A Step Toward the Star Trek Holodeck

The EU project “CyberWalk” developed an omni-directional treadmill, which together with markerless tracking, optimized control and several perceptual tricks enables humans to walk through Virtual Worlds in a natural and unconstrained fashion.

The platform consists of several belts which form an endless torus. The belts can be actuated and generate motion in one direction (X), the whole torus can rotate and generates motion in a second direction (Y). As the two motions can be controlled independently, any resulting motion can be generated to re-center a person.

The actual implementation offers 3.5 to 4.6 m of walking space and will be sized up to 5.5 times 4.6 m, speeding up to 2 m/s (person starts jogging).The platform can be easily sized up by its modularity. The theoretical span is almost unlimited by an innovative construction (patent pending). As size matters with regard to the maximum allowable accelerations on a human on the platform, this implementation can be considered as a breakthrough in the history of motion platform construction. Fields of application:

The "holodeck": The user is equipped with a Head Mounted Device (HMD) which shows the virtual reality. The HMD is tracked with a motion tracking system, on the one hand to generate the video data for the stereo vision of the HMD, on the other side to calculate the deviation of the user from the platforms center. This deviation is used to recenter the user. By respecting acceleration limitations and other restrictions, this process will not be noticed by the user. Many different applications are possible, from a walk to a new designed urban area to the research of an order picking process in an innovative environment.

Cyberwalk Project @ http://cyberwalk.kyb.tuebingen.mpg.de/
or @ http://www.amm.mw.tum.de/index.php?id=250