Post by d3lux3 in Freedom Locomotion VR comments

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Oculus Touch/Steam user here. Great job putting this together and kudos for making it free. I really like the walk in place movement. It felt more natural than I expected it to be.

A few bits of feedback:

- The tutorial level should probably have hand rails or collision to prevent users from accidentally falling off the edge. When new users are trying to get their "VR legs" and learn your movement system, they definitely don't want to fall off the edge so easily. In fact, placing users on a series of catwalks in the sky is more likely to cause nausea, or at least some VR anxiety. Since there is no functional benefit to the floating city location other than looking very cool, consider placing the first area on the ground. You can still restrict the path to be fairly linear. Having said that, I enjoyed the overall aesthetics of the scene.

- The dev notes and other buttons require the user to walk right to the edge of the catwalk to touch and activate them. When the text appears, the user is now so close that they need to back up to read the panel comfortably. When a user is still getting used to the system and adjusting to the movement speed, this all feels awkward and cumbersome. It might be better if the button to activate the panel was positioned so the panel appears 1 to 2 meters away when activated.

- Opening doors feels awkward. I feel like I need to get very close to the door to reach the doorknob but then my own collision is preventing the door from opening toward me. I'm not sure if the mechanic of interacting with doors is an important enough feature in this demo to justify significant development time. Maybe the door should just open away from the user automatically as they approach it? Once a user is very close to a level exit, is there really any reason to make exiting the level difficult?

- Consider adding a point-and-click teleport for to be used in conjunction with COATS. This could be especially useful for elevation changes like dropping from a rooftop or even traversing stairs.COATS movement was comfortable most of the time but vertical drops and upward movements still left me a little off balance.

HugeRobot7 years ago

Hi d3lux3, thanks for the feedback. Some good points in there, I'll definetly consider how to best tweak it during the revision process.

The small distance interaction is... tricky. A lot of it is me combining room scale interaction with 1.5m+ distance travel. If you're relying solely on Freedom locomotion for short scale movement, it does become less than ideal. Indeed, this stuff has become so second nature to me that the problem has largely become transparent to me. It's only when you framed those separate (but entirely related) elements like that, that it's clicking for me. So thanks.

The ideal is still to combine room scale and locomotion - that's when the system is at its best. And that's my intent for the door opening/closing - you get up to the door, and you pull it back, taking a step back in real life, then walk through the doorway, again in roomscale. It's a pretty fantastic feeling. On the other hand, if you don't have the physical space to step back as you pull the door open, then yeah, absolutely I can see how it's a not the best way to deal with it! Perhaps a button to the side (like with the dev notes) to open the door automatically so you can stand clear of it.

With that said, the last point you mention is already in there (albeit as an undocumented function) - by switching to the left or right hand for locomotion, your secondary hand turns into a teleportation function. Doesn't work everywhere, but it works in most places. I think there may have been an issue with the rooftop level that prevented teleportation - I'll have to double check (I generally don't use it as you might be able to tell).

I think in general, up/down motion is tougher for many people, so I'll definetly have to design alternative movement mechanics for those sorts of areas (e.g. push button teleportation).

zflorence17 years ago

If a player should need to walk through a door or whatever but would be facing their guardian/chaperone, could you not "blink-flip" the person around 180 when they touched or got too close to the boundaries so that the player would physically have to turn around to proceed forward through the door, in which case they would have the rest of the length of their play space to move forward within. Maybe a colored screen flash matching the boundary colors be it guardian or chaperone to go along with the blink-flip to add to the effect of what is happening systematically. It's a little crude, but it beats having to readjust yourself physically. Starfox 64 used a third person animated version of this method if memory serves to keep Fox and team from going past the boundaries, however in VR, a blink-flip would probably be best.

HugeRobot7 years ago

Hi Zflorence1

Thanks for the suggestion. Having tried a blink flip solution like you suggest... it's super disorientating. You touch/open the door, and then it blinks, and then you're looking at the other side of the door. Except because you haven't spatially reoriented yourself, it just feels like you're staring at a different door and you've teleported to some non-contiguous location.

Easiest solution... as crude as it'll be, is probably just allow doors to swing both ways, so you can open into it.

itch.io

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