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Comment by ljk | Hacker News Reader

> Rather, you make a linear movement, and THEN you rotate the simulator (if you need to sustain the acceleration).

Am I understanding this wrong or are you saying long accelerations can be achieved by accelerating, turn, accelerating, .... etc? Wouldn't the person wearing VR headset feel the turn?

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Another way of saying this: we're good at sensing the delta of acceleration, not the absolute acceleration. Also, we tend not to notice small DC values of either acceleration or rotation, so you can manipulate the user's perception.

Someone published a similar hack for full-room VR, showing you can 'bend' someone's trajectory, to create the false sense that they're walking straight when in fact they're curving. In a large enough space you could simulate an infinite hallway (by having the user walk in a circle).

Sorry, I tried but can't dig up the link right now... but it's out there somewhere.

http://cb.nowan.net/blog/2008/12/02/redirected-walking-playi...

I think you were searching for that. It seems it also comes from the Max Plank institute.

That's the one. YourGoogleFu >> myGoogleFu.

Funny, I think Star Trek TNG described how the holodeck works by saying that it tricks the user not to walk into the walls. The visual feedback of slowly rotating hallway would definitely overdrive the inner ear. Too much, though, and you're going to get sick from it.

Let's say I want to simulate acceleration going forward. First, there's the burst of forward motion provided by the cable rig, and that can be > 1G. By also gradually flipping the person onto their back you can simulate continued acceleration of 1G because lying on your back feels the same as 1G of acceleration forward. The VR rig would still show you accelerating forward. I am guessing that if the rig also slowly moved back to its original starting point the user wouldn't notice.

Thanks for explaining, I kind of understand it now, but what if the acceleration is > 2G, then gravity won't be enough to simulate it, and I'm still a little skeptical that the user won't feel the rotating and "slowly move back" to original position, but I've never used a VR headset so I might be completely wrong here

Your body's not that good at measuring acceleration. Sure, it'll be hard to convince your brain that blood's pooling in your feet, but being leaned way back will provide a pretty convincing >1g forward acceleration feeling if the visuals are right.

This is really neat! I'm really curious what the motion would look like from outside the room, and what the limits of a simulation would be using this technique...

It seems like the sort of fun project that would be cool to simulate in a graphic engine -- pairing the playing of certain games with a 3D model of the simulation room :)

I think hes saying you accelerate forward then tilt back to let gravity help out.

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