Watch: Philip Rosedale Demos New Rig-Based VR Experience Without Headset, Nausea

Watch this cool new VR prototype from Philip Rosedale and his son August, the latest project from his new studio, dubbed IRL (for In Reality Lab). As you can see in the video above, this is virtual reality without a head-mounted display, powered by massive high definition display screens, and an apparatus that keeps the user's head in place -- and tracks their motion.

As he explains on his blog, one goal with this new Rig is to create a new way of experiencing and interacting in VR that doesn't cause motion sickness:

When you are wearing a VR headset, a gyro in the device senses your head’s rotation and presents the appropriate change on the screen just a moment later. But this tiny time delay causes a disagreement between what your eyes see and what a different part of your body senses - the ‘vestibular apparatus’ just inside your ears. This slight error, unfortunately, triggers nausea due to an evolved behavior that is widely believed to be an adaption keeping you safe from drinking too much alcohol (which our animal ancestors had access to through fermented berries) or other poisons.

Now imagine that instead of having you wear VR goggles, we had you lying comfortably on a headrest which also keeps you from turning your head at all (imagine a really deep memory foam pillow), while surrounded by big monitors. Then, when you try to turn your head, the headrest detects the force your muscles are producing, and updates the view on the monitors to turn to one side or the other appropriately. Your eyes get the visual feedback they expected, which feels very much like turning your head!

And because your head isn’t actually moving at all, the secondary system your body uses - the vestibular system mentioned above - doesn’t report the slightly different version of the rotation that makes you sick.

Much more here. Philip writes that the Rig has been tested on about 20 people, all of whom report experiencing much less nausea than from a classic HMD VR experience.

In a follow-up message, Philip tells me the volunteer demographics were about 60/40 male/female, across a broad age range spectrum. The gender variable is very important due to a strong propensity of females to get nauseous in traditional VR.

One obvious use case is for people who are paralyzed or otherwise confined to one position. Indeed, Philip compares it to the "link bed" from Avatar, used by the movie's paraplegic hero.  

The Rig, by the way, is actually an updated prototype of "The Rig" that Philip built in 2000, which drove the original inspiration for creating Second Life:

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 [Linden Lab developer Andrew] 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.

Wonder if a new world will be built to work with this new Rig.

Comments

[Markopolis Balhaus]

This is a fantastic way of avoiding the head-spinning. Brilliant.

[Martin K.]

> Wonder if a new world will be built to work with this new Rig.

I wonder whether one could build a SteamVR overlay app (or whether one already exists) that is capable of turning a user's tracking space relative to the virtual world of any SteamVR app in this way.

[Martin K.]

Oh, apparently the Quest v63 update just added a lying down mode on Quest 2 and Quest Pro: https://www.uploadvr.com/quest-v63-lying-down/ . For games that allow for smooth rotation with (a thumbstick of) controllers, this might be quite close to the experience of "The Rig".

[sirhc desantis]

Never quite got the 'cult of Phil' but I have to admit He is always worth watching.