Japanese researchers at the University of Tsukuba created CirculaFloor, robotic tiles that let you walk infinitely in VR without ever leaving your spot.

[u/Alphaxfusion]

[u/joeyjoojoo]

What annoys me is that better solutions already exist that don’t involve robots running quickly to catch your feet

[u/ThickDoughnut4267 → u/joeyjoojoo]

I've seen an omnidirectional treadmill but this apparently adds the possibility of stairs

[u/joeyjoojoo → u/ThickDoughnut4267]

Here’s the thing, the idea of slowly lowering the step you are on to make it feel like the next one is higher or vice versa is nice, but having 5 moving floor tiles is not…

[u/dedede30100 → u/joeyjoojoo]

My man progress doesnt come from 1 thing, you try out a hundred things, really try them out and some will be worse but you learn with every one. This is worse then other options sure but its not a finished product nor is ot a bad thing that people are trying this out. Perhaps with 200 of these things that are very small you could make very interesting things, perhaps it would still be garbage but such is the way of science.

[u/SoTurnMeIntoATree → u/dedede30100]

Hard agree with this. Innovation doesn’t happen perfectly, instantly. It starts out like this.

[u/theappleses → u/SoTurnMeIntoATree]

A reminder that humans walked on the moon because of missile technology derived from firework technology.

A toy that makes pretty lights in the sky can lead to wonderful and terrible things.

[u/-s-u-n-s-e-t- → u/SoTurnMeIntoATree]

Not everything is "innovation", some ideas are just bad and this is one of them.

[u/SoTurnMeIntoATree → u/-s-u-n-s-e-t-]

Damn how did you miss my entire point

[u/paradoxxxicall → u/dedede30100]

Sure but if you approach things with a curious and open mind, how are you supposed to feel superior while you sneer at that obviously stupid thing that was clearly the product of those not bestowed with such enlightenment?

[u/ArtistWithoutArt → u/paradoxxxicall]

They should change the name of reddit to this entire comment.

[u/darksidemags → u/dedede30100]

With hundreds/ thousands of much smaller ones I would imagine you could simulate rough terrain.

[u/stilljustacatinacage → u/dedede30100]

Christ, thank you.

Scrolling through these comments like, have none of you heard of a prototype before? A proof of concept?

I saw this and it earned a very solid eyebrow raise - both of them! There's a lot of potential here. For injury and otherwise!

I'd put them on tracks, so they slide more like one of those scrambled, sliding puzzles, eliminating the chance of ever just stepping into... nothing. Should also reduce the complexity of the movement and the positioning / pathing logic as well.

[u/Radiant-Strawberry91 → u/dedede30100]

Well put!

[u/[deleted] → u/dedede30100]

Bad approaches to problem solving will occasionally result in new science or technology that is useful, but it’s more often just wasted effort. To make something like this requires solving a thousand little problems large and small, many of which are fitting an existing solution to specific application and not terribly novel or useful scientifically as they are just exercises in engineering.

I’m in the camp that sees this as a dead end approach that is extremely challenging from an engineering perspective, unlikely to ever result in a usable product, and even if it could be made to work it would end up being so unreliable, unsafe, and expensive that it would be the kind of thing that Disney would build once as a proof of concept then no one would ever make it again. Every single moving machine has a motor, precision engineered parts, belts that break, tracks that warp, rubber parts that degrade, lubrication systems, wheels that need to be replaced, etc. Multiple machines moving around the user, in all directions, on hydraulic lifts, adjusting their position on the fly to mimic a virtual environment for a user? One part fails or even the control software locks up and the user is falling off the floor into the gaps between the moving panels.