Virtual reality has many strengths. It’s immersive, powerful, engaging, and a seriously fun experience. However, as the industry continues to grow its weaknesses are also beginning to come to light as well. One of the most significant of these is the concept of locomotion mechanics, or physical navigation inside of a VR experience.
Recently, we featured some groups that have tried to bridge this gap by building systems that translate running in place into forward momentum in VR. There are also treadmills like the Virtuix Omni that provide a hardware solution to the issue. However, Electric Night Owl, LLC is working on their own solution as well.
In a statement emailed to UploadVR, Keller (KJack,) the Lead Developer on ArmSwinger, announced that version 1.0 of the virtual reality movement platform is releasing sometime this week on the Unity Asset Store and GitHub. In KJack’s own words:
“ArmSwinger let’s you move around the game world freely by swinging your arms and pointing your controllers in the direction you’d like to go. No head bobbing or controller-down-the-pants-ing required. Most people I’ve shown the release candidate versions to (in-person and via /r/vive) have reported no nausea whatsoever using this system. I’ve also built in several protection methods to keep the player in-bounds without breaking immersion or causing discomfort. Overall, I think the package is at a really good place, and I’m very excited to get it into the hands of VR devs.”
The below video gives you an idea of what the engine looks like in practice, while this video, lets you see an updated version with more features and a download link for the latest build of the engine.
For example, the HTC Vive offers what’s known as “room scale” VR experiences. These are experiences that allow you to physically walk around a predefined area that is now seemingly teeming with interesting digital adventures and interactive assets. The ability to have one step in the real world equal one step in the virtual one can lead to some truly immersive VR, but it also has a limit. What happens when a developer wants to build a world bigger than a 12 foot by 12 foot box? This is where locomotion mechanics come in.
One of the most popular locomotion techniques employed by VR devs today is called “blink.” Blink locomotion allows you to teleport around a larger world by pointing and clicking a controller. Another widely adopted method on the Oculus Rift side of the industry is analog stick locomotion which, as the name suggests, allows you to move by tilting a controller’s analog stick like a traditional console game.
These methods do allow for larger explorable areas, but they lose that one-to-one physical feedback that occurs when your movement in VR is tied to your natural physical movement. The puzzle of natural, efficient, and satisfying VR locomotion remains unsolved but as long as developers like KJack remain on the case, a solution may not be closer than we think.
