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VR Interfaces: Powered Shoes
Overview
Overview
of Powered Shoes
The powered shoes VR interface, due to be demonstrated at the 2006 SIGGRAPH
conference, is a locomotive platform for virtual environments. The prototype
pictured above, uses roller skates powered by two motors with flexible shafts.
It is well known that sense of distance or orientation while walking is much
better than while riding in a vehicle, and that able bodied people tend to have
slightly better sense of direction than wheelchair users. These shoes have thus
been developed to allow people to walk in any arbitrary direction in a virtual
environment, using their own sense of direction from walking to guide them through
the VR.
The actuating motors the shoes employ actually work to cancel out the movement
of the walker - they walk or run and the shoes motor to pull them back to the
start position. This does take some getting used to, as the initial response
of a user using them for the first time is to fall over.
Powered shoes are obviously not designed for VR Gameworlds. Using them somewhere
like World of Warcraft, where the user walks around for six hours, is likely
beyond the stamina levels of most gamers. However, for applications such as
VR training, immersion, data manipulation, and where space is a premium, this
innovation is healthy indeed.
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