As I wrote in my earlier blog post, VR is something that needs to be experienced to be fully appreciated. Once you do experience it, get past the initial amazing fascination and start playing games a fairly glaring problem reveals itself: how to navigate the amazing worlds that are all around you. Yes, there is some limited motion tracking but it tends to be constrained to whatever space you may have in your room, which tends to be a few square meters at best (and when you reach the edge of your space you are basically stuck there).

Some games try to solve the navigation problem through a kind of point and click mechanism. You point at where you want to go and then click and go there. Others use a handheld game controller like you would with a traditional console game. Compared to the rest of the experience both of these solutions feel, well, clunky. It reminds me of trying to operate a graphical user interface without a mouse. It can be done from a keyboard, but it will be awkward (whereas the keyboard is of course amazing with the command line).

One solution to the navigation problem are omnidirectional treadmills. This is the most literal approach to dealing with navigation. I have tried one of these at a technology conference and while it was exhilarating and got my heart rate up, treadmills seem like an expensive and large piece of hardware to have in one’s home.

My conjecture is that the more common approach will turn out to be gesture control. Here too we have early systems, such as Leapmotion. But gestures are far from common and certainly not standardized. It feels a bit as if we were in the phase when each car manufacturer had its own dashboard. Today these have become so standardized that you can get into virtually any car and know to turn on the lights, windshield wipers, etc. (and one gets quite confounded when a car deviates from these).

One of the uses of VR that I am particularly excited about is the creation of and interaction with 3D structures, such as creating designs that can then be 3D printed or designing a dress that can be knitted (see post from Monday on the coming paradigm shift in manufacturing). For this use case I expect a combination of gestures with haptic feedback to be ideal. If anyone has recommendations for the best hand tracking + haptic feedback based design experience, please let me know.