As a new wave of VR peripheral
equipment, receives press attention and thousands of pre-orders. Having spoken
to several developers and proponents of VR, the consensus seems to be twofold.
For one thing, the cost of the hardware has, in the past, been astronomical.
Some of the latest gadgets are still priced well above a consumer-friendly
level, such as the IGS Glove, a peripheral developed by Synertial which allows your virtual hand to flex and
move exactly like your real hand, right down to intricate finger movements. Secondly,
and perhaps most obviously, seamless, high-quality VR has been hard to create.
Presence, although momentarily intense, is thought to be very easy to disrupt,
hence the VR term ‘break in presence’, or BIP for short.
The application must keep you in
this other world. But the greatest challenge for virtual reality has always
been movement. The act of simply walking around a virtual space is still
restricted by the awkward correlation of that virtual room to the real room in
which a VR user is standing. This precise problem, though, is one which a
diverse array of new peripherals is hoping to tackle. There's the Omni, a kind
of stationary grooved dish and harness that you can walk and run on (your feet
always return to the same spot); the newly launched WizDish, a similar but more
affordable concept which uses anti-friction studded shoes; and finally the
elaborate VirtuSphere, a 10-foot high hollow ball which encases the VR player
within its spherical design. But all of them, however, have limitations.
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