From: Robin Hollands Subject: Re: TECH: Walking in VR? Date: Wed, 05 Jun 1996 15:43:55 +0100 Message-ID: <31B59D2B.7706@shef.ac.uk> Organization: Automatic Control & Systems Engineering, University of Sheffield > Not a device, but Mel Slater and others at QMW let users walk on the > spot and detect the walking motion through the bouncing induced in the > head tracker - a very cheap and efficient solution. See > http://www.dcs.qmw.ac.uk/research/ace/subsection3_2_1.html Or alternatively you simply mount some low-profile switches on the feet (elastic strips around the shoes). You still need some directional control - a head tracker will allow the user to move in the direction they are travelling, but you'll need a body tracker if you want the user to move around in a different direction. Because you're not relying on the tracker for anything other than heading infomration, you can use a low-cost sourceless gravimetric tracker, or build your own electronic compass. Incidentally, since my publishers assure me that they will finally get my book "The Virtual Reality Homebrewer's Handbook" out for the beginning of July, you might be interested to know that an electronic compass and a similar switch-based walker to that described above are two of the numerous projects within the book, in addition to surveys of low-cost VR hardware and software, and a lay-techs guide to the principles behind VR hardware and software (PLUG, PLUG :-)). See http://www.wiley.com:80/compbooks/catalog/05/95871-9.html for the official publishers Web page, and I'll have something more interesting available on the Web soon. Cheers, Robin