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Make it 10x bigger and 3x faster and you’re halfway to having a holodeck.
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.
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.
Summer 2016 were my healthiest few months…
“Oh?”
The world was at peace for those few months.
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
Too much realism?
my phone wont let me open this but is it colin ferrell in “in bruges”?
It is!
That movie gives me 10/10 chortles every time I think about it
Wait, pretty sure I saw this demonstrated by a small startup almost 20 years ago.
That one (assuming it’s the same as your memory) was basically just a concave dome and you wore like socks. This seems pretty different.
The one I remember looked almost exactly like this.
It was pretty exciting to see, thought for sure it would take 10 years to come to market. That was about 2008 ish.
A company called Virtuix already developed a treadmill like this called the Omni like 10 years ago. They have released a few home versions of it and some larger ones for arcades. They’re still refining it for mass production it seems.
The working principle is different though.
That is nothing like this one really.
Pretty sure that was basically a plastic bowl you slide around in your socks on.
The Virtuix unit looks really uncomfortable, and this one doesn’t require a harness, because it returns you to center
Seems like it might be helpful to prevent people from escaping the work prisons we’ll all be toiling in one day. 🤣
(Was that too dark?) Super-cool tech, though. 👍
It just makes me think of the scenes in the Ready Player One movie when they’re in the place with all the people in debt to the company who are trapped on something like this to be forced to work in VR for the company.
“they” would probably opt for more efficient robots and just let us poor people die/kill each other
I wonder what it feels like to lay down naked on this thing and have it spin you around.
Pinchy.
Also, hair-pully.
Edit: oh god imagine running fast on this thing then falling over with long hair. scalped
The inventor is balding, so you might be right!
Seems like it would only work for objects with large, flat bottoms—if you tried to use it barefoot it would likely rip your toes off.
Why would you try to use it barefoot??
That was just an example—it might also be a problem for shoes with heels, or textured soles, or people with feet too small to cover enough disks at once.
What about handstands? Crab walking? Naked lying down? What other useless ways of using this can we come up with and “show concern” about?
Laying down is a legitimate point, would have to make sure clothes can’t get caught in it.
Yeah—the harness they had Marques wear was probably in part to make sure he didn’t fall over and touch his clothes or hands to the disks.
Sounds like were pretty close to Ready Player One?
I just imagine myself getting stuck, unable to walk off, perpetually walking in place.
I’m hopeful this is further developed and licensed out. I’d love to have one of these setup at home as part of a VR rig
Something I don’t quite get: it seems like this would grind the shit outta any surface it comes in contact with (or, be ground to shit if whatever’s on it is harder than the material of the cone thingies).
Does anyone have any idea how the constant abrasion is mitigated? Or is it somehow just not that big a deal, like it doesn’t actually chew chunks outta (for example) shoe soles?
If you ever run barefoot or in socks on a regular treadmill, you’ll feel that it’s a little bit rougher than just walking around normally. But it’s still not enough to really make noticeable wear on shoes (any more than normal running on pavement is).
Basically, shoe soles are specifically made to be pretty tough, so this type of treadmill shouldn’t be worse than normal.
It doesn’t grind anything basically the same way a treadmill doesn’t sand anything. You’re not forcing anything to stay put on the surface, you’re maneuvering on the surface while the surface is counter-moving you.
MKBHD’s video shows it moving him around on a chair, spinning the chair, etc etc. In the closeup shots, it looks like there’s debris on the surface of the cone thingies:
The debris isn’t uniform and is quite obviously not part of the roller material; I just kind of assumed that it was from stuff they’d been testing on it, though I suppose it could be generic workshop crud that fell on the rollers too 🤷
There’s probably very minimal sliding against that surface. From the point of view of each point of contact, it’s mostly static friction, with very little dynamic friction/slippage.
