kingpin technology, for walking

[JDuncan]

There is some ideas on using walking with VR, so I just read somebody say to use ball bearings and I thought up some random way to use that idea and decided to start a thread about that.

A magnet can work through a thin piece of plastic on metal, so the magnet is on one side of the plastic and not touching the metal and the metal is on the other side sticking to the magnet but not touching the magnet.

My idea is to use a bunch of magnets clump a bunch of ball bearings together at the bottom of a tub/bucket. The bucket shape holds a bunch of very tiny ball bearings.

A shoe has magnets that attracts ball bearings too, so the tub has magnets and the shoes have magnets and ball bearings are inbetween the tub magnets and shoe magnets.

The ball bearings touch the magnets on the shoes but not the magnets on the tub, the magnets on the tub acts through metal material that serves to generalize the area the magnets clump too.

When the ball bearings go one way it means the tub is acting, when the ball bearing go the other way it means the shoes are acting.
When the person stands still the magnets in the tub hold onto the magnets on the shoes so the person can stand without falling.

Because the tub holds the magnets the tub is a static motion, or still. The shoes move the magnets dynamically or in contrast with how the magnets in the tub hold them, the shoes disturb the wy the tub holds the magnets.
As the shoes disturb the way the tub holds the magnets this is read by a sensor that differentiates the tub motion from the shoe motion.

If a camera on the treadmill looks at the ball bearings and finds the dynamic vs static motion, it can ID bent knees too, which would allow for crouching to be in the VR.

Then all you would need, not knee-d, is a tub with a metal wall separating the magnets in the tub from ball bearings.
A pair of shoes with magnets that attract the ball bearings in the tub.
A camera to separate the dynamic motion of the ball bearing from the static motion.
And a program to read the camera results and feed this into the VR program as a child of where the head is looking, so the head tracking would be the parent and the walking the child, so when the person walks forward they walk to where the face is pointing currently.
The shoes would be a regular shoe, any brand or type, but the bottom of the shoe is a strap on plate that is metal, and inside the plate is magnets. The entire plate is magnetic though because the magnets inside the plate magnetise the entire plate.

There would be no mechanical parts inside the tub just magnets and a metal wall.

What do you think? Did somebody already make this somewhere on kickstarter maybe?
edit,
I looked around and saw viiwok uses this design too, so it's already being made. I have included the viiwok name in the thread title because of this.

[JDuncan]

The idea of using ball bearings is a crude idea I think.
What the idea showed me is that the ball bearings are displaced then they are reset to a original condition.
In normal day to day terms, this is a button press, being displaced then reset to the original state.

So what if the ball bearings design is not used but a keyboard design is?

The idea

- A weight is tied to a cord.

- The cord goes through a hollow ball bead, the hollow ball bead is welded to the interior of the machine.

- What's being built is a mechanism that when the cord is attached to what looks like a keyboard key. The person touches this key and when they do it is pressed down then it pops right back up when it is depressed.

- When the key is not pressed in, the key is sitting at the top of the ball bead and the weight is not lifted towards the bead.

- When the bead is pressed in, the key slides to the side of the ball bead, to the user this looks like the key is pressed in.
Then with the key to the side of the ball bead, the weight tied to the cord is lifted up towards the ball bead, because the cord on the key went to the side of the ball bead which acts to lift the cord with the weight.

- Then when the key is depressed, the weight on the cord is pulled down again and the key goes back to the top of the ball bead and the user sees the key become reset so it can be pressed in again.

- Since the key goes straight up and down, it must be attached to a spring that can bend around the ball bead, and the cord is attached to the spring.
Then the key is pressed down, the spring is moved to the side and down around the ball bead, and the weight on the other side of the cord is lifted up.
So the key must go down and rest on the floor the user sees, but the spring attached to the key goes down and to the side of the hollow in the ball bearing.

That's the basic mechanism of the contraption.
Now since this uses weight and cords, it doesn't need to be in a curved tub shape anymore, it can be flat.
Because the curved design was based on using ball bearings rolling in a tub, now the weights and cord is used the curved design is obsolete.

Shoes that slide on the keys would work. Not slip on the keys but something like the omni shoes.

When the weight is being lifted it triggers a led on the inside of the mechanism.
Then a camera on the inside of the mechanism reads the led and gives this to the VR software, which then translates what the lights mean and then feeds this into the game, and this functions as the person walking or running on the contraption then seeing themselves run or walk in Virtual Reality.

Since the weight on the other side of the ball bead would swing around if left untethered when it is lifted up quickly, it needs a bungie cord that it is tied to that it can recoil to when it springs up towards the bead. This bungie cord is tiying the weight to the floor or base structure of the contraption.

This was a more advanced idea then ball bearings in a tub.

[JDuncan]

I'm not building this idea physically. This was just a problem solving exercise for me.

[JDuncan]

I then sat down to draw how this would look, and this is what I made;



Here is a description of the drawing;

1. Is the button before and after it is pressed.
It has a lip at the top of the button.
The lip rests on the floor that the button is sticking out of when the button is pressed down.
So the button can be measured so when it is fully pressed in it's lip rests flat on the floor of what it is sticking out of.

2. Is the first layer.
The first layer is a floor on the inside of the machine, that has a outer ring hollow, and a center hollow.
The outer ring hollow is what the button sticks pole 1 into when the button is pressed down.
Pole 1 is attached to pole 2, and pole 2 is attached to the cord.

As pole 1 is pushed into the hollow, the angle the two poles make is squished together, because both poles are being stuck into the outer circle on inner floor 1.
As pole 2 is being pushed into the inner floor 1, the tip of pole 2 is lifting the cord closer to the button.

Pole 2 is connected to the cord and the cord is going through the center hole to the weight.

3. The weight. The weight is connected to the cord that pole 2 is connected too.
And the weight is connected to the bungie cord below it.
The weight is pulled up to the button when the buttun is pressed down,
and when the button is depressed gravity pulls the weight down and thus the button connected to pole 1 is lifted up to it's original height by pole 1.

4. The bungie cord. The bungie cord is connected to the weight so that when the weight is flicked towards the button it does not swing around wildly.
But that when the weight swings up, the bungie cord controls where the weight can swing too.
The bungie cord is connected to the bottom of the contraption.

Also the bungie cord may allow tension so when the button is being pressed down the person can feel the button give some resistance to being pressed down.

5. The electronics. Now when the bungie cord is lifted, when it is tied to has a trigger that sends a impulse to a electronic recording device that can translate that impulse into a led or similar pattern that can be fed into a computer to process the place the person stepped.
This will allow the person to step down and have some leg tracking.

The leg tracking heirarchy would be a child to the head tracking, so when the legs walk or step down, this is based on where the parent the head tracking is facing.

[android78]

I'm not sure that I understand this device. Is it that you are basically going to be walking on two giant keyboard keys to register steps that would then be fed as forward movement to a computer?
If that's the case, you should consider a dance mat. Cybereality has mentioned something like this for his early testing.
Maybe I've missed what this will actually do though, since weights/bungie/camera/led seems a complex way to get simple information.

[JDuncan]

I'm not sure that I understand this device. Is it that you are basically going to be walking on two giant keyboard keys to register steps that would then be fed as forward movement to a computer?
If that's the case, you should consider a dance mat. Cybereality has mentioned something like this for his early testing.
Maybe I've missed what this will actually do though, since weights/bungie/camera/led seems a complex way to get simple information.

What the walking machine looks like.



Does the picture answer your questions?

[JDuncan]

A diagram that shows how to repair the walking machine.



That about covers all the important idea points of the walking machine.
I dub it, "kingpin".

The camera can be replaced by just a sensor that can feed the electronic stimuli into a board.

And the board is numbered.

And the numbers light up in a SW, that SW then lets these numbers be converted into something that lets walking be in VR.