Forum Discussion
VRGO Chair - Motion Controller for use with VR
Hello everyone,
I wanted to introduce our VRGO project to the game developers and Rift enthusiasts within this forum. We’re very excited and interested to hear the opinions of the VR community so we can work with the feedback and hopefully make our project a reality.
Locomotion, or walking around in VR is a hotly discussed subject which has been limited by the conventional WASD, mouse or game controller inputs. Although alternative devices have recently started to hit the market, these past efforts have proven to be inconvenient, pricey, unresponsive and are simply not practical for the average home. What if instead of using conventional inputs to enter the virtual world, you could be fully immersed right within your own home, whilst sitting on a chair?
The VRGO is a highly responsive, easy to use motion controller for virtual reality. The chair works by tilting or turning in 360 degrees which is translated as motion in VR i.e. if you lean forward on the chair you move forward in VR. It’s very intuitive and users understand the principles in seconds.
We currently live on Kickstarter and have almost raised 100% in under 10 days!
Here's a preview of the campaign video:
I’m really excited by the future of virtual reality as the next technology that will define the way we play games, socially interact and do business in the future.
I’m really interested to hear your feedback, so if you have any thoughts please add to the conversation!
We'll be updating our progress within this thread as the project develops. If you want to keep up to date with news you can subscribe on our website: http://www.vrgochair.com.
Here is a link to the Kickstarter if you want to find out more! http://kck.st/1MfgqNV
I wanted to introduce our VRGO project to the game developers and Rift enthusiasts within this forum. We’re very excited and interested to hear the opinions of the VR community so we can work with the feedback and hopefully make our project a reality.
Locomotion, or walking around in VR is a hotly discussed subject which has been limited by the conventional WASD, mouse or game controller inputs. Although alternative devices have recently started to hit the market, these past efforts have proven to be inconvenient, pricey, unresponsive and are simply not practical for the average home. What if instead of using conventional inputs to enter the virtual world, you could be fully immersed right within your own home, whilst sitting on a chair?
The VRGO is a highly responsive, easy to use motion controller for virtual reality. The chair works by tilting or turning in 360 degrees which is translated as motion in VR i.e. if you lean forward on the chair you move forward in VR. It’s very intuitive and users understand the principles in seconds.
We currently live on Kickstarter and have almost raised 100% in under 10 days!
Here's a preview of the campaign video:
I’m really excited by the future of virtual reality as the next technology that will define the way we play games, socially interact and do business in the future.
I’m really interested to hear your feedback, so if you have any thoughts please add to the conversation!
We'll be updating our progress within this thread as the project develops. If you want to keep up to date with news you can subscribe on our website: http://www.vrgochair.com.
Here is a link to the Kickstarter if you want to find out more! http://kck.st/1MfgqNV
10 Replies
- Locomotion is definitely a major challenge for VR -- looking forward to hearing more about your project as it progresses.
- Very interesting idea, i am thinking you sucess will be very much tied to cost and build quality / durability, i will be watching this one closely, any indicator on max weight at this point?
"zerowaitstate" wrote:
Very interesting idea, i am thinking you success will be very much tied to cost and build quality / durability, i will be watching this one closely, any indicator on max weight at this point?
Thanks for the response. Hopefully we can make it a success! The chair weighs in at 4KG, with the majority of the weight located on the bottom to keep the gravity in the centre and the user stable on the chair!- We've just released our Kickstarter Trailer
- Although this is the right part of the forum, odds are this 30 day limited Kickstarter would attract more attention by being advertised in the "Oculus General Discussion" forum.
Good luck with it :) - We are live! http://bit.ly/VRGO_forum
- Well, based on my own experiments with VR navigation i agree that this solution has the potential to greatly reduce sim-sickness, since it basically shares the same principles:
https://forums.oculus.com/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=18422
The main idea is that even though VR and real-life accelerations are not exactly the same, there is a direct correlation between them which helps the brain better predict the next position in space and thus reduce simulation sickness.
So acceleration/deceleration and rotations that are directly controlled using the chair should be much more comfortable. However i believe that games/experiences should still be designed to eliminate other potential issues, like jumping up and down, elevation changes or sudden stops when colliding with objects. The examples shown in the videos using Minecraft are something that would still create many undesired vestibular conflicts; this type of input is not a magic bullet that immediately allows you to have any kind of movement in VR.
I would also like to know if it's still possible to lean your torso in order to inspect objects closely without accidentally activating movement, i think that would be quite important.
Personally i'm not entirely convinced it's worth having something as big and expensive when it could be easily replicated using a normal swivel chair + an IMU (which could be even your own cell-phone for instance) and tracking the user's torso to see if he is leaning (this would have the advantage that could also be used while standing), but i agree that setting up the VRGO chair is probably simpler for the average user and can also be more easily adapted to existing games.
So in the future (when body tracking improves and comes as a standard in all VR systems) i don't see this special type of input as being necessary, but for now i think it's a great solution for people who can afford it.
Anyway, best of luck with the Kickstarter, almost there! - Really interesting idea, I´d like to try it :) Good luck!
"VRGO_Chair" wrote:
"zerowaitstate" wrote:
Very interesting idea, i am thinking you success will be very much tied to cost and build quality / durability, i will be watching this one closely, any indicator on max weight at this point?
Thanks for the response. Hopefully we can make it a success! The chair weighs in at 4KG, with the majority of the weight located on the bottom to keep the gravity in the centre and the user stable on the chair
