I've been lurking for months, so I'm thrilled to finally have something relevant to add to a current discussion. I've long wondered how well a Balance Board would handle this task, but never felt optimistic enough about it to buy one (upload some demo videos, please!), and while the Crespodisc™, that “foot mouse”, and Rich's accelerometer concept have some promise, I'm reminded of a (warning: typically vulgar)
Penny-Arcade comic. I'm confident VR is going to change a great many things, but mankind's predisposition toward sitting on a comfy chair while gaming is not one of them. As much as I'd like to avoid becoming a pariah on my first official day here, Project Holodeck, for all its ambition, is unlikely to achieve commercial success on account of being too much too soon, and gamers across the globe, blinded by a VR rig or not, don't particularly want to flail around knocking every lamp off of every end-table. All the omnidirectional treadmills and force-feedback haptics we can imagine won't get the VR revolution off to its proper start if a robust input scheme isn't available while sitting down. After all, “From the mightiest Pharaoh to the lowliest peasant, who doesn't enjoy a good sit?”
Even without first-hand experience with a serious VR rig, I strongly suspect tying character rotation to head tracking is the wrong approach here. If, within virtual space, we literally cannot move in one direction while looking in another, how does the experience meaningfully differentiate itself from playing in front of a 3D monitor? Descent-style 6DOF games will have their unique challenges and rewards and are likely to take their control schemes from the colorful world of flight simulation hardware, but for all those great many more game with a humanoid avatar, “pitch” and “roll” cease to have meaning, and “yaw” is just turning your head (someone please prove me wrong with a long-overdue
The Specialists remake – I'll say “yaw” as much as you want if I get to do side-somersaults and shoot people while ass over teakettle). Luckily, in any virtual space in which Cartesian coordinates are more appropriate than flight dynamics, Z axis motion will be limited to crouching and jumping (two buttons mapped, no Kinect required), and head tracking
does fulfill the role of mouselooking up and down, so the problem becomes mercifully two-dimensional. I'm all for a foot control scheme that a seated player can use, absent any other inputs in his hands, to describe 100% of character motion, and all while being intuitive, precise, comfortable to operate for extended periods
and cheap to produce, but I'm skeptical that such an engineering challenge will ever be met by us mortals, and we need something to fill this very large void in less than a month. It's possible I've been blinded by fanboyism for the VR pioneers at
Virtual World, but I think the ultimate winner here is going to be as simple for us as it was for them:
analog pedals.
Transcription machine pedals have been mentioned, as have rudder controls, but the former are unsuitable for being strictly on-off, the latter for being an elegant solution to a subtly different problem. It so happens that my desire to replicate (albeit poorly) the
Battletech: Firestorm experience led me to build something that I think we're all going to want under our computer desks, and it has the advantages of being so simple as to not warrant an
Instructable in addition to -philicity-'s and so cheap I barely spent $10 on the non-Arduino parts. Here's the complete process: Take one of
these, gut the electronics (preferably while scoffing at the entire premise of Guitar Hero), replace the weird potentiometers inside with cheap linear 10ks, stuff in some washers if the pots aren't snug and trim out whatever plastic necessary to secure an Arduino inside and access its USB port. If you're smart and have done this with an Uno or later and also happen to either have an
AVR in-system programmer laying around or have the patience and nerves necessary to do a lot of firmware flashing, you can use Dimitri Diakopoulos'
HIDUINO firmware to turn this into an HID device that most Windows PCs will recognize as a joystick without even installing a driver. Test for the endpoint values of the pots in their current orientation, upload
a sketch so simple even a novice programmer seasoned by mere weeks of Arduino tinkering could write it, and you have a fully functional and satisfyingly analog single-axis joystick. I'm going to wait until my Rift arrives to decide whether it feels better to assign this joystick to character rotation or strafing, but I suspect using pedals to turn yourself in place will feel more intuitive. Of course, this leaves strafing and forward and backward motion to deal with, but in my view that's something suitably solved by a single thumbstick, be it on a 360 controller, Wiimote nunchuck, or (ideally) Hydra wand. At this point you should be looking around with your head, turning with your feet, and moving through virtual space with your thumb, each entirely independent of the other, and still have nine fingers free – and back in meatspace you're seated comfortably and not even accidentally strangling yourself with a video cable. I'd love to be proven wrong by a better control scheme, but I'm not confident any such thing can even be conceived of until the world is blissfully awash in production model Rifts, if ever; pedals may not be sexy, but I believe they'll get the job done.
Like many of us here, I've been fantasizing about VR for most of my life, so I don't think my conclusions are faulty due to a lack of scrutinizing the problem, but at this point I would prefer a spirited debate about why I'm wrong over agreement or deafening silence. Am I even correct in assuming that I've explained this adequately, or would you guys want to see some videos demonstrating how smooth and responsive these pedals feel? And regarding Kickstarter, I have been mulling over seeing how this prototype would do, but it feels entirely too simple and obvious, and the only reason I can fathom for a lack of some similar commercial product is a lapse in my Google-fu. If I ever manage to get my Power Glove 2.0 prototype together, though, the pedals will make a great companion reward – stay tuned.
TLDR: GUYS LET'S USE PEDALS FOR TURNING