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Walking Dream – single-player adventure game for the Oculus Quest

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Re: Walking Dream – single-player adventure game for the Oculus Quest

#11

Post by TheRealSteel »

gfaure wrote: post #3

The most interesting thing here for me is the use of redirected walking ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redirected_walking ). I saw the video accompanying the paper but this would be the first game I've seen try to use it.

I look forward to trying this. Improving locomotion in VR would be great.

But I feel we may be overthinking it. I believe simply tracking leg movement and having the player jog on the spot is the solution.

Having simulated this myself by holding forward on the controller while jogging on the spot, I believe it's the way forward. If you have a headset, give it a try. I admit walking doesn't feel very natural, but jogging works well.

Of course, games don't have this option with most popular current hardware (but foot trackers and whole body trackers do exist).

It would be tricky to blend/differentiate movement and jogging, but I think it's doable.

I predict that future headsets will do inside-out tracking of your entire body, including the legs (they made need a flip out camera to be far enough out from the body to do this). They've already put out a software update for the Quest that does surprisingly good controller-free hand tracking.

There was also a comment on HN a few weeks ago (I'll try to find it) where someone implemented this system and said it worked well.

Re: Walking Dream – single-player adventure game for the Oculus Quest

#15

Post by andybak »

TheRealSteel wrote: post #11
gfaure wrote: post #3

The most interesting thing here for me is the use of redirected walking ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redirected_walking ). I saw the video accompanying the paper but this would be the first game I've seen try to use it.

I look forward to trying this. Improving locomotion in VR would be great. But I feel we may be overthinking it. I believe simply tracking leg movement and having the player jog on the spot is the solution. Having simulated this myself by holding forward on the controller while jogging on the spot, I believe it's the way forward. If you have a headset, give it a try. I admit walking doesn't feel very natural, but jogg…

> Of course, games don't have this option with most popular current hardware

There's a great low tech solution - pair your mobile phone and leave it in your pocket. The accelerometer data is more than good enough to detect jogging.

There was an app for Steam VR that did this and I recall it worked quite well.

EDIT: here: http://pocketstrafe.com/

Re: Walking Dream – single-player adventure game for the Oculus Quest

#16

Post by evilturnip »

TheRealSteel wrote: post #11
gfaure wrote: post #3

The most interesting thing here for me is the use of redirected walking ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redirected_walking ). I saw the video accompanying the paper but this would be the first game I've seen try to use it.

I look forward to trying this. Improving locomotion in VR would be great. But I feel we may be overthinking it. I believe simply tracking leg movement and having the player jog on the spot is the solution. Having simulated this myself by holding forward on the controller while jogging on the spot, I believe it's the way forward. If you have a headset, give it a try. I admit walking doesn't feel very natural, but jogg…

treadmill solutions seems to be the way the industry is going. The Kat Walk C is a kickstarter project that actually works pretty well, and relatively small:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqchs9xMLCw

Re: Walking Dream – single-player adventure game for the Oculus Quest

#18

Post by rspicer »

gwillen wrote: post #4
gfaure wrote: post #3

The most interesting thing here for me is the use of redirected walking ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redirected_walking ). I saw the video accompanying the paper but this would be the first game I've seen try to use it.

I will be very curious what the minimum area requirement for the game is. I can't imagine redirected walking being very convincing in the Quest's minimum 6.5 x 6.5 ft square.

I agree that 6.5ft^2 is probably too small for a good RDW experience based on the gain numbers I'm familiar with. The tracked volumes of the experiments I was a part of were all on the scale of ~15-20 ft square. (I'm not a researcher, really, but I was a developer at a lab that did some RDW research -- for instance, https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/2931002.2931018). There are some tricks that the literature suggests could help (forcing the user to turn >360 degrees in place, exploiting change blindness to get people to accept non-euclidean spaces, etc) but I believe it's not controversial to assert that the user is going to realize they're not walking straight if someone tries to get them to walk a circle with radius ~3ft with traditional RDW cues!

Re: Walking Dream – single-player adventure game for the Oculus Quest

#19

Post by andybak »

tazjin wrote: post #9
sxp wrote: post #2

> Conrad was ... the author of several technical books, including the classic "Land of Lisp". That book has very interesting art. I hope he brings that style to the game. I hope he does something strange like implement the game in Lisp and use some sort of self-modifying game engine. > Walking Dream, on the other hand, is built on a brand new combat engine with a rich weapons crafting system. This system is shared by…

I immediately recognised the Land of Lisp art style - looking forward to trying this. On a side note, this is one of the few things where I would like to be able to sign up for a newsletter.

> On a side note, this is one of the few things where I would like to be able to sign up for a newsletter.

How does one solve the "tell me about this in a few weeks/months when you launch" without email notification?

There's no reliable way to notify someone via Twitter or Facebook. Timelines are too noisy and there's no mass private messaging APIs.

I love my email but I've noticed that projects and products are beginning to appear that shun email communication totally.

I nagged a few projects into starting a simple list via Google Forms because I knew I wouldn't notice when they launched any other way. But "Me nagging" doesn't seem very scalable.

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