Disney unveils the HoloTile floor

John Carmacks take:

I am skeptical of something like this making an impact for consumer VR, but it should be possible to integrate the sensor input at the OpenXR level, allowing it to work with all apps without needing per-app specialization.

However, it probably doesn’t “solve” motion sickness, because the vestibular system still won’t think you are going forward. The bouncing around motion of walking does have a masking effect that will help some.

Source: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1750557236798148613

the vestibular system still won’t think you are going forward

Why not? Movement is relative, of course, and I'm moving relative to the floor and relative to what I see. What does the vestibular system detect that isn't happening?

Your legs are moving but your head / vestibular system isn’t experiencing acceleration that it expects with those leg movements. Think of it this way, if you are holding a pendulum and take a normal step forward, the pendulum will start to swing. If you take a step forward on the magic floor tiles, your legs move normally but since your body stays in the same place, the pendulum is motionless.

Your legs are moving but your head / vestibular system isn’t experiencing acceleration that it expects with those leg movements

That's also true on a treadmill. I think the bigger problem would be that the world appears to be moving (unlike a treadmill) and you don't feel any acceleration.

But on a threadmill you're going in a straight line and usually at constant speed. A constant speed, you don't have acceleration.

you don't have acceleration

If you actually use a treadmill, or watch motion capture, you’ll see that this isn’t the case. It’s a lot of slight accelerations and decelerations. The variation change from person to person, and more experienced runners are able to minimize them, but they’re still present.

Edit: this study is peripherally related https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8160945/

It’s a lot of slight accelerations and decelerations

Isn't that always true? If I pay attention to it, I notice a lot of tiny movements of my head, as I just sit here typing.

"You don't have acceleration" is just talking about the big accelerations from 0 mph to roughly 3 mph to 0 mph, not implying that you're completely motionless as if frozen in ice.

Acceleration is change in velocity and change in time, either can effect the apparent amount of acceleration. The velocity you accelerate to or from is just an implementation detail.

Exactly, you don't have acceleration, and the world around you isn't moving relative to you, so there's no mismatch.

The treadmill shows that performing the walking movements without acceleration doesn't generally cause motion sickness.

You don't get motion sick on a treadmill because you're not wearing a VR headset. There's no forward motion of your head captured with your eyes to mismatch what your vestibular system is feeling.

To add to your point, there is a somewhat unpleasant sensation once you get off the treadmill, i.e., even if you are standing in place, it feels like you are moving forward.

This reminds me of the similar weird sensation of phantom movement after jumping on a trampoline.

This is incorrect. You don’t get motion sick on a treadmill because the small accelerations and decelerations match what your eyes are seeing. There is motion.

I actually do get a bit of motion sickness when I get off a treadmill. It takes me a couple minutes to get my bearings after stopping.

So can I use the Disney system to simulate running on a treadmill?

The simplest thing is air resistance / drag — you can feel yourself moving through air (or any other fluid.)

But a sufficiently-clever mechanical VR system could blow air at you as you move, so let's ignore that one.

Your inner ear is literally an accelerometer. When you accelerate (or rotate your body around relative to a gravitational pull), the liquid in your cochlea sloshes around, and the hairs in it (which aren't just on the bottom surface, but all around the sides and top as well) feel the liquid as it passes by them and build an image of your position and acceleration in space. (It's oddly similar to how the wires in an old-school mercury tilt-switch accelerometer interpret the mercury sloshing around. Just with a lot more pairs of wires!)

Also, you've got an interoceptive sense: your organs are somewhat free to move inside your body; and so, as you experience g-forces, your internal organs continue to move a bit after your body is stopped — and you experience this relative displacement of your organs as a familiar and intuitive "lurching" sensation.

When your inner-ear accelerometer signal fails to cohere with your overall computed sense of motion, you get the feverish-dizzy, lacking-air, mentally-induced-nausea feeling of carsickness.

When your interoceptive signal fails to cohere with your overall computed sense of motion, you get the bad kind of "lurching sensation" — which, if it happens enough times, causes a unique kind of acute "body load" nausea purely localized within the gut (something common among riders of rollercoasters with negative-g-force moments.)

So here's the first thing I thought of: remember those "spaceship" amusement park rides that sat about a dozen people, with the space adventure playing on the front "window", and it tilted front/back and side/side to simulate the effects of acceleration and deceleration.

And I don't think there's any way of actually telling whether you're accelerating or tilting, as long as you keep the forces within a certain limited range?

Which immediately makes me wonder -- what if you put this HoloTile floor on top of a platform that can tilt on both axes? What if the moment it starts to detect you walking forwards, it tilts "uphill" in the direction you're walking? When you suddenly stop walking, it tilts backwards slightly for a split second, then resets to level.

Because this actually matches what our body experiences on a sidewalk -- when we walk forwards we actually tilt our body slightly forwards as we accelerate, and tilt it backwards briefly to stop. (Same as a Segway does, if that's easier to picture.)

So if the floor tilts... would that be good enough to complete the illusion, and send the right signals to the inner ear? Because the liquid in your cochlea is now sloshing around in the right way? The interoception is matching as well?

This is what I'm thinking, yeah. This is Disney, perspective and momentum tricks like this are decades old and pretty well refined by this point. If holotile works out it just gives them another dimension to layer onto the existing tricks to make small linear spaces look and feel just enough like they're large and non-linear to shuffle people through an attraction.

I don't think that would work, your inner ear would still detect the absence of movement.

The part that makes Star Tour work is that your entire body is moved around when the ship is tilted (because you're strapped to your seat). That wouldn't work with a tilting floor, I think.

I almost always put a fan on me in in VR. It helps keep me cool and I use it to know which direction I’m facing.

+1, honestly essential. Allows me to go for hours playing Jet Island

Nit picks from former vestibular researcher :

the liquid in your cochlea sloshes around

The vestibules are not the cochlea. The cochlea is responsible for sound. The vestibules are just about the sensation of movement, the structures are called Semicircular canals. You have one is each axis of rotation, more or less (x-y-z)

feel the liquid as it passes by them

The hair cells are embedded in a crystal matrix, the otolith. The inertia of the 'heavy' crystal pulls the hair cells (which only look like hair and are not actually hair) and that sends a signal to the brain. Not the liquid. The Spins from drunkenness are due to the change in the density of the liquid in the vestibules (from the additional alcohol) causing a different buoyancy of the otoliths and thereby making the hair cells change resting position.

build an image of your position and acceleration

Only the acceleration, not the position. You can only feel, via these organs, the 2nd derivative of position (0th derivative - position, 1st derivative - velocity, 2nd derivative - acceleration)

When your inner-ear accelerometer signal fails to cohere with your overall computed sense of motion, you get the feverish-dizzy, lacking-air, mentally-induced-nausea feeling of carsickness.

This feeling is very unique to people and their lived experiences. Seasickness will subside for most people, and sailors/figure skaters/ballerinas/skateboarders/etc generally have a higher tolerance to motion sickness.

Overall, very good overview! Thank you!

Thank you for taking the time to reply! Comments like yours are why I enjoy reading (and learning from!) HN.

Try running on a treadmill. Very surreal experience at first, not much common with regular running, every sensory cell screaming WTF this is weird and I felt like some cartoon characters when they 'power up' for running.

What you can and should do is to tilt it a bit just to make it more like running, but its still far from regular experience. You body knows, and trust me its not 1 or 2 things that are out of place, its everything.

You can and will get used to it, but never ever it will feel like regular running.

How much does the inner ear accelerate horizontally when you're already moving, though? After you're moving at a set pace, wouldn't almost all the acceleration be up or down, depending on how much "bounce" there is in your gait?

When your interoceptive signal fails to cohere with your overall computed sense of motion, you get the bad kind of "lurching sensation" — which, if it happens enough times, causes a unique kind of acute "body load" nausea purely localized within the gut

Something like this would happen to me sometimes when I was intoxicated on alcohol and cannabis together (getting crunk, the kids used to say). After achieving a substantial buzz, if I closed my eyes and leaned back deeply in a chair or lay down on my back, I could get this vivid sensation of falling rapidly. Just like going down a steep rollercoaster. As long as I stayed in the sweet spot intoxication-wise, it was a thrilling and pleasurable sensation.

From what I recall, after a few brief moments of exhilaration (that I could maybe relax and focus into in order to prolong), a subconscious awareness that I'm not actually moving takes over, which turns the sensation into pure nausea. Right in the pit of my stomach, like you describe. Sometimes if the nausea passed quickly enough I could open my eyes and sit up, re-center myself, and then induce the effect again. Anyway, kind of relevant in a weird way. The things we do for cheap thrills...

And on that note, I could see potential for some people to get acclimated to this effect of the technology and actually enjoy it as part of the experience.

Movement is relative, momentum is not. Run as fast as you can and then come to a screeching halt where you lean backwards. You can’t do that on treadmill. You might be able to simulate the screech and the lean by moving you on the treadmill, but the rest of your body can feel that relative motion.

Of course you can, just put your feet on the sides instead of on the belt (don’t actually do this, you will absolutely hurt yourself).

You won't lean backwards like you do when stopping from a run because your body has no momentum.

Inertia from the fluids in your ear being sloshed backwards when you move forward.

Think of it like a plumb bob hung inside your skull. Would it be canted forward or back? I don’t think relative to floor matters for that kind of mechanical detection of movement.

Perhaps headsets that manipulate the vestibular system via ultrasonic are in our future.

(a entirely uneducated conjecture)

Unfortunately physics can't be fooled. Your limbs will still move according to the laws of inertia, and when that motion doesn't match your sense of balance your brain will likely be just as confused. But more importantly, you will immediately fall over if your sense of balance doesn't match reality exactly. Then you'd have to be supported by a harness. Obviously constantly being prevented from falling over by leaning on a harness is not going to feel like the natural movement that people want these systems to achieve.

Then you'd have to be supported by a harness.

Single-person omnidirectional treadmills for VR already exist, and as far as I know all of them use just such a harness: https://www.virtuix.com/

Yes, I know and I've used several types. They remain extremely niche exactly because they don't achieve anything like the natural walking feel people imagine these systems would provide.

Here's a good overview of omnidirectional treadmills by a VR native.[1] There are schemes with rows of endless belts. Ball bearings. Slippery surfaces. Running while going nowhere can be made to work in VR. At least for people who are somewhat athletic. Note, though, that the Disney demo doesn't show any fast motion.

Useful advice from the VR native: get on platform, harness up, then put on headgear.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NN5RjAW8TV0

They were born… in virtual reality?

I don't know, humans are pretty adaptable. I'm imagining spending a day "running" around in VR and then running in IRL and having all of this unexpected momentum causing me to fall over whenever I want to stop.

Or perhaps it can be solved the same way as going from teleporting-only nonsense to normal joystick movement was - people just got used to it. We can adapt to just about anything if we do it for long enough.

The majority of people did not adapt; and instead are currently assiduously avoiding VR for simulation-sickness reasons until it solves these problems.

(My hypothesis is that the minority of people who did manage to "adapt" to movement in VR, are people who have lived for years with inner-ear problems that have essentially made their vestibular sense deaf.)

Please back up your numbers claim, I'll even take a twitter poll. Especially since we have good evidence that most people adapt to boats.

Says a man clearly in the pocket of Big Boat.

I believe those are called ships.

You don’t need to fully fool the vestibular system. This could be installed in a large room and move users slowly back to center as they approach the edge

I think this is the most likely outcome. Then you get unlimited walking distance and no vestibular drama (or light vestibular drama).

I wonder if it makes you puke if you don't quite move as far as you expected... like each step counts for 3/4ths of a step or something... and then you imperceptibly move backward.

There is an Oculus game Tea for God that had step scaling as an option. It is rooms ale, but every step you take, it moves you 1.25 steps of distance.

I get motion sick easy, but this option doesn’t make me sick.

The characters in "Star Trek" are well aware of the holodeck's limitations. Data can "see" the walls:

https://youtu.be/uWWn0fPbcRs?feature=shared&t=192

B'elanna Torres (and many other characters, mostly Klingon) are notorious for disabling the holodeck safety protocols, because the experience is not "real enough" unless one can actually get hurt:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30TXMZ_TSjk

The awareness of the holodeck experience being fake is so pervasive, that Odo actually believes the real Kira Nerys is a holodeck character:

https://youtu.be/8_nfZGFEm5k?feature=shared&t=82

I think this is the correct direction for AR/XR development (and why I'm a fan of AR as a concept, but not necessarily of VR): rather than trying to imitate a real experience as closely as possible (and then inevitably nose-diving into the uncanny valley), work with the medium and its inherent limitations and just let it be its own thing. We might discover applications we wouldn't dream of, just like the EMH from Voyager eventually rediscovers himself as a real person.

I tried out an experience last night called "SandboxVR" which would be the perfect customer for such a system - you walk into a room equipped with motion-tracker cameras, the staff straps you into VR gear, then you play an immersive video game with your friends. The games are designed so you don't need to move around much, because a flashing red grid appears in your vision if you get too close to the walls; with a moving floor, they could give you a lot more freedom to explore.

Or even just a medium room. Let the user accelerate faster and then the system accelerate slower to start centering then.

From the video it kinda seemed like to people had to walk quite carefully, and it seemed a little awkward. I can't imagine it working well with a headset on your head in a virtual world not being able to see the real world.

Most other VR walking systems, you're strapped in an safe from falling.

its a tiny setup, too small for normal steps. it may be just fine if it were bigger.

and anyway, it probably won't be the final iteration of this. it's just a prototype, a proof-of-concept. people are looking at this like you can go down and buy it today and are writing it off.

That's another thing that I found strange. Why make the version you show the public so tiny, especially if you want to show off multiple people on it. I understand it's a prototype, but surely they can scale it up a bit more to a reasonable size before showing it?

You might as well ask “why show it at all”. If you’re a small research outfit you do demos like this to attract potential clients but Disney has more than enough internal applications for this thing to keep them occupied for a long time.

My cynical view is that an exec was looking at the share price and thought “ahh crap let’s go film some stuff in R&D to reassure people we’ve got the future in hand”. Didn’t matter they hadn’t scaled the thing up, we’re still all talking about it in the top post of HN.

I believe that these sorts of demos/disclosures are intended to be soft job adverts-- They're cultivating a reputation of being not only an innovative R&D lab, but one that allows researchers to (sometimes) share results without being buried under a pile of NDAs. These are both things that potential new hires will likely care about a great deal.

The issue is not motion, the vestibular system cannot measure velocity, only linear acceleration and rotation. The only issue is while you are accelerating in a horizontal direction in VR, but you are not actually acccelerating (remember acceleration is absolute not relative). But I don't expect this will be much of an issue. We don't have a problem speeding up or slowing down on a treadmill.

It's very cool, but the guy answer sounds so corporaty that the only thing I hear is: patent, proprietary platforms, restricted use cases, we'll make lots of money and sue anybody even drawing it. Have fun! We mandate it!

So, a typical Disney product then?

Today's Disney.

If you looked at the video from the studio showing off tech decades ago, you could hear, see and feel the passion.

You can definitely hear, see, and feel the passion of Larry Smoot in the video on that page.

Also, Disney has patented their inventions since the beginning: https://patentyogi.com/technology/celebrity-patent-walt-disn...

I worked in that very lab, side by side with Lanny Smoot for four years straight.

The man is 100% passion and 110% invention.

Read his Wikipedia, wow he is amazing. Can you post a thread about his inventions and what it was like working with him?

I'm not in a position to discuss, unfortunately. For now, I'll just say he's the real deal, and I'm proud of him and Disney Research.

Oh I don't doubt the man, the invention itself is so amazing anybody working on it must be incredible.

I'm saying the message format sucks, which for a company specialized in medias, is ironic.

When I watch the video, I don't see the Disney family friendly that I used to love.

I see the corporation that seems to be uncomfortable to invite me to the party they are trying to sell me entries to.

That's a good example.

Look at the video showing off this exact tech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdHTlUGN1zw

You feel like you are part of the family while watching this.

It's a completely different vibe.

Honestly, I feel vaguely threatened by the HoloTile Floor demo tone. The way he answers the question about what's it's going to be used for feels like a parent that doesn't want to reveal something to a child.

It's a completely different vibe.

Sure, but everyone shouldn't be expected to have the charisma and salesmanship of Walt Disney.

You feel like you are part of the family while watching this.

Fair enough! I'd just note that Walt was pioneer of content marketing, and I'm sure that was the goal. (This segment was broadcast in the television series Disneyland (1954–1959) in the episode, "Tricks of Our Trade".)

Honestly, I feel vaguely threatened by the HoloTile Floor demo tone. The way he answers the question about what's it's going to be used for feels like a parent that doesn't want to reveal something to a child.

This one? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68YMEmaF0rs Agreed, it's terrible — overscripted, artificial, inauthentic — and a failed simulacrum of what Walt's Disney did above. The only honest part is 2:15-3:00, marred only by the terrible reading of the pretend guest.

This feels shortsighted. The patent holder gets exclusive rights for a limited amount of time in exchange for publishing how the thing works. Eventually, and not long from now, everyone can make use of it without restriction. And maybe after reading how they do it someone has a better idea.

While I'm not a fan of patents in general, it's more about how you manage your IP that matters.

And honestly, this videos feels like they show it off because they have to, but have so many restrictions to do so that they must weight every single word.

It doesn't look like they want us to have fun with it.

It looks like it's something they hope to sell us.

If I enter a restaurant, I know they want to sell me food, but I want to think about the food, not the bill. And I appreciate a passionate chef.

They won't sell very many of them if people are not having fun with it. That's such a twisted bit of logic on your part. They don't have an actual retail type product, so it's just a tech demo for now. But it's Disney, so once there is a reatail product, you think their PR department will be showing people not having fun with it?

See the other comment about older tech videos by Disney.

You'll see they used to know how to make you feel excited and happy about it.

It doesn't look like they want us to have fun with it. It looks like it's something they hope to sell us.

Well, yeah; they (Disney Research) are a tech company, not a product company, and this is — essentially — a B2B presentation for those big partner companies of theirs who might want to license this technology. They're not talking to consumers; they're talking to businesses who could build this thing into a product of theirs that is then sold to consumers.

When this is in an actual product, they won't be talking about the tech of it at all. Disney Imagineering (the department that builds Disney's theme park rides) tries to make the tech as invisible to the experience as possible. A PR piece about a new Disney ride that used this system, likely wouldn't even mention the floor. It'd just mention that they have "high-fidelity VR immersion" or something like that — and would let guests explain what that entails in their reviews of it.

See the other comment on old tech videos by disney.

Do you also buy phones with this mantra? Or anything for that matter? Because this is just a bit of electronics, nothing more.

Sometimes I just want to buy half a kilo of butter, and not caring much about the craftsmanship of Swiss diary producers and whole chain of experts and distributors and their skills and tricks a bit.

and not long from now

That's not quite how I'd describe the terms of patents

Especially with Disney. They'll figure out how to redraw it and extend the patents for another 75 years. (of course I understand the diff between copyright & patent)

Considering how Disney extended copyright law for so long, I can't blame the person you're replying to for suggesting it.

Yeah what a piece of shit for inventing something completely new and novel and wanting to make money off of it. He should create a bullshit AI startup instead.

Valve makes plenty of money out of a proprietary platform, and still manages to be the good guys.

It's possible.

But disney has lost the friendly vibes for a long time.

They still got talent, and that's not nothing.

Valve is a private company.

fish stinks from the top, doesn't it?

Best comment! He's almost as bad as that jerk who was paying for surgeries to cure people's blindness. :-)

Would you prefer if this didn’t exist at all, like before this things creation?

No, hence the "this is cool".

I just have the reflex of clinching my butthole now every time I hear that kind of speech.

It's not the speech of the people that invented the machines, it's a speech written by the lawyers, sellers and executives.

Even Nintendo, which is one of the worst offender in obsessive legal actions manage to actually have creators sharing their vision in their voices about their games.

This video is the opposite of that.

    A tile with ultrasonic array of transducers are provided as in the assembly to provide instantaneous friction control for any objects contacting or supported on the contact/upper surface. [1]

So that's what these tiny tiles are, something ultrasonic, not tiny wheels.

EDIT: Found some more explanation in a reddit comment. [2]

    Ultrasound vibration makes it slippery, then it has an X-Y pistons underneath. So it makes itself slippery when it wants to reset position, then makes itself sticky again when it wants to move you back into position. Now repeat this process to fast for you to tell anything is happening.

[1]: https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloa...

[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/BeAmazed/comments/19eef29/comment/k...

Interestingly, on the video it appears as rotating wheels that change inclination: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68YMEmaF0rs&t=203s

From the close-up shots, you can clearly see them rotating and changing inclination.

By changing inclination they can control the contact surface of the rotating wheels and as a result control the direction of your movement. Very clever and simple but might be dangerous(you wouldn't want to have your pinky stuck between load bearing rotating wheels) and prone to tear and wear due to the high dynamic friction.

However, if there's actually a way to make it sticky or slippery with ultrasound then you can get away with a partial rotation back and forth while turning it sticky in one direction to push the objects in that direction and turn it slippery to reset its own position and get ready for another push. This probably will make it quite safe.

That's what I am still confused on how these discs look like wheels to people because lots of comments are saying that. All I see is discs changing angles and can't see them rotating like rotating wheels.

At 3:33 there's a close up and you can see dirt stuck on the edge of some wheels and it clearly goes around.

Maybe, the part that goes from slippery to sticky with ultrasound is beneath the rubber disks and when there's no load they just rotate freely?

It looks to me that they're spinning than rotating; in other words, rotate around an axis that is perpendicular to the ground, instead of parallel to the ground.

And because of this, the person above is stepping on the "spinning surface" (the "base" surface of a cylinder) of these tiny disks, instead of the curved surface like a normal wheel or some industrial conveyor wheels (as someone linked below, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRS0Uj2WdpA ).

So in a sense, they're not "rotating like rotating wheels" despite being wheels/disks.

BTW, it looks like they also can adjust its axis angle slightly (less than 30 degree), which I imagine is also crucial to how it works.

That's what I mean. Rotating around their axis, which is spinning. Like the world rotates or spins. And by wheels I also mean disk, probably disks is more precise just as the spinning but really don't see why anyone would be confused when there's a video.

But anyway, thanks for improving my English.

(Text here is removed due to bad wording.)

To mrtksn: yeah I think your original post is pretty clear. But there are indeed other comments in this thread that are confusing the two.

Yeah probably but there's a minutes long video with close ups.

In my mental model its wheels attached in different way that rotate around an axis perpendicular to the ground. I call in wheels because moves the things around.

I'm really confused by the confusion. Isn't it obvious on the video that its cylindrical objects that can be considered thick disks and wouldn't all disks rotate on the round surface around the axis?

I also found the close up video to be self explanatory but I understand the confusion. People are thinking of it as multiple tiny treadmills that change direction rather than the spinning disc it actually is.

English isn't my first language but if it people were referring the motion as spinning instead of rotating and discs instead of wheels it wouldn't be confusing.

Yep, and by tilting the spinning discs/cylinders you can have omnidirectional control by changing which part of the edge of the rotating cylinder is in contact with the surface above it. You don't need the ultrasound thing posted in the other comment, that patent may be a different path they've also tried.

Yeah, I think this is right too. It'd also explain the sound.

Feels like a very mechanically-simple strategy, but hard to make durable / safe from fingers (and detecting "skin" vs "shoe" doesn't seem like something you can make foolproof) / that would hurt to fall onto.

Society says that progress goes forward. Toes? Not always.

Beautifully simple that it only has to spin the wheels one direction! I do imagine it has to stop though when the person stops walking.

The drawback of this is that it requires a firm contact point like shoes to work. You wouldn't want to walk in socks on this. You also couldn't have a performer lay directly on the surface and transport them across the stage, nor allow them to have baggy clothing near it. Running would be difficult from a balance perspective, not to mention holding a wheel at a particular tilt would require quite a bit of force if someone runs on it. It's going to have a very particular use case for Disney.

That's pretty gnarly. So the discs are basically doing little inchworming steps back and forth but never has to break contact by modulating the friction? Very much a bit of cleverness turned magic.

The one thing that I notice is item 726/Fig 7./PDF pg 10, it has "with the soles and attached/embedded ultrasonic transducers". Is that maybe a different or older envisioning of this system? His shoes seemed totally normal.

Just trying to wrap my head around how much the friction can be changed by vibration, like a solid-ish state fluidized bed. Don't know it both contact surfaces need to be vibrating.

That's a cute system.

Moving stuff around with controlled vibration is known. There's a cute trick where you drive a flat horizontal plate in three axes (X, Y, and rotate about Z). Sawtooth waveforms will move things around; the slow part of the sawtooth produces motion, and the fast part yanks the plate back to the starting point, breaking from static friction to weaker sliding friction. It's even possible, by using combinations of translation and rotation, to move multiple objects in different directions. The original research was funded by United Parcel Service. They wanted to take a table full of boxes, separate them, align them, and send them to a conveyor. Didn't work well enough, although someone did a chessboard demo where multiple pieces were moved around separately.

This is a similar idea, but at a finer scale.

"with the soles and attached/embedded ultrasonic transducers"

That suggests doing this in the shoe, instead of in the floor. Different system. Disney might license that to Nike.

I can't see it for theme park customers. This system can make people fall down.

Performers, though...

Oh, okay, I see, in that alternative system, the tiles still move, but your shoe with transducers is used to adjust the friction.

The normal model of friction already has static vs moving friction. They just vibrate to switch between them.

Sorry but if I input energy into the system by walking, and the holotiles input energy by producing ultrasound… how is this energy dissipated?

heat

Heat, and not very much

Conceptually, the demo is showing a kind of omnidirectional conveyer. It’s a fun implementation of tech that has been used in shipping and fulfillment for a while.

https://youtu.be/HV2zh6ZDgUs https://youtu.be/XAokGOEjAFs

Companies tend to shotgun out a bunch of patent soup unrelated to actual working prototypes during R&D. The media latches on to the most interesting sounding thing they can find relating to a demo so you end up with “ai controlled space lasers” describing something that’s actually much more mundane.

They must be vibrating the surface of those picks with ultrasound to modulate the friction. Pretty clever.

How does that work for moving the box then?

For a long time I thought we were on a solid track to full VR, which would be indiscernible from reality. Recently I’ve realised that I was very wrong, and this is why. The visual element of VR is pretty much solved. Audio no problem. But the movement in space is intractable I now believe, and it is an absolutely critical issue that scuppers the whole idea.

Tricks like this can give you a better approximation but I don’t think it’ll ever be good enough. You want to jump, spin, crouch, crawl, lie down. And interact with others.

I think AR is going to be massive and Apple Vision Pro will be a big hit by gen 3 or 4, but VR is something likely to be “Human-Brain-Interface complete”.

Given HBI success will likely arrive on or after the time we reach AGI, I don’t really know how that’s going to work out. I think headsets will be really fun for a while, but we’re not going to get the full experience.

Unless we can suspend people in some kind of viscous fluid with respirators, and ummm people think that’s acceptable… suspend them on cables and blow compressed air at them? Google glass no longer looks so embarrassing…

One thing I was thinking recently is that if we get sufficiently good at humanoid robots, perhaps it will be within reach to build a robot around a human that can put arbitrary pressure on different parts of the body sufficient to create the feeling of soccer, jujitsu, or even sex. This is probably a 10-100x harder robot to make than a humanoid robot. But it seems more straightforward than a HBI capable of full VR.

You mean like a suit?

I find current HMDs strapped to my head very uncomfortable, and that they're a major hurdle for mass VR adoption. In general, people want to be _less_ physically absorbed by technology, not more. I can't imagine anyone would want to use an exoskeleton robot suit for increased VR immersion. If anything, you would be less immersed because of the suit itself.

I think this level of physical immersion is not feasible. It's likely that we'll prefer brain-computer interfaces instead, and the stimulation would be done directly on our nervous system.

In general, people want to be _less_ physically absorbed by technology, not more.

I’ve found this to not be true. If you were to give people the ability to get mantis blades, they would probably get mantis blades

You can't physically stimulate inner-ear response without actually accelerating and moving. You'd need to find some way to mask those signals so you actually feel like you're moving. Would also be the only way I could use VR due to awful motion sickness.

So back to Aerotrims?

Feels like it might be easier to get direct access to the brain and simulate those feelings at the source

I am not getting in the VR iron maiden.

With a sufficiently large version of this, why couldn't you jump, crouch, crawl, and lie down? The system would move you back towards the center between jumps.

A remaining missing piece is possibly some type of Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation system. Tell me if I'm totally off-base on this, but this seems like a technological achievable problem.

I'm not saying it's perfect (you can't simulate scrambling over a rock, for example), but it would enable a pretty wide range of movements.

A remaining missing piece is possibly some type of Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation system.

That's kind of like saying the missing piece for antigravity is the ability to control gravitons, though.

Both of which problems I could fix, using my mystery machine, if only this planet weren’t so depleted of the necessary Solvtonium.

As I said, "tell me if I'm totally off-base on this, but [Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation] seems like a technologically achievable problem."

I say this because early forms of the technology appear to already exist, e.g. https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/capabilities/research-l...

Yeah it seems like people are assuming the person engaging with the floor would be kept completely stationary. It seems to me if the floor were covering a larger area and therefore required less manipulation to keep you stationary then it could use minimal inputs to keep you within the borders and still allow your inner ear to receive most of the inertial inputs required to feel realistic.

You want to jump, spin, crouch, crawl, lie down

I played Squid Game VR at one of those whole room VR places recently. It was great! We could run, crouch, jump, spin, and interact with others. It all worked. It was even part of the games to do these things.

Felt surprisingly immersive. You forgot you were in some dark room in the basement.

I'm surprised something like The Void never caught on. We've had laser tag arenas for decades, just rent a warehouse and construct an arena where any wall in VR is represented in real life. For hygiene you mandate people buy a face gasket from you or bring the one they've used previously.

No treadmills needed and you can actually touch and lean on surfaces in VR.

it’s not a great business model because it’s a big space with a small number of people at a time… and the games are fun but more arcade like due to needing to get people in and out of there

with laser tag (also not a huge money maker) you can have many more people in the space, like 5x easily

We shall see, no point trying to guess where we will be in few decades.

One random idea out of ocean of ideas - we might realize with a bit of training our brain will smooth out the difference and we shall be well immersed even with these mild moves.

Maybe 100% immersion is a stupid yardstick, and say 85% is the sweet spot where you feel like you are having tons of fun without actually getting heart attacks. Think about it a bit - action games, shooters etc. put you consistently in situations that would be pure survival. Body goes into fuck-it-all mode where immediate survival is the only goal, side effects are ignored. But if you keep exposing yourself to such experiences regularly without actually having decades of brutal training and experience that real life requires from such a situation, over time you mess up your untrained heart, burn out forever various receptors and fear managing systems in our brains, and you just wreck yourself badly. There is a term 'adrenaline junkies' for a reason, its dependence just like the rest.

Maybe... who cares. Good invention, smart approach. Bring more, iterate, thumbs up.

Yeah it seems like it will be much easier to create an AR environment that uses pneumatics, robotics, lighting, AI, maybe technology like this to manipulate the environment around you into an actual physical "playscape" (e.g. creating virtual landscapes with real physical obstacles, hiding spots, ladders, sportsball, etc) while you still retain your sense of balance, motion.

Maybe you'll even get an exoskeleton so you can Hulk out :)

But yeah AR has a much brighter "active" feature, and VR will be relegated to "passive" reality.

John Carmack pointed out on X that there is a fatal flaw in this design:

“I am skeptical of something like this making an impact for consumer VR, but it should be possible to integrate the sensor input at the OpenXR level, allowing it to work with all apps without needing per-app specialization.

I personally could not get over the awful bout of motion sickness after I played my first “walking around” game on VR.

Calling this a fatal flaw is silly.

It may not fix everything with movement wearing a HMD, but one can imagine a whole lot of use cases without HMDs, and it might improve a lot of HMD use cases.

Sure but I think that Disney is likely to be presenting this as a potential consumer use case and if it can’t make traction there it seems pretty fatal if they can’t find a way to make money from it.

We see a lot of POCs like this that never make it anywhere.

I think it's far more likely that this will be used in the parks division: Selling to consumers involves far more variables than creating a VR enhanced ride. Only if it's successful as a ride, with time to get the problems figured out and the prices low enough, they will consider retail.

The video mentioned stage shows as an application, which makes total sense. It’s like the turning platform from Hamilton x1000.

As it stands though VR motion sickness is an even bigger problem for a park ride, sometimes you can get used to the sickness but if you’re doing it for a one off ride.

I think it depends how it's supposed to be used. If you try to use it like a treadmill in a tiny room then no - and I'm sceptical it would work at all, because the motors would probably be overpowered by any kind of decent sprint or jump.

However I could imagine this to be able to expand the abilities of venues that already have enough space to let you walk around: You could have people move on their own as long as there is space, but then "stealthily" move them around when they think they're standing still, allowing either much larger geometries than would even fit in a hall or let you play around with non-euclidean geometries, etc.

But yeah, in general I agree, I don't see how this will enable some kind of VR breakthrough or even just move us in the direction on one: Even with this tech working perfectly, you'd be restricted to scenarios where you walk on flat ground and never touch anything. Even a basic hike in the woods has more complex interactions than that, not even starting with the kind of over-the-top acrobatics that we're used to from non-VR videogames.

So yeah, you could probably do the Stanley Parable in VR with this (without the staircases and the drops), but I don't see much else.

I wonder how quickly you can spin someone while they're walking without it being perceptible. If you have a large area, you could use sneaky rotation to constrain movement while minimizing the amount of sliding people around you have to do. Though I'm not actually sure that'd be less noticeable at practical sizes.

you'd be restricted to scenarios where you walk on flat ground

I don’t think it’s either surprising or discouraging that flat walking surfaces get worked out before dynamic surfaces.

It might take a while, but it is inevitable.

A rolling wave, with a grippy active surface, could keep you centered while you perceived an upward slope. Seeing and feeling a vista of uneven slopes in VR would be fantastic. I would love Skyrim as a health app!

Also, simple tilting could provide the force feedback of changing speeds.

Motion sickness in VR is not universal. Many do just fine playing unoptimized, stuttering games/apps at 50fps including when using smooth locomotion.

It’s a problem most people experience, having worked in VR for years, I am still very sensitive.

I thought I didn’t have a problem until I played a action-y game for over an hour in one go and felt very nauseous after

I don’t know why he’s saying that. Treadmills solve motion, why wouldn’t this?

Have you tried a treadmill with a VR headset on? It’s not the movement that’s the problem it’s combining it with a VR headset.

I have tried it and I don't know what are you talking about. VR + treadmill is better than VR + stepping in place. And VR + stepping in place is better than VR + moving with a joystick.

The fact that this invention perhaps doesn't solve the immersion/sickness problem perfectly doesn't mean it is fatally flawed.

Even if it didn’t solve motion sickness, I think it would dramatically help with immersion for me.

Artificial movement brings me out of it more than anything.

If you make one of these big enough then you wouldn't notice the motion. That would of course be crazy expensive. Cool though.

Direct link to the goods: https://youtu.be/68YMEmaF0rs?t=203

Everyone in the video looks like they are walking funny, which kind of makes me wonder if it works if you walk normally?

It looks like it's limited in speed.

It's the first version

How do you make it fast without accidentally throwing people on their ass or ripping their fingers off if they trip?

How do people not fall of treadmills running at full speed?

It is impressive tech, but you are right, it looks like the person has sh*t their pants and are gingerly trying to get to the bathroom.

Burst out laughing so hard I startled my baby, thanks for that

Pretty sure it's because this demo floor is so small - in the clips of two people on the mat at once you can see if they took larger steps they'd physically step off the mat. I hesitate to assume what it feels like, but I imagine larger area mats may allow more natural steps

Walking normally would probably result in you falling forward.

This is basically like walking on ice, except you slip more slowly, and you also un-slip (your feet are actively moved) occasionally to recenter.

That limits both the speed you can pretend to walk, and the speed at which you can be moved back to center; because both relative movements are working against your natural balance.

You will never be able to work with or against the inertia of your body weight. That is the core limitation of any treadmill.

Quiet possible a balance issue. When walking you are moving you mass forward this pushes your feet backwards I would imagine that if not carful it could cause you to fall

It's a tech demo. It's not quite there yet.

It looks like their shuffling not walking.

If you walked at normal pace and stride I bet you’d just walk straight off the mat

For the lazy, from minute 3:28

So, from looking at the video, it looks like these are wheels that can be angled so they make contact with whatever is on top of them more than the wheels next to them, applying a tiny bit of momentum in the desired direction to then angle out of the way while another wheel takes over. This is a really cool solution, but I can't imagine it not feeling very weird while walking since it's not you being moved with your entire contact surface area instead of some parts of your shoe getting dragged somewhere. In general the unexpected inertia must also feel really weird.

The same is true for a treadmill, and that doesn’t feel really weird to walk on. Though omni-directional treadmills for VR have been tested before, and IIRC it’s the starting and stopping that feels weird.

and that doesn’t feel really weird.

Seeing people step on a treadmill for the first time I'd say it definitely does. You get used to it but the feeling is very different from regular walking/running.

If it’s running at a constant speed, it shouldn’t be any different according to Newtonian mechanics. Perhaps seeing the environment stand still is weird, but in VR (which I understand would be the main application here) that’s a non-issue.

It also needs to be sufficiently low-latency in its reactions to your change in speed. That’s not an issue when you’re walking or running outside. I think the need to maintain a very consistent speed is one of the difficulties in using a treadmill for the first time.

My issues with a treadmill is that there’s this wall right in front of me I run into if I run too fast, so it’s hard to run fast (even if I don’t run into the wall); the tread is narrow so I can’t move too far to the side (which makes it harder to run even if I don’t move to the side, I also find it a bit harder to run on a narrow sidewalk than a wide one); and of course I can’t run too slow or I’ll fall off. Seeing everything around me completely still as I run makes me nauseous, but that’s much less of an issue. The main issue, having to consciously constrain how I run (even if I actually run at a constant speed in a very straight line outside, so in theory it wouldn’t be necessary), makes running outside significantly easier and faster.

VR should stick to bike trainers. Making an immersive bike that can simulate hills and turns and feel natural seems achievable today and is relatively a piece of cake.

It's weird, but it's not "learning a bike" weird

IIRC it’s the starting and stopping that feels weird.

Well sure. You can't feel absolute velocity, you only feel acceleration.

Oh, right. Feeling no force feedback when you stop. Yikes. Must feel like trying to walk on ice.

Just reverse the inertial dampers to simulate the sensation.

I wonder how that interacts with being visually immersed in a VR environment. The walker will have no momentum, but still go through the motions of walking -- the visual feedback won't align with that of the inner ear.

Maybe the next step is to put the rolly floor on a platform that can be dynamically angled away from horizontal, effectively creating a pitch that makes the person feel like they're leaning (well, they would be leaning) and that might be enough to fool the inner ear? Gravity and acceleration are pretty interchangeable after all.

Also what if you walk into a virtual wall? Is there some collision detection and can it force you to stop somehow

oddly it’s vibration and tilting rather than wheels, it reduces the friction using this method so it might be more like walking in place on ice

If you actually read the article you will see it works in an entirely different manner.

It's the human-scale version of these parcel sorting devices

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRS0Uj2WdpA

See some comments up top -- the patent is for a fundamentally different source of friction control. Ultrasonic, not mechanical/directional.

Which should make it more amenable to higher-frequency control than mechanical systems would be able to shift at (given they're limited by mass).

That said, having seen high-throughput parcel sorting, the modern tech is amazing and the reason we have flow-through logistics and 1-2 day delivery.

They've got it slowed way down in that video.

Here's a system at closer to full-speed: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nPWTfT9sO2Y&t=26s https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JzURbt0qlqk&t=1m52s

It may also make pets hate it.

purrfect. they won't be trying to get under foot while you can't see them in your VR set up.

The patent folks are pointing to is not what this Holotile is made of. The Holotiles are slanted disks that can both rotate around the vertical axis and the slanted axis, with control motors for each tile. The Ultrasonic stuff is for a different use case, though could be integrated into this, it is not the primary motive mechanism.

That was the first thing that came to my mind as well.

Given that those things already exist for some time, I wonder if Disney actually used them as a base and then made their own version of them or something.

Used to be a ride at Coney Island: https://youtu.be/9Wz5vZmU8Dc?t=221

This is really neat.

Although in Star Trek, holodecks never had such a feature. Instead the simulation would use trickery to make sure you're never lead into the wall. E.g it would use illusions to trick you into thinking you're walking straight, but you're actually walking in a circle.

Depends on the implementation. I remember the TNG tech manual having a description of treadmills on the floor of the holodeck being used for exactly this.

Huh, I did not know that. Never read the tech manual, but I can't remember that being mentioned in show though.

There's a lot of neat ideas in the manual that I read about on memory alpha, that I wish they explored more in the show. Like the fact that they have dolphin crewmembers. They're only mentioned off hand in one episode, never shown, and never involved in the plot.

That explanation totally falls apart when you have a bunch of people in the holodeck at once, unless each person was being shown something different.

True, but I also don't get why you'd want multiple people in the same holotiled room if they're just wearing headsets and staying in the same spot(due to the holotiles) anyway.

In Star Trek holo decks used whatever convenient plot device that was necessary for the story.

Something like this could be considered such an illusion, explained in layman's terms.

But how does it work?

Little rolling elements that have a wheel in them. It knows where you are, and treadmills you back to a starting point as you move.

The idea is simple, but the details to make it usable, safe, work well, etc, are tricky.

edit: Reading more, it looks like it's mostly tilting, with perhaps high frequency vibration being used to modulate the amount of friction on each tile.

Wouldn't that feel like you are about to fall on your face the entire time?

Isn't that the same as walking?

Walking on a sheet of oil perhaps. Walking typically moves you forward, not backwards.

Wouldn't that feel like you are about to fall on your face the entire time?

Isn't that the same as walking?

You feel like you are falling on your face when you walk? I think you are referring to snowboarding!

Can’t wait for all of that, but I think really really impressive tech demos are going to be all we get for some time.

There are no rolling elements / wheels that I can see - it looks like low friction pucks that angle and raise/lower to push the objects laterally by having them slide to towards the lower pucks

A little idea utilizing a new level of indirection. You might call it "HoloTile meets Segway". A platform is one square meter (or rather circle) capable of moving in any direction (using conventional wheels). It is covered with HoloTile. A person on it just "walks" on it in any direction and the soft/engine just moves him or her in this direction, but much faster. Probably some self-balancing magic is needed in order to keep the person standing firmly

Put it on a drone instead and now we're talking!

Call it Disney’s Magic Carpet.

The hoverboard. Finally!

Alternately, just buy some Moonwalkers:

https://shiftrobotics.io/

If we're talking alternatives, why not roller skates?

Absolutely, that's why a bicycle/kick scooter is better than Segway, at least for your health :). This new tech is interesting. If we forget about the price, in my opinion the design is not that great. Btw, this reminds me of detachable inline skates (Hypno, Doop). While maybe the main function of riding them was ok, they were usually not looking so sexy, especially with the blades off.

One idea for VR is to hold these static and let you walk around normally but anytime you stop walking they move you back to the center.

You'd feel that.

Maybe not if you do it slowly. One hack that room-scale VR systems do to make you feel like you're in a larger space is subtly curve the direction you're walking, so you end up walking in a large arc but you "see" you're walking in a straight line. It's subtle enough for most people to not notice.

Can you link to a pic of such a room? The idea seems interesting

I'm not sure about a room with this, but I remember seeing a demo of this concept some years ago: https://youtu.be/1orUctibUow

The keyword is "redirected motion/walking".

That makes me think - if you can do that you can also make it emulate hyperbolic space or spherical space which would be interesting.

Oh that’s nice. Would love to see someone put it through its paces though. Like really try to run. It would be amazing to see something like this that you can’t physically get off of no matter how hard you try. That would be the pinnacle of what this thing can be.

While the walking demos show slow, methodical movement, the one demo with the chair ( https://youtu.be/68YMEmaF0rs?t=269 ) is definitely much faster. Maybe it can't handle automatically moving the human if they walk too fast and suddenly change direction (improvable with better software), maybe they don't want to overpromise what it can do.

Yeah the 'force' movement was really cool. Maybe this is the other way you could do the Jamiroquai video for Virtual Insanuty?

I've never really used VR stuff but I wonder what does it feel like in your head when your legs move and your view moves but your body doesn't?

And then the edge case is extreme but topologically, can something like this work for running where you can lose contact with the ground and your body is sort of compensating for momentum?

I guess treadmills work without people flying off them, so is it just a matter of getting the impulse right?

what does it feel like in your head when your legs move and your view moves but your body doesn't?

That could be fixed with some active tilting of the whole platform to create dynamic lateral forces.

Those little wheels will need to be strongly controlled & grippy to avoid real and perceived slippage.

I wanted to see the same but I think it might bring havoc to your balance control without training.

Community did it first.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=z4FGzE4endQ

(Fixed link)

VR treadmills were a thing long before they did it

I mean their in story VR rig was from the early 90s, that was part of the gag. I just thought of that clip when I saw the headline, but I will say the Disney one is truly amazing

Does anyone know how it actually works? I can’t tell on the video.

They don’t look like wheels.

Top comment lists the patent, you can read it. Many comments are making up answers and adding a bunch of technical jargon to sound legit

Tilted cylinders that rotate around the main cylinder axis to push you along the tangent of the outer lip of the raised portion, and rotate along global up axis to change where the raised portion is, changing direction.

It acts like a roller on its side that can be rotated to change direction, but probably has advantages mechanically or with not crushing your toes or sucking in your shoelaces or something, or just less friction from the direction rotation change.

Outside of VR, there's some other future uses (with the big assumption it will be easy & cheap to implement some years in the future) that are interesting if you have a floor that can direct people/objects.

Somewhere of course like a Disney theme park or an airport where you choose your destination and you're shuttled to your gate with your luggage following.

Or perhaps a secure room/floor in a building that if you don't have authorization to you simply cannot walk into without being pushed out of it.

If we go dystopian, imagine a business suspects you of shoplifting and simply doesn't let you leave, or shuttles you to security automatically.

But the suspicion is unfounded. Profit!

Beyond the VR thing. I keep thinking this could have more immediate impact on manufacturing and logistics. Imagine a delivery truck with this on the floor that could optimally organize packages dynamically.

You mean like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRS0Uj2WdpA

"inching" being the key term here

The demo of him sitting on a chair and being moved around shows IMO impressive acceleration. It's probably dependent on how much surface area is contacting the floor, but it certainly looks responsive enough for real usecases.

Disney researches / develops some really cool stuff. Their Disney Research Hub channel is a goldmine.

One of my favorites is Touché. The world becomes your touchscreen: https://youtu.be/E4tYpXVTjxA?si=Sbh97JURR9NGdeiS

This is really cool tech, but the first application concept is hilarious [0]. If you hook a cereal bowl up to this device, you can have it make a loud sound if your child puts their hand in the bowl as opposed to using a spoon? That's simultaneously funny and utterly dystopian.

[0] https://youtu.be/E4tYpXVTjxA?si=5XEqcynBDerfpQ6P&t=173

Control immersion is massively overated. WASD won for a reason

WASD?

Until there is tech that makes a 3D feeling surface that can create corners, people, anything, vr will feel hollow. At this point, a full body suit that creates haptic responses to simulate feeling an object seems more feasible than a static exterior surface like this that fulfills the other half of the vr illusion.

This is basically the opposite of haptics. It's trying not to be noticeable while solving a problem essentially unrelated to perception.

With a large enough version of this, safety could be an issue. Imagine getting trapped in the center and never being able to leave.

21st century version of the pit of Sarlacc.

In its belly you will find a new definition of pain and suffering, as you are subjected to new iterations of Star Wars over a thousand years.

What is good here they are trying to do something unusual. Disnep movies and tech and fascinating

But what about inertia? Is there a way to eliminate that?

Boy it's really annoying that videos get embedded from social media sites these days with no player controls on them

And how does it perform when rotating, starting or stopping fast?

Nobody walks like that. I guess it only works if walk like a teenager sneaking out of the house late at night.

I wonder if you could get away with two motors per "pixel". One motor spinning the fixed tilt wheel and the other rotating the axis of the spinning wheel around the vertical axis.

This setup should be able to impart the motion in any direction.

Is that how this works?

What would happen if the interior of a tube was lined with these, could they move an object cylinder through the tube?

What if you have the exterior covered in these, could they move (easily) a donut surrounding it?

What happens if you have these face each other?

can these be use for super slippery loading sled-tracks in ships, planes, trains? Whats the weight limits?

Can they be scaled down really small and basically put around a cable-line to slide things along like a zipline?

Seeing the video of multiple people on the holotile, in close proximity but completely oblivious to each other struck me as an apt metaphor for this technology.

He's not wrong about dancers learning to do amazing moves on this surface tho.

When I saw this, I was wondering whether Florida has a new startup-style VR project -- this time with the “Magic” Kingdom.

Unfortunately for the Sunshine State, Disney’s two research labs are located in Los Angeles and Zürich.

https://la.disneyresearch.com/labs/

When it comes to VR, for theme park use it’s hard to see how this would be more cost effective than a large open space, maybe with many floors stacked to maximize throughput. For home use this seems like it will never be cheap enough to be worth it. It’s very cool tech, though.

This is totally a bit of speculation, but given Disney is one of the majors (only major?) with an app for the launch of Apple Vision Pro, [0] I can't help but wonder what is coming from the NDA discussions between the teams working on HMD technology.

If the dais/stage/platform of the HoloTile product Lanny Smoot demos is a true prototype, it's likely miniaturizable (as well as scaled up) for implementation in both court-sized and entertainment room-sized versions.

The future gets closer and closer.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jy94Ezsj9NE

Over my head, but heres the patent (pdf): https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloa...

This really doesn't seem that new, just a neater implementation of prior competitor products like KatWalk and Virtuix Omni

Super cool but I'm guessing a long way to go. Notice that nobody lifts their feet when walking on this. I'm not sure if it's fear (those small careful steps conjure images of people ice skating for the first time) or if the tech doesn't work well in that scenario.

I usually shit on VR but this looks kind of cool. I can’t help but notice the people are basically shuffling around on it so I doubt it will scale effectively, but it’s cool.

In the video they ask, "where do you see this tech being used" and then seconds later show us someone moving a file cabinet with their mind.

I'm guessing the first place we will see this is in some live action Star Wars show to make things move with the Force.

Is there a contest for the most stuffy and uncomfortable product reveal?

When did IGN become a ad riddled hell hole?

So many questions....If you're in the middle of a room with this floor...... um, how do you get back out? is there an escape hatch? Could this be used in some fancy new prison? Could they add some sort of energy generation, so walking generates energy? Would that create even more incentive to incarcerate more people for longer? Where do I get one?

You can read the patent here: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20180217662A1/en

Nice but Teamlab put Disney behind a while ago. They have no answer yet.

That reminds me of the battlefield3 simulator. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eg8Bh5iI2WY

So annoying, it detects where I'm connecting from and redirects changing the language

Its nice to see Disney doing something other than destroying the movies, cartoons, and comics I loved as a kid.

Can this technology be used in exo-skeletons? Providing support and mechanisms for movement?

This is neat and all, but it seems to be yet another attempt to solve the (to me less-interesting) problem of how to have people use their feet as input for navigation in VR, while keeping them stationary; rather than an attempt at actually creating any high-fidelity sensation of moving through space in VR, according to your own human "internal accelerometer". (I.e. the sense you have that combines inputs from your inner ear, wind against your skin, interoception as g-forces smush your organs around, etc.)

I presume that doing the latter would necessarily involve allowing you to actually move away from center within a bounded space — and then subtly re-centering you whenever you're not moving.

Has any company ever put effort into developing a VR floor technology that works more like that? One that allows you to actually feel like you're moving?

I bring this up, because it seems like the technology on display here could actually be made to do something akin to this, with a few more tweaks:

1. build a large room covered in this surface;

2. configure the surface to not actively slide you around while you're moving, but instead, to only begin "re-centering" you when you stay still (or when you are walking slowly enough that your "internal accelerometer" isn't receiving much input anyway);

3a. design the VR experiences consumed through such a platform, so that you'd mostly only have reason to walk, with "free-roam" areas where running would make sense only lasting a few seconds at a time, broken up with dialogue / interactions / etc. to give the floor time to re-center you.

3b. Or, if these are VR games, then as another option, use a stamina system in the game that depletes as you run in real life (bonus if your character's stamina drains exponentially the further you get from the center of the floor); and have the player wear a force-feedback resistance system (i.e. a TENS unit on their legs) that effectively cripples you physically from doing any more running, for as long as your character is out of stamina. (Verisimilitude!)

4. Either way, you probably still need a fallback if you manage to get near the edge of the room somehow. Like if you're completely ignoring what's happening on-screen and just running in a scene where your character is supposed to be stationary + talking to someone. So have the floor actively re-center you, like is shown here, only when you get near the edge — and hyperbolically, with more force as you get closer to the edge.

5. Some impetuous people will run full-tilt just to see if they can overcome the floor. So make sure to pad the walls. :)

That being said, while I think that kind of set-up might work... the real trouble with it is that a passive system doesn't prevent people from bumping into one-another. Which is fine if players' real-world positions are meant to correlate 1:1 with their in-game positions (or if, like in the demo video, there's no true per-individual "VR", just a shared wraparound screen in the room.) But it probably means that for true "immersive VR worlds" (i.e. a hypothetical VRMMO), you'd need one huge room per player. And that's a bit impractical, price- and space-wise!

I imagine this has uses in more than just flooring for a Holodeck-like uses. I can imagine a smart factory powered by AI using this to move things around, or assisted living where you can help disabled people move around. Some form of it could be used underneath seating to create an advanced type of wheelchair or mobility device.

Very cool but the killer app, watching someone sprint in place with a blindfold on is not seen

now do climate change

Can we have it in the shoes, instead of the floor? Or, some combination of the two, working together?

(which may well, in some ways, be akin to the question "would you prefer to stand on a conveyor belt, or roller skates?" - but the errant thought occurs regardless..)

Carmack is skeptical

https://x.com/id_aa_carmack/status/1750557236798148613?s=46

The videos make this floor look slick as ice. I wouldn’t want to walk around on something like that with a vr headset on. Sounds like a recipe for a broken arm.

One thing my mom (an occupational therapist) brought up when seeing this was the potential applications for therapy. I'm not sure of the nuances, but one concept that comes to mind is that you could increase force on a user such that you can get a persons strength increasing without them even noticing it.

I'm not really sure what types of solutions currently exist in these spaces, and I'm sure that this would be a very expensive solution for this topic, but future thinking possibilities of this type of thing seem like they could have applications outside of just VR.

What if I could now tilt the platform - on which the HoloTiles are mounted - in all directions?

I'm bullish on this! I'll never pay to go to disney world or disney land (can never get these two parks straight) but this is a clear symptom of staying power of a technology.

This is better news for VR than facebook could ever manage.

Hope nobody will die getting trapped on this.

It’s a treadmill that attaches to a phone you can strap to your face. Neat, I guess.