I've looked at motion platforms in the past in connection with multiple monitor/projector displays, and the good ones run to $100K plus with 6DOF, skew etc.
It occurs to me that although FPS players will use the frictionless treadmill, racers and flight sim players will need a chair manipulator of some kind.
In the same way that Oculus has democratised head mounted VR, someone needs to do the same for domestic scale motion platforms.
Physical motion feedback will go a long way to ameliorate motion sickness in users if their mental motion sensations are matched by actual physical sensations.
The current SDK does not support arbitrary player frame orientations. It "may" do so in the future but for now you would need to add this as a custom layer on top of the SDK.
"brantlew" wrote: The current SDK does not support arbitrary player frame orientations. It "may" do so in the future but for now you would need to add this as a custom layer on top of the SDK.
Am I able to turn it off completely and add my own tracking to the device?
We made a custom version of LibOvr 0.4.1 and 0.4.2 to add the possibility to dynamically offset the rift orientation to the player seat instead of the ground. Combined with a sensor and a motion simulator, it reduces simulator sickness, improves the sense of presence and feeling of motion (Vection).
It's a simple patch file to apply to the Oculus SDK, it doesn't affect the performances If your game/application could benefit from a motion simulator, please apply the patch to your SDK version before compiling your game/application.
I've never personally tried one of these, so I can't vouch for them. The reviews seem favorable though. Definitely not cheap, but also not 100k. 🙂
I have a Stage 2 and a GS4 seat. They work great! I'm actaully really excited about having some titles that support both SimCommander (that's the software that drives the seat) and the Rift... A bit of a tall order, but it's coming together in early forms (Live for Speed, etc). They haven't delved much into flight sims yet but I hope they do soon- right now they have basic X-Plane support- so I've been watching closely for that X-plane DK2 patch. But yeah i think seats like this are what you really want paired with the Rift for any kind of vehicle games. For games where being moved around in the seat would be detrimental, the GS4 alone is great because it's more just sensations on your back and bottom.
I was thinking about this last week while sitting on a beach in Aruba.. Yeah, should have been relaxing instead, but I couldn't help thinking that it would be really cool in the future where we will be able to get a beach like experience without the full day of travel each way.... Anyway....
Not sure if it has been discussed before, but what if a chair was modified (or custom chair) that could provide simple vibration to various locations on the bottom and back of the chair... Nothing intense, just something subtle that would coincide with the direction that the virtual body was moving in the rift... Ex. Moving forward slowly you could get a mild vibration on the back... move faster it would intensify slightly... same with left and right, up and down....
Would this slight physical interaction be enough to trick the mind into avoiding VR nausea? If it did work, I wonder if in the long term it would actually cause everyday motion sickness while walking or driving because the mind and body gets used to it...
Just a thought... Ok back to work... I should have stayed in Aruba....
Here you are the campaign guys! I wanted to show my conceptual design in Indiegogo in order to understand if there is people interested in working for real on a chair based motion platform. Th reality is that making hardware is damn complex, and without traction we will remain without a motion platform... It is someway too experimental to be financed by VCs.
I've read a couple positive reviews of their prototype that was at SXSW. I think this one should make it to full product--the team obviously has experience.
I found that the video at the bottom of their kickstarter page to be a better description of the capabilities than the other videos. It is the video which describes one of their prototype stages where the product was still called "VR Explorer".
