 years ago

Can this technology be used in exo-skeletons? Providing support and mechanisms for movement?

gbolcer• 2 years ago

That reminds me of the battlefield3 simulator. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eg8Bh5iI2WY

polynomial• 2 years ago

Seeing the video of multiple people on the holotile, in close proximity but completely oblivious to each other struck me as an apt metaphor for this technology.

He's not wrong about dancers learning to do amazing moves on this surface tho.

rglover2• 2 years ago

People are poo-pooing this, but this is the type of thing that someone like an Apple will fix the rough edges on and turn into a "one in every house" type of product (e.g., Apple Floor, Apple Ground, Apple Earth). For what it is: this is brilliant.

Disney unveils the HoloTile floor

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