Walking direction =/= looking direction

[Sharkku]

I'm sorry if it has been discussed before, but:

I'm going crazy that EVERY demo is using looking direction as walking direction! I want to be able to walk along the street, and at the same time look into the windows without ending up with my nose pressed against the glass! When looking direction equals walking direction I end up using the Rift as a 3D screen strapped to my face, instead of a virtual reality-device! PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, all developers, implement a "tank" mode or whatever you would call it in your games! At least the option has to be there! It's driving me NUTS!

[RiftXdev]

You have to be able to see your body in your lower field of view all the time to ensure your brain knows where the body is pointing without having to move the body to work it out.

The current demos where you have no body would make you immesnely sick with a tank mode as you'd never know where forwards was.

So the pre-requisite for decent tank mode is a virtual body and enough HMD FOV to be able to see it clearly in your lower vision FOV. Your body in real life manages alot of it's spatial awareness by watching the perphial field of view sub consiously. It's how you manage to blink when something is thrown at your face when you don't even see it (consciously), your brain is always watching all your view and only a small part is actually seeing a part of it with conscious focus. To have successful VR immersion a developer needs to understand how to ensure all the FOV has the required cues in place that the brain needs to recognise it's in the environment. I'd expect a psychololigst would be well placed to contribute to the discussion of feeling presence early on in VR until a standard is found.

[DarrenM]

"RiftXdev" wrote:
You have to be able to see your body in your lower field of view all the time to ensure your brain knows where the body is pointing without having to move the body to work it out.

The current demos where you have no body would make you immesnely sick with a tank mode as you'd never know where forwards was.

With tank mode your virtual head and body are always in the same orientation relative to each other as they are in the real world. That's because when you use the mouse/controller to turn your body, your head is turned by the same amount. When you want to know where forwards is, or which way you will move when you start walking, all you have to do is physically look straight ahead.

Look straight ahead at something, close your eyes and wobble your head about, return your head where you think straight ahead is and open your eyes. I'm sure you'll find that you'll be looking at almost the exact same spot every time proving that you don't need to physically see your body to know your head orientation.

Grab FireBox if you haven't already. When you load it up turn 180 and you'll see a button to switch to tank mode. Left mouse click to turn it on, then walk around to see how it works in practice. You can press the c key with your head pointed straight forwards to realign your torso if necessary. Having your headset oriented straight ahead before you launch the app also helps as always.

viewtopic.php?f=29&t=1309

[RiftXdev]

In real life, yeah that exercise would work because you can feel where you head and body are.

In a VR game I'd expect my head to be where I'm looking and my body to be wher I'm going, and my body can be controlled (turned) whilst keeping my head still.

As we will likely be sitting in a chair facing the keyboard when playing and looking around with our HMD on it is very likely that our in game body will not be facing forwards in the same orientation as our body.

Imagine driving forwards in a tank whilst looking forwards with with your head in turret mode. You look 45 degress left (in relation to your RL body) and you rotate the tank 90 degrees to the right (in relation to your RL body). When you centre your RL head to your RL body you will be 90 degrees out from the orientation of the game. We only made one change to the tank here so it's obvious where you are going and if you are in motion its even more obvious.

However if you are looking around alot (presume turret moves as fast as your head) and your tank moves fast as well (as fast as your body in RL) then you could be making hundreds of movements to both in a minute. Without actually seeing with your periphial vision where the tank is pointing at every point in time you are going to feel a vast disconnect when you attempt to move as it will unlikely be the same orientation as your body and head in real life. In a tank game one can imagine a 'centre turret to tank' button and a 'centre tank to head' button, but with games where your avatar is a body and not a tank then this will need to be more intuitive/automatic and less 'button' based.

I can't say how this is going to be done, only I that I feel it needs to be for an immersive experience.

In FPS games, the implementation in HL2 where you can at least aim your gun in a direction other than the one you are looking is a good start. I can't imagine FPS games working where your body goes one way, your head another and your gun/weapon yet another! :twisted:

[DarrenM]

"RiftXdev" wrote:
Without actually seeing with your periphial vision where the tank is pointing at every point in time you are going to feel a vast disconnect when you attempt to move as it will unlikely be the same orientation as your body and head in real life. In a tank game one can imagine a 'centre turret to tank' button and a 'centre tank to head' button, but with games where your avatar is a body and not a tank then this will need to be more intuitive/automatic and less 'button' based.

This just isn't the case in practice. Your virtual body and head do stay in the same relative positions as real life and nobody is going to suddenly forget which way their head is turned no matter how frantic the action. You need to grab firebox and see first hand how it works instead of theorizing.

The center torso button is no different to the center HMD button some games have at the moment for drift issues. It's something you'd use rarely and possibly won't be required at all with the camera based tracking in DK2 onwards.

[RiftXdev]

OK, I'll try FireBox instead of theorizing, as you say.

Thanks.

[Sharkku]

Interesting discussion. You explain it very well, DarrenM. And you are right, RiftXdev, that if the head movement was completely decoupled from the body movement, it would be very disorienting. The crucial point that DarrenM made , and where your thinking differs, is this I'd say:

"DarrenM" wrote:
With tank mode your virtual head and body are always in the same orientation relative to each other as they are in the real world. That's because when you use the mouse/controller to turn your body, your head is turned by the same amount. When you want to know where forwards is, or which way you will move when you start walking, all you have to do is physically look straight ahead.

"RiftXdev" wrote:
In FPS games, the implementation in HL2 where you can at least aim your gun in a direction other than the one you are looking is a good start.

"vr_moveaim_mode 4" with "vr_moveaim_reticle_yaw_limit 0" works closely to what I think is best. However, it has an interesting behaviour that actually can be a bit disorienting, but simultaneously is pretty clever: If you look to the side and then turn your aim to the same side, the head orientation does NOT rotate with your body. This is clever, since if you see something you need to shoot, you want to keep your head fixed on that direction, while changing your aim to match your viewing direction. But what happens is that you get this decoupling between your real body and your avatars body, until you look straight ahead again, and turn your body back with the mouse, that you are talking about, RiftXdev. What really would solve this problem is to have complete decoupling between gaze, bodymovement and aiming. But for that we need virtuix omni and complete 360 deg gun- and headtracking.

"RiftXdev" wrote:
I can't imagine FPS games working where your body goes one way, your head another and your gun/weapon yet another! :twisted:

Then you have to let your imagination out of the box! 😉

[schmeltzer]

Just.make.it.an.option.thanks!

[enilcleahcim]

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