Imagine yourself back in high school, entering your gym – not for sports but to take an immersive virtual reality field trip in which you can walk for miles. Professor Eric Hodgson of Miami University, Ohio, a psychologist, studying human spatial ...
Sandys VR's insight:
This actually is pretty amazing. I was able to try the "shoe-lace tracker" from Prof. Hodgson this year at IEEE VR in Orlando. Off the trade show floor in the hall he had his equipment set up. Well, set up is actually a little bit too much, it's just a backpack with a laptop, an HMD and two little gyroscope tracker that click onto your shoe-lace. Although I didn't have shoe-laces on my ballerinas we got it to work (we actually taped it to my shoes). And then I started walking through a virtual supermarket in full scale. Actually they didn't watch out for me properly and I ran into a wall and afterwards into a door. It works amazingly well! It was a little jumpy sometimes but I could even walk outdoors with reasonable results.
Afterwards, Eric showed me some pretty impressive graphs comparing WorldViz's active optical tracking results to the results of his tracker. They we're aligned almost perfectly! It's really impressive work the guys in Ohio do. The HIVE is pretty awesome. I still hope to be able to visit them at some point. Imagine a basketball field for VR :)
And I just realized that not long ago I wrote almost the same about this amazing piece of technology... Just a few scoops down, there was an interview with Eric Hodgson.