To create a Near Complete VR Immersion Rig, check out the following items and then how we can put it all together.
VR Goggles and Wireless Surround Sound Headphones
Then the Oculus Rift came out and so did wireless surround sound headphones. This largely removes the allure of the Pandorex Gamebox except for the social interactions and potential visual strain. The feeling of being in an environment is hard to match without the environment but humanity is changing that quickly.
VR Goggles
In the beginning, children had the View Finder that let you look into it and see things in 3D. It used two images slightly different to create the visual. You could click over and over again to see various different scenes in 3D.
Then you had Sega VR in 1991 and Nintendo’s Virtual Boy in 1995. They had problems with refresh rates and making people sick. The Oculus Rift designed in 2010, acquired by Facebook, then had a commercial release early 2016.
Sega VR
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Nintendo’s Virtual Boy
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Oculus Rift 2015 Consumer Commercial
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Testing the Oculus Rift Development Kit 2
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Surround Sound Headphones
Turtle Beach seemed to kick off the party when it comes to quality gaming headsets that were surround sound and then wireless. Their comfort and quality are amazing and the prices just keep dropping. Other wireless headphones are available on the market now but the type Turtle Beach has with surround sound is just amazing. They have 7.1 surround sound in these things. You would think the power would drain out but many models that are wireless can play in multi-day gaming marathons without needing a recharge. A passionate video gamer was telling me about this in Best Buy when I was looking at the headsets and asked about if he had experience with any of them.
Turtle Beach i60 Wireless Gaming Headset 7.1 Surround Sound
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Near Complete VR Immersion Rig
The “Near Complete VR Immersion Rig” was a concept thought of to improve upon the Pandorex Gamebox. It was thought of before the plastic floor version, Virtuix Omni (Website | YouTube), that allows you to essentially slip around inside a bowl with your feet to create a walking type system.
Before thinking of using the flying rig however, a method using points in space that raise and lower like the childhood toy many of us pressed our faces into as child. The pins would be driven by some kind of actuator which could be a solenoid or hydraulics. MIT ended making a system like this called inFORM.
The system I was going to use would become the floor and have little roller balls in the ends so that you would essentially just walk around on a moving environment. The ground would move beneath you. This allows you to crawl, step up or down, and feel the ground topology around you. This was not very cost effective and not something most likely to put in your home. The Pandorex Gamebox remained the VR method of choice until I could find something later on which happened to be the flying rig method.
The Virtuix Omni could be improved and quieted by using slip on shoe covers that have a fairly smooth bottom on them that is designed to have a good amount of friction between the ground and the shoe cover. These shoe covers can contain gyros and or location lasers that can be pulled from an optical mouse. The gyros would show motion of feet and the laser would allow you to calibrate the dead reckoning further so the software has a much better idea of where the feet are at. A simple arm could reach out from a post to capture the torso with something similar to a weight belt to put around the waist. You could also use a backpack instead of the waist belt or in conjunction if you would like to add another harness point. Although removing the back and leaving just the strap structure could prove to be more useful. This can be easily folded up and moved out of the way to such places as behind or under your couch or bed. Virtuix Omni and anyone else, feel free to take those upgrade ideas on your product and put them to use. Hopefully we can get some makers to build something neat. If they can build full body 3D scanners with Microsoft Kinect cameras, they can probably do this in a night.
MIT inFORM Demo
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(Article)
Pin Art Toy
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Virtuix Omni
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Tesla Suit
The Tesla Suit is a full body VR suit that gives you sensory feedback. From what was seen in the video, it seems to be that they at least use electric stimulation to stimulate muscles and such.
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VR Gloves
Long ago there was a thing called Nintendo Power Glove. It was a magical idea that never seemed to pull through the ages. Now with newer technology and a thirst for virtual reality experiences, brilliant individuals are pioneering the way with newer concepts and iterations.
Teens React to Nintendo Power Glove
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(wiki | Buy on Amazon)
Today there are 3D mouse gloves that can track your hands location and fingers very accurately. A company called Maestro Glove makes some pretty impressive 3D mouse gloves. They appear to be very lightweight like a thin winter glove.
Then there are gloves that go past this and emulate sensory feelings as light as winged butterflies, raindrops, and wheat through the fingers walking through a field. That is made by a company called Glove One. Their gloves allow you to feel texture, weight, resistance, vibration from things like shifting a gearshift, and sensation of heat from hot things.
Another technology could be added to Glove One that would allow people to feel temperature in both hot and cold in realistic terms. Perhaps too hot is not good for realism and actuators are just fine. However the option for both hot and or cold are available in the form of thermoelectric generator technology. You can either harness a temperature differential between the hot and cold surfaces of the device to generate electricity or you can input electricity to get hot and cold.
You have both hot and cold so you would need to make sure to insulation properly to only allow so much to happen. The cold is what you would want to harness as the hot could be accomplished with heating cables in coils in a matrix woven throughout the glove. The cold points would also have to be distributed in a matrix throughout the internal surface of the glove. This cold can also simulate wetness of water and other liquids.
Ryerson students’ and various companies such as CyberGlove Systems, that are also working on force feedback vs haptic feedback versions. They look as if they want to give physical feedback on the fingers and hand motion itself.
Maestro Gesture 3D Mouse Gloves
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(Website)
Glove One VR (Feel the world)
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Pelteir Module Cooling – The Pelteir Effect
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Ryerson Students’ Haptic Feedback Gloves
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CyberGlove III
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Scent Simulation
Scent is a powerful stimulation that brings up memories, causes powerful and instant reactions, and in general paints the scene with much more vibrant detail than you would have without it. There are companies that will help you add scent to your store or theaters or what not. SensoryCo 4D is a company that provides such scent services. Some folks are using a few scents and some are using many. SensoryCo 4D shows that there is a very wide diversity of scents that you can acquire and put together.
Base chemical sets could be used that the nose actually scenes when it smells. Things smell because of their molecular structure. We can even smell metal by the oxidation of that metal. We don’t smell the actual metal, just its reaction with the air.
Scent Simulation Studies
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Flying Rigs
Flying rigs can be used to suspend VR users from a fold up and collapsible frame. Many tent designers are well skilled at creating strong and fold up structures. These mixed with fold up table strategies can form a strong suspension frame to hang the flying rig from. You can be suspended and moved with winches in many directions by cable. The alternative is a type of gyroscopic frame you are suspended and move about in.
In addition to the flying rig and winches, a lazy susan type device can be attached to the main frame and the flying rig and winches attach to the rotating lazy susan. This allows you to spin around, flip, and move around in almost any direction you need simulated that works with a fold up and collapsible flying rig.
Flying Rigs
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Motorized Lazy Susan
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Mind Headset
Emotiv’s mind headset and other mind headsets are getting very powerful and able to read the signals that your brain produces while you are thinking about things. This allows them to use the headset to drive software, multi-copters, RC cars, and more.
This could allow the game to sense what is going on with you and fine tune the bodies reactions or even allow it to give you more senses than you actually have in the simulation or game. It could allow you to have more than 2 arms and legs in a simulation. At some point you may even be able to have a physical feedback loop of the extra things you are controlling by adding new senses like David Eagleman talks about in one of his TED Talks.
Emotiv’s Mind Headset Demo
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(Website)
David Eagleman – Can we add new senses for humans? (TED Talk)
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