Related Efforts
Several alternative whole-body human-computer interfaces exist. The VirtuSphere permits a person to walk on the inside surface of a large, hollow ball. Like the Tamkang University's device, the VirtuSphere is passive. It requires user energy input to start and stop sphere rotation.
Walking- or stepping-in-place as a substitute for real walking was researched by Slater, Steed, and Usoh, at the University of London, in 1993. More recently, the US Navy's VIRTE project employed walk-in-place as a substitute for real walking. A similar approach by the Southwest Research Institute uses a walking pad.
Besides an ODT, the University of Tsukuba VR Lab has built numerous prototypes of various natural navigation walking devices. These have included rollers on shoes combined with a waist harness and the CirculaFloor, a group of smart tiles that arrange themselves to recycle from the rear of an active surface to the front. A computer-animation of this concept and a demonstration of a prototype are available on YouTube.
D. Johansson and L.J. de Vin at the University of Örebro in Sweden, presented a new approach, which reduces the mechanical and control complexity of the two-dimensional walking problem virtually down to one dimension. The floor uses a 16-sided polygon of triangular treadmills in order to always transport the user back towards the centre whilst at the same time allowing walking in all directions. The floor is commercially available and manufactured by MSE Weibull in Sweden.
Numerous references to walking interfaces for virtual reality environments exist in the US Patent Office database. Most of these have not been reduced to practice. There are parallel developments being conducted by researchers working on projects sponsored by the Department of Veterans Affairs to create virtual reality environments for a wheelchair trainer in order to promote therapeutic exercise. The bicycle trainer can also interface with computer generated environments to provide virtual navigation capabilities.
Read more about this topic: Omnidirectional Treadmill
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