History
Although the concept of an omni-directional walking surface parallels the history of virtual reality technology, it wasn't until 1997 that one was successfully constructed. US Army's STRICOM (now PEO-STRI) funded the first ODT. After lengthy testing, the device ultimately found a home at the Army Research Lab, Human Engineering Research Directorate (HRED). The patent for this device (No. 5562572) was issued in the US to David E. E. Carmein on October 8, 1996.
This unit employed a belt made from plastic, toothed rollers. It employed mechanical tracking using a body harness, and included provisions for pneumatically powered, full-body force feedback for haptic and force display. The photo at right shows this unit with its first mechanical tracking arm.
At the University of Tsukuba VR Lab, Dr. Hiroo Iwata's group independently conceived and built a belt-based ODT in 1999. It had individual treadmill segments each powered by its own servomotor. It is known as the Torus Treadmill because, as with all treadmills of this class, the active surface forms a flattened torus.
In 2003 the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering at Tamkang University in Taiwan built a passive treadmill surface consisting of balls constrained within a concave walking surface. It relies on the users energy to move the balls during walking, and a waist harness to provide counterforce. This design is quite similar to the virtual space navigation device described in Michael Crichton's book Disclosure.
The CyberWalk Project began in 2005 through a European Commission funded collaboration of several universities. Their first design, like Tamkang University, relied on a bed of rotating balls. Unlike TU's design, CyberWalk's Cybercarpet actively powers the balls by rotating a standard linear treadmill underneath. A prototype has been produced which was big enough to evaluate the behaviour under conditions of normal walking.
A second-generation, belt-based ODT was funded and developed through a US Army contract in 2003. A video of this design in operation is available on YouTube, and a photo of the installed unit is shown above. At the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, as part of the "3rd Generation Omnidirectional Treadmill Project", a combined ODT/CAVE was developed based on COTS parts and is in operation since early 2009.
In 2007 another omnidirectional platform was released by the Cyberwalk project: The Cyberwalk itself. It also uses belts which form a torus and claims to be sizeable by its architecture without limitations. The whole system will be implemented in the Cyberneum in Tübingen, Germany.
Read more about this topic: Omnidirectional Treadmill
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