Here’s How That Disney 360° Treadmill Works

mox@lemmy.sdf.org to Technology@lemmy.world – 324 points –
Here’s How That Disney 360° Treadmill Works
hackaday.com
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Really interesting video. I can imagine playing an MMORPG where you get around by actually walking and running. Suddenly the biggest computer geeks would be super fit.

like when the collective world went outside at the same time when Pokemon Go launched. Our quiet downtown area was amazing to walk through. all those people.

Kind of a shame that the pandemic was so soon after. I wonder how much it affected the game's popularity.

It was 3.6 years after? And it was pretty dead at that point. Like it was popular with a core group who were making Niantic and TPC tons of money, but the phenomenon was dead by the anniversary.

It died in my area when they dropped the amount of spawn nodes to the point where you couldn't really walk around. You had to drive pretty far at that point, and that kill let most people's enthusiasm.

I don't know if it was complaints by local businesses or what, but after that I never saw large groups walking around again.

Niantic was already killing interest in the game long before COVID wrecked it up a good bit, and they haven't let up on pissing off the Pokemon Go gaming community since.

COVID hit and they released "play safe" features like remote raids and increased spawn radius. Then they started enshitification and striped features, raised prices, started starving players of resources and new features were pay gated. It's still mildly popular but you need to join discord groups to raid.

Just think how annoying it would be if like the best players in the world were only good because they were literally Olympic sprinters and just ran literal circles around you in a fight lol

More realistically, it'd be nerds who found a way to hack or cheat their controller to give them ridiculous speed, lol

Unikely.. Kinda why VR also didnt get too popular, most players just prefer "classic" controls and not movement-controls.
But this is huge for VR and other usages of this, probably even useful for production routing, but i dont have any knowledge of that.

Personally I'm surprised that there are so few non-full-body-movement games. It's amazing to sit down and play whatever game in a completely different 3D world. Moss is a great platformer in VR, pinball games are really cool in VR, and driving sims with a wheel and pedals kick absolut ass in VR. I bet games like FIFA, NBA, NHL etc would be amazing, top down car games would be amazing etc etc.

It's just really difficult and expensive to make proper games for VR, and the market isn't quite there for it to be worth it. Lots of people still say Half Life Alyx is the only "full" VR game made by a popular company while a lot of PSVR titles felt like tech demos.

The only real way for vr to explode would be for already established companies to make vr controls for their games, I'm thinking service games specifically. Imagine roaming in ff14 or wow in VR. I would still do hardcore content with standard controllers but I would 100 percent roam around doing stuff in VR.

Well what I'm saying is there should be more "less full" VR games. VR could be a somewhat simple add-on to many types of games. The difficult thing with VR is the object interaction, the handling of resources etc. if you're in a large 1:1 world, but if you're implement VR as basically just an extra viewport it's not that difficult (for many types of games that are not FPS) and it could still add a lot to the game. Or you can do something like Moss, which is a really cool game.

It really isn't, you're probably just not aware of all the "proper" games that are out there for VR. Browse the Steam store and look at all the VR games sometime.

I have about 40 VR games in my Steam library, for example. I admit I haven't played them all yet but I've played a lot of them and most of them are great. There are tons more that I could buy if I had the time to play all that shit.

Speedrunners must be able to speedrunning irl.

I've recently been thinking about what I am calling double or compound walking where you walk with both the joystick and your real body for potentially combined movement speed. I don't have enough room to verify if it works in any games but after I move I have a decently long hallway I could test it in. My thinking is to work around the abysmal stamina in the vr games I've played so far and weirdly slow movement speed.

The holotile would probably need some way to pass its tracking to the game if that was being used though.