One of the ironies of virtual reality is that the endless digital worlds which it provides require some real-life square footage in which to operate. Researchers and programmers have been battling this problem ever since VR's heyday in the '90s, coming up with weirder and weirder-looking contraptions to mask the fact that you're "walking" through a make-believe "world."
German, Italian and Swiss researchers transcended differences in geography, culture and language to create a massive treadmill called The CyberWalk, the largest virtual reality platform in the world. A series of linear belts makes up the moving part of the omni-directional platform, which provides a synthetically boundless arena in which to get your VR on. The array can move as a whole while individual belts can move perpendicularly, creating 360 degrees of movement while keeping the user as close to the center as possible.
We understand that you can't really create an expansive and realistic VR universe without some kind of ever-unravelling space in which to play. But watching this video reminds us strongly of another time in our lives, a time when we kept hamsters as pets and watched them scamper around and around their wheels for lack of either knowing better, or a more gratifying option.
Source: Switched
German, Italian and Swiss researchers transcended differences in geography, culture and language to create a massive treadmill called The CyberWalk, the largest virtual reality platform in the world. A series of linear belts makes up the moving part of the omni-directional platform, which provides a synthetically boundless arena in which to get your VR on. The array can move as a whole while individual belts can move perpendicularly, creating 360 degrees of movement while keeping the user as close to the center as possible.
We understand that you can't really create an expansive and realistic VR universe without some kind of ever-unravelling space in which to play. But watching this video reminds us strongly of another time in our lives, a time when we kept hamsters as pets and watched them scamper around and around their wheels for lack of either knowing better, or a more gratifying option.
Source: Switched