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 <i>input</i> for navigation in VR, while keeping them stationary; rather than an attempt at actually creating any high-fidelity sensation of <i>moving through space</i> 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.)<p>I presume that doing the latter would necessarily involve allowing you to <i>actually move away from center</i> within a bounded space — and then subtly re-centering you whenever you're <i>not</i> moving.<p>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?<p>I bring this up, because it seems like the technology on display here <i>could</i> actually be made to do something akin to this, with a few more tweaks:<p>1. build a large room covered in this surface;<p>2. configure the surface to <i>not</i> 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);<p>3a. design the VR experiences consumed through such a platform, so that you'd <i>mostly</i> only have reason to walk, with "free-roam" areas where running would <i>make sense</i> only lasting a few seconds at a time, broken up with dialogue / interactions / etc. to give the floor time to re-center you.<p>3b. Or, if these are VR <i>games</i>, 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!)<p>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 <i>actively</i> 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.<p>5. Some impetuous people will run full-tilt just to see if they can overcome the floor. So make sure to pad the walls. :)<p>That being said, while I think that kind of set-up might <i>work</i>... 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 <i>per player</i>. And that's a bit impractical, price- and space-wise!