Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and How the tech are You? And as the poets of Stained once said, it's been a while since I did an episode dedicated to virtual reality, but I thought it would do one this week because I actually saw a cool video that showed Disney imagineer and now Inventor Hall of Famer Lanny Smoot show off an invention called the hollow tile floor, which could, among other things, potentially provide a solution for folks who want to explore a virtual space while simultaneously moving around their very real, you know, physical environments with their actual physical bodies here in the real world, you know, without bumping into things. And that prompted me to think of the challenges that inventors face when designing those kinds of systems. But let's lay it out. Even though some of this is pretty obvious stuff. As I'm sure all of you know, virtual reality is on one end of the spectrum of mixed reality. So with virtual reality, you have replaced some or maybe even all, sensory input from the real world with computer generated material instead. So it's possible that with a VR system you could have all visual and audio data provided by computers, but you might also have other stuff too. A computer might control a selection of fans to blow air at you to simulate wind or you know, rushing air if you're flying, or something like that. You might even have a system that releases certain sense, sort of how Disney's soaring over California will blast riders with the smell of oranges as you appear to fly over a grove of fruit trees. You can have haptic feedback systems. These are ones that give you some sort of tactile feedback, so you might have like a vest that vibrates when you are encountering a dangerous situation or something like that. They're all sorts of different ways where a computer could provide the sensory input that your body normally would get just through navigating through a physical space. But the thing to remember is that the computer is providing all this input. The computer is replacing whatever is actually in your real world environment with computer generated alternatives to that, right, and these things can be very convincing. People have felt scared or anxious while walking up to a virtual cliff side, even though they know that in reality they're standing on a solid floor in a room. There's no chance of them plummeting off the side of a cliff because there's no cliff there. But the experience of seeing it in virtual reality can still be convincing enough to prompt your body to go into a stress response. In fact, it could be so convincing that some mental health professionals actually use VR systems and scenarios as part of immersion therapy with patients who experienced various phobias. I remember interviewing one psychiatrist many years ago when I was working on a piece about VR in medicine, and this psychiatrist actually used an airport scenario, a virtual airport scenario, to help patients who have a fear of flying go through a simulated process of going to an airport, walking through the airport, making their way to the departure gate, all the steps they would actually have to do in real life if they were going on an airplane trip, and it was all meant to kind of gently confess front the experience, and patients would report feeling similar sensations of anxiety and fear while they were doing so, even though they knew deep down that they weren't actually in an airport. But the scenarios gave those patients the opportunity to experience these situations in a safe and controlled space and gave them confidence to build up their tolerance and understanding of the situation so that they could ultimately go and do it in the real world further down in their therapy. And it was a really cool thing to learn about. In many ways, it reminds me of how thrill seekers enjoy things like roller coasters, right, because roller coasters, assuming that they are properly designed, simulate dangerous situations. Right, That's where the thrill comes from. You're not in control, You're going along a track at high speeds, up and down, maybe in twists and loops, all this sort of stuff. It simulates being in a dangerous situation, and thus it is thrilling, but at the same time, we ultimately know, or at least we certainly hope that the ride is safe and that we're not in any real danger. It's very similar in that regard, But there are a lot of different challenges that come along with virtual reality, and I think That's one of the many reasons that virtual reality still isn't as widely adopted as you might expect it to be considering how long VR has actually been around. For those of you who are old enough to remember, you might recall that back in the nineteen nineties, when VR was first starting to become a big deal, that a lot of money was poured into research and development, but ultimately it kind of petered out. Some folks even opened up VR arcades that gave the general public the opportunity to experience it for themselves. In fact, I did this. There was a mall that was, you know, not too far from where I lived called Gwinet Play Small, and they had a little VR arcade. You could go there and I think it was like five or ten bucks for like five minutes of playtime and you would play the game. I remember. It's one that lots of people know about from that time period called Dactyl Nightmare, and you were fighting against polygonal pterodactyls as well as other players while navigating through a very simple geometric space. It wasn't terribly compelling from a graphics standpoint, but it was really neat to quote unquote inhabit a game. However, the limitations like those graphical limitations and the fact that you really couldn't do that much in the games. The games were pretty darn simple and limited because of how much computational processing power was required for it to actually work. It meant that people found out that we had a really long way to go to make VR what it had been kind of hyped up to be. The expectation of what VR could do was at a huge gap compared to what it could actually do. And you got to remember, like there were a lot of limitations. The headsets back then were huge, and they were heavy. In fact, they were so heavy that most of the time you were talking about a headset that would be suspended from a frame in the ceiling. The suspension would let you turn left or right, so it's not like you were stuck in place. You weren't like in a static position. You could turn left or right, but you couldn't really move forward or backward because you had this harness essentially that was carrying much of the weight of the headset. If it weren't, then it would be far too heavy for you to wear it comfortably, especially for like five minutes so in order to keep you in place, you also would end up standing on a pedestal that had a rail around it at about waste height, and this would keep you from toppling off the side right, so you could turn left and right, but you couldn't actually step forward or backward or anything like that. There were other issues too. Some systems struggled with latency. That's the delay between when you take in action and when you see it reflected on the screen in front of you. That delay creates this swimmy effect that for lots of people, including me, can lead to motion sickness, and it is incredibly unpleasant. So the various limitations sapped away a lot of the enthusiasm around VR, and so funding dried up not long after that. There were still folks who were working in the field of virtual reality, but they really had to scramble to get funding in order to push research forward. So progress slowed way down because there just wasn't enough financial support to keep it going at a good pace. But some other tech fields ended up doing quite well, and the VR industry would end up taking notes essentially scavenging, in order to get things that other tech fields had developed and repurposing them for the needs of VR, and one of the big ones would be home video games, specifically home video game consoles that became a popular source for innovation and equipment that VR would end up repurposing. And those advances were meant to enhance console systems and to create competitive advantages against other console systems, but the VR space would appropriate the technology to help advance their own research, so stuff like motion controls and camera systems and light guns and all sorts of other peripherals and control systems and functions would find a second life over in VR research. We're talking about things like even the Nintendo Power Glove, which admittedly was a pretty lack luster video game controller, even though it looked cool and every kid I knew wanted one because I grew up in the era of the Nintendo, and when the Nintendo Power Glove came out, everyone thought that was the coolest thing ever. Turned out to not be the most practical control system, but it was something that ended up being useful over with VR research. Now, eventually we get up to the twenty tens, when a teenager named Palmer Lucky It produced a prototype VR headset that would eventually become known as the Oculus Rift. Later on Facebook, Slash Meta would acquire Oculus and these days what used to be the Oculus Quest is now the Meta Quest. So it all dates back to the early twenty tens. Lucky was confident that he was onto something, and he even dropped out of college in an effort to develop a mass produced VR headset that could become a consumer electronics item. Like it wouldn't just be something that you would find in you a VR arcade or an amusement park or something. It could be something that people could actually own and use in their own homes and VR could explode. So again into the whole Oculus story would require an episode, at least one, probably a couple plus. Then we would probably have to acknowledge that Palmer Lucky has said and done some stuff that has rubbed some people the wrong way to put it lightly. But rather than get bogged down in all of that, let's just take a little side step. Well, just mention that at this point in the twenty tens we started to see a real push to get VR to the consumer space, and that's still where we are today. For certain elements of VR, there have been tons of advancements. The headset technology has really come a long way to the point where now you don't even need to have a tethered headset. So for a very long time, if you wanted to have the performance capabilities needed to have a good VR experience, your headset needed to have a physical connection to a very powerful computer. That requirement has kind of faded away over the last half a decade, where now you can have an untethered headset. That's a huge, huge leap forward, and you know, it's possible now to make a headset that someone can wear at least for a short gaming session without having to mount it to the ceiling right like you. They're no longer these enormous, clunky, heavy things, although they are still significant, like you can't just wear one all day and not feel it. They will start to wear on you after a while, but you can at least play for you know, a half hour or an hour typically without it being too much of a burden, so to speak. Controllers were getting better too. Nintendo and Sony had both created control systems that used cameras and gyroscopes and sensors and other technology to let players interface with games by using gesture controls and waving controllers around rather than just manipulating a joystick or a direction pad or something like that. And this was seen as an important component for VR as well, because anything that lets you move closer to the way you would if you were actually doing the same sort of stuff in the real world really supports immersion when you're in the virtual world. If the only way you can interact with the virtual world around you is to hold a traditional game pad in your hands and use joysticks and buttons, that creates a kind of layer of abstraction that interferes with immersion. It doesn't necessarily break it entirely, but it's not helpful, right because that's not how we interact with the real world when we're going around all the time. Plus, controllers act as a kind of barrier to entry because for non video game players having to use a game controller, it can be an obstacle. It's an unfamiliar experience. In fact, I would argue that one of the big reasons that Nintendo we became so popular when it first came out is that Nintendo created a few non traditional motion based methods to interact with the game system, and that really appealed to people who had never played video games before. Because it didn't have this barrier to entry. You could move around and that was controlling the game, and I think that was a big reason why the we took off, and it's one of the reasons why VR companies look for ways to kind of reduce that barrier of entry. Well, clearly, all those motion controls were very useful for VR, but there's another challenge that relates to this. How do you actually navigate around a virtual space while inhabiting a physical one. That's what we're really going to focus on for the rest of this episode. Before we get into all of that, however, we need to take a quick break to thank our sponsors and we'll be right back. Okay, so you're in a physical space, but you want to play a virtual experience of some sort. Maybe it's a game, maybe it's a virtual tour, whatever it might be. How do you move around once you're inside the virtual space? Is there a way to make it feel like you're actually moving through a real space even though it's all virtual? Can you do that? Or are you stuck using video game controllers to either virtually walk or as a lot of games and experiences do teleport short distances as you navigate through the environment, so that instead of physically moving, you point a controller at a space that you can see on your screen, and you select it and it zaps you there, and then you can turn around and look. Maybe you interact a little bit, and then when you want to move, you do it again. Like that's obviously not how we really move. I wish it were. I would love to be able to teleport, even if it's just line of sight. It would be super cool. That's not how the real world works, and so it is a bit of an immersion breaking experience. So creating an alternative to a controller based system is a non trivial problem. People are experiencing these virtual reality scenarios inside real physical spaces, and these spaces have real obstacles in them, like furniture or walls. Meanwhile, the person in VR can't see these real obstacles right because everything they're seeing is coming courtesy of a computer system. It's not reflective of the real world at all. It's all what the computer has generated, and the computer might not be generating the fact that there's a coffee table in front of you or a wall immediately to your left. So while in VR it might seem like you're in a meadow of flowers, in reality, you could be a step and a half away from a footstool that's just waiting to ruin your whole afternoon. So moving physically through a space while you appear to be in a virtual environment is dangerous. This danger becomes compounded if you want more than one person moving around within that same physical environment at the same time. So for a VR experience involving multiple people, you have to actually figure out how can you have all of these people come together safely within that virtual environment. Now, one option is to only allow people to join over a network connection, so they're not actually in the same physical space at all, right, like you could each be in say, your own homes or in adjoining rooms or whatever. But what if you actually want to have people grouped together physically, because there are times when you might want that. Imagine that you're doing a military training simulation and you're moving with a squad of soldiers, or maybe you're playing a fantasy RPG style computer game and you're with a party of adventurers and you're all in the same space and you're all working together. You can even reach over and tap your friend's shoulders silently to indicate it's time for them to move forward. That would be pretty cool, but you would have to have a way to orient everyone together and to keep them from running into each other. This is a non trivial problem. For one thing you'd have to build in the orientation feature. I'll explain this in an example. So let's say that you and I are together and we want to play a cooperative VR game, which sounds awesome. I would love to play a game with you, and so we each put on our headsets. We're in the same physical space. But let's say just because the way we're standing and putting on our headsets, we're not really paying attention. You're facing the north wall of this physical room, and I happen to be facing the east wall of this physical space, this physical room, and we put our headsets on, but the game just establishes that we're both facing the same direction within the virtual world, even though physically we're at right angles to each other. So the game thinks that the north wall is your current version of forward, the east wall is my current version of forward, and unfortunately, it thinks we're both facing the same forward. So within the game, if I were to look over to my side, I would see you and it would look like you were facing the same direction. I am same for you. If you were to look over, you would see me, and it looks like we're both facing the same direction. If I stepped toward the east wall to you, it would look like I took a step forward. If you took a step toward the north wall, to me, it would look like you took a step forward, even though we're now moving within right angles to each other in the real world. Now you can correct for this, this is not like an unsolvable issue. You can build in what is essentially a compass within the equipment so that it knows what physical direction you're facing, and that compass can feed the VR system information, letting it know that the two players are actually facing different directions in the physical world, so the game can feed each of us a different view, so that in the game, we would be facing different directions and I would see, oh, I'm at a right angle to you, I need to switch. I need to turn ninety degrees so that we're facing the same way, and then that solves the issue. Right The hardware could also instead of using a compass, it could use some other method like cameras. Right, you could have a camera system both externally like on the system itself, and you could also have cameras built into the headsets, and together these can establish which way we're facing within the real world, and that can feed into our experience in the virtual one, so that we don't have this issue. So it is possible to work around it, but the point is you have to build it in. It's not just naturally there. Otherwise you end up with like an mcsher kind of situation as people are moving in different directions in the real world in order to move in the same direction in the virtual one. The old VR arcades had a real elegant solution for all this because the players were held captive on those pedestals. Right. You were standing on a little platform and you had to rail around you, so you couldn't go anywhere. The headsets were all tethered to the VR system. You had these huge cables that would descend connecting to the headsets, but that also provided a solution for orientation. You physically couldn't move around the room, and the headsets were wired in such a way that they could show a specific point of view depending upon which way your head was pointed. But that doesn't work so well if you want a more flexible and free experience, if you want a bunch of untethered systems that are all connected together in the same physical space. Now, there have been numerous attempts to translate physical movement into virtual commands, and one of them relies largely on the fact that we human beings are not terribly good at walking in a straight line. When we're blindfolded, we have a tendency to veer off. We don't walk in a straight line. Typically, when we're blindfolded, we walk in a more curved path. Now, you can overcome this with a lot of practice. I'm not saying that there's no way to walk a straight line, it's just not how we typically move. If we aren't using our eyes to give virtual cues so that we stay on track, Generally speaking, we're prone to walk in circles. But with the right approach in VR, it's actually possible to take advantage of this and turn it into a feature, not a bug. By presenting subtle visual cues within the virtual environment, you can influence how a person perceives their surroundings and by extension, how they move through those surroundings by changing visual distances between points by small amounts, or by adjusting the arc of how much your point of view changes as you turn your head. These tweaks can be subtle enough so that they don't seem strange to us, and yet they can affect how we move through the space. So we would perceive that we're moving in a straight line, but in fact the system is very subtly moving us in a curve so that we are able to continue forward progression, but we're not in danger of walking so far that we slam into the wall. And this method is called redirected walking, which makes sense right, and it does work, but only up to a point. You can't design a VR experience that moves people in a really tight curve and then convince them that they're walking on a straight tightrope. That just doesn't work. So there's a limit to how much you can redirect someone before they no longer feel like they're walking in a straight line. There's going to be a disconnect from what they see and what they're feeling. So redirected walking actually requires a pretty large physical space to allow for that kind of movement, right, because you need to have enough space where a gentle curve is still enough to keep someone from being in a collision course with a wall. Most of us don't live in palatial estates, and so if you do have a room that you have set as for VR, or one that you can use for VR, chances are it's not so big that it would allow for redirected walking in any meaningful way. Also, I imagine that redirected walking is much easier to implement if you've built out an experience that's intended for a specific physical space. That is that the VR system quote unquote knows how large the physical room is, and so it can adjust the virtual cues accordingly, and everything is hunky dory. I imagine it would be a lot more challenging to have a system that could adapt to any given physical space and thus make appropriate adjustments to those visual cues with regard to how much room is available. That's a lot of complicated math, right, Like if you were to port an experience from a room that's maybe let's say twenty feet to a side, it's a big, big room. It's twenty feet to a side, but then you move it into one that's you know, made be fifteen feet to a side. I don't know how easy it would be to have a system that could readjust for that reduced amount of physical space and plan out new versions of visual cues to keep you from running into walls. I'm sure it's possible, and I'm sure it's been done, but I bet it's hard, and it's got to be even harder if you're talking about your typical consumer space, because again, most of us don't have access to these really big rooms that would be very useful for redirected walking. It is possible. It's something that's been going on and I'm just not aware of it. One common strategy in VR is to make use of cameras to keep an eye on people within a physical environment as they move through the virtual environment. And the cameras could include some that are mounted in static positions around the room, right like you might have some that you have mounted on shelves, on the walls or close to a one specific location. And then you typically also, like I said, have a camera like a forward facing camera in a headset itself, and collectively these cameras can keep an eye on where a person is in relation to their physical walls or other obstacles around them, and these systems typically will give the user a visual queue within the virtual experience if they start getting a little too close to these barriers. So you might be walking through a space and then in this like virtual space that you're walking through, you'll see suddenly a grid outline of a wall, and that could break the immersion right like now you're suddenly seeing It's kind of like in Star Trek you see the wall of the hola deck or something. It breaks the immersion, but it also helps you avoid breaking your nose on a wall or something else. This is not an ideal solution, because in a perfect world you would avoid anything that would take you out of the virtual experience, but it's certainly preferable to an injury. For example, the Meta Quest formerly known as the Oculus Quest, allows users to set up boundaries and they call the system guardian. The system gives the user the freedom to define a play area within a physical room, and Meta stresses that you really need six and a half feet by six and a half feet or larger to have this workout well. Otherwise you should probably play VR in a stationary position, either seated or standing up, so smaller than six and a half feet to a side, you're going to encounter some frustration. The setup includes something that you might not have thought about. You actually have to establish the height of the floor. Now, the way meta handles this is that you put on the headset and you lower a controller down to the floor, and you look at the controller, and this lets the system establish where the floor is with relation to the rest of the environment. Metaquest then lets you define the play area by showing you pass through video in the headset. So this is sort of like turning the Metaquest into an augmented reality headset rather than a virtual reality headset. Augmented reality, or AR, is when you have a view of the real world around you over which digital information can be laid. It doesn't necessarily have to involve a display. That is the typical way we think of AR, but it's a pretty common to do the display version now. In many ways, AR gets around a lot of the challenges that you've come across in VR when it comes to movement, because the person who's using an AR system can still actually see the real world around them, including the people who are in it, it's just that the extra digital stuff gets thrown in there too. Anyway, Using pass through video, the player uses a controller and they use that to kind of shoot a beam to trace the outline of their intended play area within the physical room where they'll be playing their VR stuff. So to an outside observer, it would just look like the player is pointing a controller and moving in a slow circle. But to the player, they would see they were generating an outline which ultimately would form into a box, and this becomes the defined play area. So if the player were to walk close to one of the boundaries of that play area, that's when they would see the warning indicator, letting them know they're getting a little too close to being out of bounds. The boundary solution is functional for smaller spaces, but it's not necessarily ideal for multiplayer implementations. For those, you still need a way to keep people safely in their own little physical bubble where they're not likely to slam into each other blindly at full speed. And that will bring us to another method, the treadmill. Before we get into that, we need to take another quick break to thank our sponsors. We're back, so treadmills in many ways, are a little similar to those old pedestal solutions of the VR arcades I've talked about a couple of times in this episode. They keep each individual player confined to a physical space within the environment, But unlike those pedestals I talked about, the treadmills allow players to physically walk and to have that physical motion translate into the VR experience as VR locomotion. Some of the treadmills allow players to turn and change direction while walking. In fact, some of them allow players to even run. These omnidirectional treadmills tend to be pretty darn expensive, and they also attempt to address several of the barriers in the way of people moving freely in a physical location while exploring a virtual one. There are a couple of products either out on the market right now or that are scheduled to launch very soon. Some of them have been in development for the better part of a decade. The ones that I'll mention here just because they are similar and one of them is on the market now and the other ones going to launch soon would be the cat kat Walk C two Core that's one, and the virtueix Omni one. So the C two Core is something you can purchase right now. It's at a hefty nine hundred ninety nine dollars. The Omni one is available for pre order for a whopping two thousand, five hundred and ninety five dollars. And considering that these are peripherals, right, these do not include the actual VR setup. That is a huge price tag. Right, You still have to have the computer system. You still have to have the VR hardware, or at least the VR hardware. There's now standalone VR hardware. Back in the day, you had to have a computer that was really a chonker in order to run V. It's a little different today, but you still have to have those base systems before you even worry about these these treadmills. It's also this would be another reason why VR in general hasn't seen widespread adoption, because it be expensive, y'all. It is a high price to enter, and that's before you even start thinking about a library of content that you can actually use. Now, at a casual glance, these two systems, the C two Core and the Omni one, seem pretty darn similar. Both consist of a treadmill quote unquote a treadmill that actually looks more like a dish, like an upturned satellite dish, or maybe like a very very shallow walk And both of them have an arm that's mounted on the platform that has that holds the dish. This arm is a vertical arm, so it extends upward and it also can rotate along the perimeter of the dish. And mounted at the end of that arm is a harness that you are to put on when you're using the device. So as I said, the arm can actually rotate around the whole perimeter of the dish. That lets you turn in place while you're wearing the harness and you're using the treadmill, and that harness keeps you from falling over or tripping off the side of the treadmill, and also lets you have that stability you need if you want to do something like try and run in place. Obviously, like if you've got something obscuring your vision in the real world, your body is not going to want to run, right. Your body's going to say, heck no, it's stupid to run when I can't actually see the environment around me. That harness and that arm is meant to restrain you, so that you can feel confident that you can make those kind of motions, that you can run in place and it's not going to have you, you know, do a kool Aid Man through the wall of your room or anything like that. These arms are also articulated, so they can extend up or downward. They allow you to do things like you can squat, or you can kneel, so if you're playing like a shooter game or something, you're not just stuck at one vertical level. You can do things like squat down. Like if a game has that capability where you can, you know, squinch down and get underneath a barrier, then you can actually do that within the physical space because the treadmills allow you to do that. So both systems act like controllers. From what I understand, they are mostly compatible with existing VR titles, to varying degrees of effectiveness. At least the ones that allow you to navigate through the VR experience using a controller. Most of them work pretty well from what I understand. I have not had personal experience with either of these, so I can't say from that regard, but from what I read, it sounds like, reasonably speaking, they're fairly compatible with a lot of these titles. They do all the conversion for you, so there's not like extensive setup that you need to do. In most cases, there are a couple of differences between the two besides the price. So the C two Core, for example, requires players to wear special shoes. You have shoes that come with the platform, and those are what you need to wear when you're using the device. These shoes have sensors and the bottom of the shoes that face downward. It's kind of similar to how a laser mouse has a sensor on the underside of the mouse that what helps it detect movement and position. So you can't just hop onto a C two Core with your normal kicks. I found an Ask Me Anything on Reddit where a user going by the handle of a tickle Monster five twenty eight explained how they had put a thin pair of socks or stockings around these shoes in order to improve how they slide against the surface of the treadmill itself, and that as long as it was thin enough, it didn't inhibit the sensor's performance on the treadmill itself, but it made it way easier to walk and or run on the surface of the treadmill. The Omni one does not require you to wear special shoes, but it does come with overshoes. They kind of look like sandals that slip on and snap on on top of your normal shoes. They have straps and everything. You strap them to the underside of your shoes, and that's what you use to run against the Omni one treadmill. Otherwise, in many ways, it seems pretty darn similar to the C two Core. They're not identical. They do have differences, and I'm sure there are also differences as far as compatibility and performance are concerned with VR titles, But without the opportunity to try them out for myself, I can't really compare and contrast, so I can't say one is definitively better than the other, or performs more consistently than the other one does I don't know. I know that both of them, at least according to other folks who have used these devices, can occasionally have performance issues where things get a little janky. It's still, from what I understand, incredibly immersive and really effective in most situations. It's just once in a while you might encounter a situation where you take a step forward, but what you see reflected in the game or the experience isn't a one to one match with what you were doing in the physical space. So within the discourse of the VR community, there does seem to be a mixture of enthusiasm and skepticism around these products. Some are heralding them as the bridge that turns VR from an interesting diversion and a niche interest among a hobbyist community into a compelling activity that has mainstream appeal and something that could end up becoming an important part not just for stuff like entertainment, but maybe in fields like fitness. Others are arguing that this technology, this omni treadmill approach technology, is not yet refined to a point where it's fun to use, Like, clearly the potential is there, but it's not ready for actual prime time yet, and that once the shine wears off from getting something like this and getting to try it, the limitations become more evident and can become aggravating, and that maybe it's better to wait a bit longer for the technology to mature. And that's tough because that's kind of what the argument was for VR back in the nineties, and it was understandable at the time, but Waiting for something to mature requires that the technology still have the support necessary to continue to develop. Right. You still need the money and the talent in order for the tech to advance. It doesn't just do it on its own. And so if everybody holds off and says, you know, it's interesting, but I don't think it's ready yet, then you don't have the money coming in that will fund the next generation of the technology. Meanwhile, if you have everyone rush in, they might try it and say this isn't what I want it at all, and then they just abandon the technology entirely. You know, there's no easy solution here. But this does bring us up to the hollow tile invention that I mentioned at the top of the show. The hollow tile approach uses a collection of tiny hexagonal tiles I'm talking about like they look like they're about the size of maybe a half dollar if you're familiar with that. So each of these tiles can act like a treadmill, and it's a treadmill that can move in any given direction, and collectively, these tiles can keep someone within a relatively stable position on the floor as the person attempts to walk around a virtual environment. So If you were to watch this, you would see someone standing on what looks like almost like a carpet of hexagonal tiles, and as they're moving in various directions, they're not actually traveling anywhere physically right because the treadmill is keeping them in the same relative position physically, but within the virtual environment, they could be traveling wherever they're going. Now, the demonstration was really limited. There was an early view of this technology. It showed users walking very slowly and using very small steps, and that implies to me that it's very early in this technologies infancy. It cannot handle someone just walking at a normal pace. You have to be walking at like, you know, a quarter speed with small steps in order for it to work as it is designed right now. But the potential is pretty darn cool. Imagine that we've reached a point where this technology can handle people walking or maybe even running, and yet keep them in the same relative physical location inside a big room. You can have a bunch of people inside the same physical room standing on a floor made of these hexagonal tiles. They can be facing different directions. They could all be walking or running at their own pace and still staying in the same relative position so that they're not in danger of running into each other, and yet they can all interact in the same virtual environment. That is a really cool concept. I don't know if we're ever going to get there, but it's the potential that's really exciting. Because those tiles will just keep you within that same relative physical space even while you change direction and speed. That means you can all share and experience together. You're walking, but you're not really going anywhere. It's kind of like that stereotypical nightmare where you're in a hallway and you're running toward the end of the hallway, but you never get any closer to the end, except you know, it's just what's going on within the physical space. In the virtual space, you would actually be moving all over the place. And you can imagine how this technology would enable really cool experiences that Disney might use and attractions in the future. You know, maybe you could have an interactive virtual experience that lets you explore a famous fictional world, like imagine being able to walk around Wonderland or never never Land, or dare I say it Fresno but was a joke. I know Fresno really exists, and you could do this with your friends and family, right, you could all be in that same instance together, and you could all be walking around and exploring this space and split up and go your own way, and you'd be safe from running into you know, mom and dad because everyone's on their own little, you know, patch of hollow tiles that are keeping them isolated from everybody else while still being able to share this experience. Of course, for all that to happen, this technology will need to work a whole lot better than it does now. And as I said, and the demonstration, it was clear that users were really going easy on these tiles. They did have a demonstration where they had two people facing different directions walking on these tiles, but again they're doing those kind of tiny little baby steps at very slow pace. But the demonstration was still really impressive. And I think the takeaway is that solving for movement that pairs actions in the physical world with the virtual world is still really hard. You're pretty much forced to make concessions. You may have to make some concessions in order to ensure that the system is functional, or you may have to make concessions to make sure it's safe, or some combination of the two, or maybe there are other considerations that come into play. I think it's one of the big challenges that's holding back VR adoption in general. As it stands, you can do some really cool stuff in VR, but it still feels fairly limited. Beat Saber is a really great game, but you're standing in place while you're waving your arms around. You're not set free in a virtual open world where you can explore by really walking around a physical space. When you do use games that allow you to do some physical walking, you have to work within a limited play area or else you risk slamming into a wall or knocking over a valuable antique or something. It's going to take a bit more work to get to a point where the reality in virtual reality lives up to the potential of virtual reality. For that reason, I think augmented reality actually has a slightly better chance of seeing higher adoption, at least in the relatively short term, because AR has a few advantages. Now, it does come with its own set of challenges, like how do you integrate, say, game elements into AR so that they fit naturally within someone's real world environment, But it removes other challenges because you can see the physical world around so the system doesn't have to find ways to protect you from the physical world, or to protect the physical world from you. If you are a limb flailing maniac like myself with AR, the limitations of the space around you are evident, and with a really well designed application, you might not even think of them as limitations. It may just all feel like they all naturally fit together. But programming something that can be a compelling experience no matter what the physical location happens to be, that's not easy either. It may be that you end up programming a game that's fantastic if you happen to have access to a space that's the size of a gymnasium, but maybe it's way more underwhelming inside your typical den or partially finished basement. I do like checking in on these technologies every few years to see what sort of progress has been made. One thing I find encouraging is that we are seeing devices like the C two Core and the Omni one make it to market. These could have been cases where companies had come up with this nifty idea and maybe got some seed money for it, but it never really got much further than the prototype stage. Like that happens all the time, especially in the fields of VR and AR. But these made it like they got to the point where you can buy the thing and get it delivered to your house and have it and use it, like that's a phenomenal achievement. But you know, despite the fact that these gadgets are meant to keep you in place, we're still moving forward. That's pretty darn cool. All right. That's it for moving around in VR. There are other elements we could talk about, and maybe I will in future episodes, but I thought that was a good way to kind of talk about an interesting set of challenges. It gets you to think about what you need to solve for in order to create the experience you want. That's really a big part of what engineering is all about, right, It's problem solving. It's one of my favorite things about inering in general and talking to engineers, because engineers, when you talk to them, you realize they're constantly attempting to solve problems, even if they're not aware of it, and I think it's fascinating. I hope you're all well. I am glad that I'm back and podcasting again. We'll be talking to you again on Friday. I'll be doing a news episode about what's been going on this week in tech, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.