The Infinadeck Omnidirectional Treadmill - Smarter Every Day 192 (VR Series)

From a more holistic point of view, these systems suffer from the following contradiction: On one hand you need to perform walking movements, but the average force your body applies onto the system should be zero (to avoid movement in the real worlds space). But if you cannot bring forces onto the ground, your equilibrium system is missing its actuator and cannot stabilise you. They "simulate" "zero forces" by moving the ground below your feet (ideally at the speed of the feet). Other low friction systems solve the "no force" condition by "low force by low friction and counterforce by body fixation". Automatically they solve the stability problem by "body fixation" and "still small amount of force for the human equilibrium control". To allow stable walking on the infinideck, they would need to not only control your position on the deck, but also your equilibrium (CG over contact surface) faster, than your body does (so it would not notice), but I guess, their hip and feet position sensors are by far not fast and precise enough to meet the precision of what the human brain does. Its also a question of the control strategy. To bring your body position back to the center of the system, they would need bring your feet in front of you shortly (inverse pendulum) but that might contradict the feeling of walking forward.

Stefan Schloesser

Hi Destin, although I really like the idea of the infinadeck, I think their approach is not the best solution. So they have to cope with the following problem: Standing and walking is actually balancing an inverse pendulum. As long as we do not accelerate, our CG is pretty precisely (by some centimeters) controlled by our body to be above the center of gravity of the contact surface our feet have with the ground. During walking, that is dynamic, but in principle its the same. If we accelerate, we bring our CG outside that surface (we slightly lift the toes, that brings that surface backwards, that creates a momentum, so we fall forwards into movement till we are fast enough and bring the feet back below the CG) as long as we accelerate. Now, if you move forward on the infinideck, they have the following contradicting requirements: On one hand, they need to bring you back as fast as possible, but they have only the feet to pull you back, and if they do that, that brings your CG even more out of your contact surface and creates even more momentum that makes you fall over. So they need to bring you back slowly to allow your equilibrium controller in your brain to cope with that disturbance. This is actually what you see in the video. Everytime you change speed and/or direction that happens and you often are instable.

Stefan Schloesser

Nice one Destin, that was cool

JAYTEE

Destin is also being swallowed by software!

The depth of feeling and emotion you went into/through, in your Ready Player Onepodcast was impressive. I have listened to the book a few times (Will Wheaton reads it *very* well).

Chris Phillips

Loved the reaction: «Dude that is messed up!»

Oh yeah, also, were you able to run on it? How fast did you get up to?

I find it interesting that they did a much more "free" design" using tracking and trying to keep you centered as opposed to a system which uses fixed harnesses and seemingly requires less processing... just lets gravity do it's thing and keeps you still... I guess ultimately their design probably scales better and all in all ends up becoming a lot more natural. Also curious to see if they continue with the Vive hardware or if they use something homebrew instead. Wouldn't the off-the-shelf equipment have more latency than something custom? Seems like that would be the case. One last question—how loud was it? it sounded pretty loud...

Amazing as ever.

Yes!!