Walking Dream: An RPG for the Oculus Quest with redirected walking | Hacker News Reader

Walking Dream: An RPG for the Oculus Quest with redirected walking

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24 pointstosh11 comments

I had previously ignored all this VR stuff but I had a go on an Oculus Quest 2 recently and it compeletely blew my mind, just the demo/tutorial when it takes you through the basics.

And I know we all hate Zuck or whatever but the Quest 2 is half the price of an iPad (more or less). Its the most amazing experience I've had with a bit of consumer technology since my first smartphone.

And so now I'm seeing how they've really finessed the VR experience in the last 5 years:

- fast framerate

- track hands for natural hand manipulations

- room scale movements (moving around in a small area)

- avoid nausea by keeping to the wearers natural movements as much as possible (no 'walking around' using a joystick, its better to teleport)

- this means a lot of the best games/experience involve standing still or fairly still - e.g. Beat Saber (which is awesome btw)

So this redirected walking is trying to use subtle tricks to make the players room scale movements take them further.

The Quest 2 is a marvel. My first VR headset and I have found so many ah-ha moments. Facebook reportedly has 20% of the company working on VR and AR, 10,000 employees. They are all in.

Key moments I've had:

When it's on you're head, your mentally there. The immersive impact is immediate and strong enough that you'll bash your lamp off the table and not even care. It's the end game of what every home theater, hi-fi audio system, high end gaming setup is trying to do, just done immediately and with no buy-in needed on your side.

Fitness is already a killer app. Get into a boxing match and your body will react like you are in an actual fight. You'll go so hard you can easily hurt yourself. No motivation needed on your end.

Social interactions are close enough to real life that you treat people like humans instead of Twitter ragers. Once face and eye tracking are added, it will quickly top video conferencing as the most personal way to communicate at a distance.

Media consumption is awesome. A movie theater in a box, complete with digital popcorn.

Productivity and apps have interesting potential. With hand tracking and multiple wall sized screens, it's already tantalizing close to the computers in Minority Report.

Gaming is extremely compelling. The immersion means instant fun. Play table tennis and you might forget it's not the real thing.

Experiences. Stand on Mars. Go to a foreign city. Get on a roller coaster when you are deathly afraid. Stand on top of a mountain you could never climb. The "thereness" will mean you have experienced it in an important way.

This seems like a product category that will have some impressive developments over the next 10 years. In its best moments, it is as compelling as the Star Trek Holodeck.

This is just a link to a reddit discussion. The actual link is (non-SSL) http://walkingdre.am/

There's another game in development with redirected walking you can try now called "Tea for God". It's in a bit of a rough state, but with a large enough play space it's quite a nice stroll and gives off "Another World" vibes. The basic concept works really well. It uses non-Euclidian geometry to basically turn you around MC Escher style so you don't run into your couch. I like these games as a concept, but don't think they will ever be mainstream due to the space requirements. Hardly anyone has a mostly empty large room at home.

Tea for God does not use redirected walking (it is still awesome though!). Redirected walking is specific term for specific mechanics. It is about using the allocated playing area in the best way, by distorting the mapping between real world and VR in subtle way, so that player doesn't even notice it. For example, turning your head might result in less rotation in VR if player is near the edge of play area, to encourage player to turn more and face away from edge. Distances can also be distorted so that small step towards edge results in larger VR forward movement. Smaller spaces require more distortion, which results in nausea with some people.

Tea for God takes into account player area and builds whole worlds into that small space, connecting different rooms and corridors using non-euclidian geometry. The critical difference is that 1:1 mapping is still preserved.

As far as I'm aware there is still no redirected walking demo/app/game available for Quest.

I actually did try a redirected walking demo[1] a couple years ago on Quest. The implementation was very basic and the experience felt really disorienting. It didn't make me immediately sick (I'm pretty well adjusted to VR at this point), but it did make me feel like I was losing my balance whenever I started walking in the distorted space; kinda like I was dizzy and about to fall over. This was in a relatively large play space too, in my backyard.

On the positive side it did succeed in redirecting my motion, which was pretty cool. And again, the implementation I tried was extremely basic. An application programmed to be a bit more clever with the redirection might have felt more natural.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/OculusQuest/comments/bubyr8/redirec...

No trailer or gameplay footage?

Just as marketing advice it seems a waste to push a game without providing even some early footage.

What is "pay.reddit.com"?

Apparently[1] at one point Reddit only supported SSL through a separate subdomain that was created to let people pay for ad slots on the main site (back in the days where people thought HTTPS was only important for protecting payment information). That same subdomain also happened to serve normal Reddit pages if you passed it the right URLs, so HTTPS-Everywhere added it to their rules causing all Reddit users with HTTPS everywhere installed to get redirected to pay.reddit.com. I assume the domain only exists for legacy reasons now.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/j9bzz/what_the_...

See this video by two minute papers [1] for more information:

[1]https://youtu.be/KEdrBMZx53w

The release date is supposed to be "early 2021" which I'm guessing would be Q1. If I go to walkingdre.am and try to subscribe to their mailing list, I get a 404. I wonder what the status of this project is.

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