Is Philip Rosedale’s “Rig” the Key to Create Truly Immersive Virtual Reality?

25 years ago, Philip Rosedale was tossing in bed, unable to sleep. Virtual reality was enjoying its first flush of consumer awareness in 1992, but the head-mounted displays on the market back then were massive, heavy, expensive. Still in college at the University of San Diego, he wanted a way to create a VR experience for an HMD that used the bulky but affordable CRT computer monitors of the time.

“Suddenly,” Rosedale remembers, “it hit me that instead of moving the monitors around in front of a person (which would of course be almost impossible), what if we instead immobilized the person and instead detected their 'trying' to move and then changed what we showed on the monitors.”

He rushed to a notebook and started sketching out his vision, then ran to the UCSD library to research human perception. He sketched some more and came up with what you’re seeing here -- a design that until now, has been seen by few outside of Linden Lab, the startup he’d found a few years later. What you’re looking at right here is what came to be known as “The Rig”.

“The initial simple demo Philip showed me was a single rigid metal bar clamped to the edge of a table,” early Linden Lab engineer Andrew Meadows remembers. “By pushing the bar side to side or up and down I could move a little 2D platform on the screen. I could slide the platform under a ball in the simulation and pick it up. The ball would ‘feel’ heavy, and its weight could be dialed up or down by tapping the keyboard. The illusion of a real interaction with the ball was surprisingly good, but my hand wasn't actually moving: it was only trying to move.”

Back in my days at Linden Lab, I saw The Rig ball demo once or twice, and people who tried it were positively awed -- physically moving their body actually seemed to move objects in the virtual world. As Rosedale’s diagram suggests, the original plan was to map the entire body to the rig, so that it would feel like your physical self was fully embodied in the virtual world.

From Philip Rosedale's US patent filing for The Rig

The Rig was a totally different approach to VR than the HMD-centric devices on the market now, like the Oculus Rift and Vive, which continue to suffer from slow sales. (Perhaps partly due to our fear of feeling isolated and blinded by the headset.) The Rig, by contrast, centered the VR experience not on sight and hearing, but the user’s motor system, and proprioception -- i.e., the way we unconsciously perceive ourselves and the world around us through physical movement.

While Philip Rosedale is now working on High Fidelity, a VR platform optimized to work with HMDs and hand control peripherals, he believes something like The Rig could be integrated into his virtual world:

“I do think it is possible (but not certain) that this technology could be used, in particular to create a whole-body simulator similar to the ideas presented in Ready Player One. It may be possible to immobilize the person's limbs (maybe immobilizing the head is unnecessary) using this approach.”  

Rosedale filed a patent for his Rig in 2000, and for a, time Linden Lab worked on turning it into a consumer product -- for instance, for use in arcades and theme parks. But as I explained in my book, it was at this point that the company pivoted into the MMO/virtual world business with Second Life: 

“The logic was: the hardware project could maybe be used to grow a $100M company in a very competitive ‘PC accessories’ market with low profit margins,” as Meadows puts it, “but the software platform could launch a $1 billion company with higher margins. Also, we suspected no one was even thinking about similar hardware at that time, but we knew people were trying to build virtual worlds: we could punt the hardware into the future when we would be able to throw more resources into it.” In other words, rather than build The Rig, they started evolving the software that was used to demo The Rig -- which ultimately became Second Life.

Linden Lab did once reach a valuation of $700 million with Second Life, though the $1 billion+ prize would ultimately  go to the more accessible Minecraft. And with HMD hardware sales floundering, maybe it’s time for the VR industry to take up Linden Lab’s 17 year old punt, and work on new forms of virtual reality based around The Rig.

Thanks to Andrew Meadows for tracking down the Rig sketch from Linden Lab's archives!

Comments

[Patchouli Woollahra]

Wow. I'd read about this in your book, but it's one thing to read dry text and another to actually see a lineart concept of it.

Divorcing itself from the Rig was probably a better call in 2002/03 though: a GeForce 256 could never have pumped out enough fidelity to make VR anyway remotely realistic. It would be several years before PBR rendering was something more than a academic proposal running in a entire roomful of computers.

Hardware startups also tend to have a higher rate of failure as they are unfortunately more reliant on other factors rather than inhouse talent and gear.

It does seem to make sense that till we have a way to override sensory perception and movement control, a full body rig would be the closest available option to replicate full-body sensation and control in VR. Here's hoping someone runs with the ball.

[cyberserenity]

I started a company called cybernetic worlds to build co-op computer worlds. But it was before the internet and really networks. So it kind of died out. Not all projects work. lol.

[inthisboxgoesaname]

projected screen thingies. Wasn't it valve, nvidia or some company that was doing this. They used the room though, so you woul maybe have kids complaining to mom about the decor lol. But, when you move out on your own...uh, the pizza box, pile of clothes on the floor and mattress on the floor are not a big deal right? LOL, yeah basically there isn't a solution other than HMD but possibly augmented reality making use of a physical space may make it a little easier. Especially with dedicated tracking hardware chips that have their own camera. WIth more information (like heat maybe?) and dedicated software and sensor, a tracking system would work faster and be more accurate. It leverages the need or urge to be somewhere, be mobile even, rather than veg out in front of a desktop computer in a room all alone.

[Melissa Yeuxdoux]

"hasn't been seen by hardly anyone"? So if hardly anyone has not seen it, that means almost everyone has, right?

[doctor]

Stoner Phil single handedly working to increase obesity and mental illness.

Yay Phil Yay.

[Wagner J Au]

""hasn't been seen by hardly anyone"? So if hardly anyone has not seen it, that means almost everyone has, right?"

Doh, good catch, thanks; fixed.

[lord]

Over the past 5 years, I have often thought that, considering the direction we are going with control technology, that the sweeping instrument displays that we see in, for instance, the Star Trek television series, is likely an outdated concept, and that instead, there would be no instrument consoles and it would all be displayed and accessed via a VR or AR headset (depending on type of application) instead. Also, knowing how susceptible to imbalance and falling that the bipedal humanoid model was, that we would adopt chairs like in sports cars with straps to strap the person in,that would allow for alot of movement to increase our perceptive capabilities while in those headsets.