Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

After a month as a VR game anchor, in addition to becoming more and more addicted to "half a Life: Alyx", I am also thinking about another question: what is missing from VR now?

As a "person in the middle", I will use avatars to explain it live-I believe that if there must be a virtual world in the future, we should be "deeply bound" to our digital doubles. This binding is not only external cognitive, but also the experience in the real world and the virtual world should be common.

Players know that VR games have a very different experience from traditional games. In VR games, you don't have to stoop in front of the computer, fiddling with the mouse and keyboard. You can really use your two-handed handle as a gun, aim at the enemy, pull your index finger and press the trigger. Today's VR games can identify finger movements very accurately-but you can't pick up a dropped clip in the VR world.

Occasionally, when I was hanging out in the tubing, I saw Lucas (the founder of an American VR startup team) making a VR tactile glove, focusing on the cost of all the parts, which cost him only $60.

I reprinted this video application to my account, but the response was overwhelming. Add Lucas's sentence "you can really touch anything with it", which increases my curiosity. Following the trail, I found open source tutorials on GitHub, and I'm going to make a pair.

In terms of current technology, I do not expect the emergence of VR peripherals that "can touch anything". But that's what moved me. At present, in the VR market, except for one head display and two handles, there is nothing new, and I think any attempt to expand the user experience at a "civilian price" is worth a try.

In the cheapest way to touch the virtual 1987, or the era of Nintendo red and white phones, gloves have assumed the function of "input device" as a peripheral of somatosensory games.

Power Glove? YouTube "Gaming Historian" in reality, if you want to touch the gun in the game, you should not only let the computer recognize that your hand is moving, model the virtual hand moving synchronously with the real hand (signal input function), but also wait until the virtual hand holds the gun and return a signal-- this signal acts on the hand, which is what we often call force feedback.

Meta has released videos of tactile gloves, using microfluidic (microfluidics) technology, using an air actuator (pneumatic actuators) to create precise pressure by inflating and deflating bubbles. To that end, Meta says it is also building a high-speed microfluidic processor. When people were pleased that Zuckerberg, who was still "all in" in meta-universe, finally came up with something, HaptX, another developer of tactile gloves, said, "Meta copied us!"

Meta has been developed for seven years and HaptX has been developed for ten years. We don't know who copied which, but to be sure, it will take many years for VR-related technology to mature (at least accepted by ordinary users at a price).

I am excited about how to give feedback with "very low cost" implementation. When I flipped through the tutorials, I found that LucidVR used a particularly "tricky" way. If Meta and HaptX are meant to make every inch of your hand skin a point of force, then LucidVR gloves only give force back to your fingertips.

Fix the rope to the finger. To put it simply, the moment the object is grasped, the finger should be pulled immediately to prevent further bending. Because the bending amplitude is different, it means that the objects "held" in the hand are of different size and shape. The way to control that the fingers cannot continue to bend is to give the fingertips a "reaction".

Fingertip force? the author provides the picture, so the main part of the glove is a "master gate", extending out five pull ropes at the fingertips, shouting to stop at any time.

The steering gear is connected to the potentiometer. When the axle turns to the (steering gear) limit, the steering wheel will block the screws on the axle, so that the axle cannot continue to rotate and the rope can not continue to unfold. When I know the principle of force feedback, I still need to figure out when and how to "close the gate".

"when" is easy to understand when a virtual hand touches an object in the virtual world. So we need to be a medium so that the action signals of the organism and the electrical signals of the computer can be converted into each other and "understand" each other. This is what I think is the most ingenious design of this pair of gloves.

The rotary potentiometer (whose principle is similar to the sliding rheostat in the junior high school textbook) is connected with the pull rope. When the fingers are bent, five pull ropes drive five potentiometers respectively, and the length of the pull rope is converted into the change of the resistance value of the potentiometer. Transfer to the virtual world for analysis.

The sliding rheostat on the textbook? the picture is from the network modeling "data glove", and there are other implementations based on IMU (inertial measurement unit) or bending sensor, for example. The so-called inertial sensor is a device for measuring the three-axis attitude angle and acceleration of an object, which generally includes a three-axis gyroscope, an accelerometer and a magnetometer for multi-sensor data fusion to reconstruct the three-degree-of-freedom direction of each finger. The bending sensor is better understood that when the finger is bending, physical deformation occurs to change the resistance value of the sensor.

Compare the price of the bending sensor and the potentiometer? the picture from Taobao is obviously more accurate to transmit data, but why not? There is only one answer: more expensive.

With the help of 3D printed axles, the potentiometer and the pull rope are "connected". The author provides a picture to know when to "turn off" and how to "close the gate". Obviously, the rope needs a device to "jam" it in the process of stretching. I followed the tutorial to buy back the MG-90S, the steering gear commonly used in aircraft models, which is also very cheap for 10 yuan each.

MG-90S steering gear with a wide range of applications. Pictures from Amazon for a month, only picked up a wine bottle in the game to read the tutorial, I quickly mastered the principle, said to myself, this "seems" quite simple? Why don't we do this first, then this way, and then that way?

I immediately placed an order on the e-commerce platform for all the parts, which are common tools in our daily life. Only some of the off-the-shelf products (skeletons that put the modules together) are solved with a household 3D printer based on the open source component parameters.

Of course, you can also find the omnipotent Taobao Daiba, the author to provide pictures, and then, this is done for a month. At the same time, I deeply understand that another meaning of "trickery" is "not perfect".

When I put on my tactile gloves, adjust the position of Valve Index (VR head display), and start the game "half Life: Alyx". I was in the familiar "City 17". I took a pistol out of my backpack and aimed at the wine bottles scattered on the street. "bang!" At the moment of shooting, there should be a recoil coming from my brain. In fact, only my index finger was pulled the moment I pulled the trigger-the experience was more plastic than shooting balloons in the park.

But I must have succeeded! I changed a wine bottle scattered on the street, "take" in my hand, I can probably "touch" it, it is a cylinder.

The effect of use in the game. When I wanted to use them more flexibly, I found a problem.

The first is the problem of "recognition accuracy". We need to understand that positioning tracking and local tracking are two concepts, and the overall positioning tracking of gloves can be achieved by attaching Vive Tracker and Oculus handles, so ready-made tracking technology.

The local tracking of fingers is the focus of a force feedback glove. When I assembled, I found that this pair of gloves are not designed with sensors for every knuckle, and the bending state of the fingers can only be roughly modeled by the resistance signals converted by pulling ropes (Lucas may have designed a set of software for this), which is not accurate enough to reach every joint.

Hand tracking? the picture provided by the author is followed by the question of "identification scope". Also because of the simple construction of the gloves, my fingers can only be recognized when moving up and down, left and right, rotation and other degrees of freedom can not be achieved. But Lucas told me that he is already working on this problem, and that the next version of the glove will increase the degree of freedom to unfold left and right by adding a potentiometer at the first knuckle.

Whether the identification is accurate or not will affect the effect of feedback. Another factor is the adjustment of the limit position. The different bending degrees of the fingers correspond to different limit positions one by one, driving the steering wheel to turn to different angles, and then acting on the stretching rope.

In my understanding, to achieve this, the LucidVR system presupposes this "correspondence".

However, the condition of each person's hand is different, and the limit needs to be "personalized" calibrated before use. If the adjustment is too tight, the hand will be pulled before the object is caught; if the adjustment is too loose, holding the object is like making a fist with an empty hand.

There is no easy way to do this. You can only feel the tightness and "estimate" the limit position when wearing the head. After taking off the head display, unscrew the steering gear and adjust the steering wheel over and over again until you happen to grasp the object in the virtual world.

In addition to the drawing provided by the author, long stretching will lead to the deformation of ropes and gloves. Because the whole device is not completely attached to the hand, but glued to the glove, the slight displacement of the glove will also bring the error of force feedback.

The optimization experience cannot be stopped! It can be modified or replenished by the brain.

There is a small episode before the gloves are actually used.

After I debugged it many times, the steering gear remained motionless. I went to Discord for help, and netizens told me that it was not that the rudder line was connected to the development board wrong, but that the current was too small to take the steering gear. I need to connect a new portable battery to the steering gear separately instead of sharing a portable battery with the development board.

There are 14000 followers in LucidVR's Discord discussion group. Some people have improved this pair of gloves and replaced the rope with a tougher plastic sheet to solve the problem that the rope is easily deformed.

Others directly change the structure to make the exoskeleton shape, leaving room to add more sensors. Many open source projects will not cover all aspects, on the contrary, they will leave a lot of "gaps" for technology enthusiasts to explore on their own.

Exoskeleton version, Lucas, in his presentation, depicts the gloved VR experience as extremely exciting. In half a Life: Alyx, you can pick up cans, throw them out, walk to the car, open the door and get in the car, or even climb the wall when you are in danger. However, this is more of a "brain tonic" that brings into other sensory experiences. You can experience the resistance against a wall at most, and you won't have the feeling of climbing up against gravity.

Knowing this, when I put on this glove for the first time, I felt whether the object was big or small, round or square, even if it was just the stiff "touch" coming from my fingertips. Before that, I couldn't even imagine holding a glass bottle empty.

Almost at the same time as I was making gloves, I made a SlimeVR full-body tracker. In the same way as gloves, I made five sensors tied to the ankles, thighs and waist (because the SlimeVR software did not model the upper limb). The five sensors first identified the absolute position through the T-pose reset, and then identified the relative position by "each other", parsing the electrical signals into the movements of the virtual human. With this pair of gloves (handle) and head display, you can make the "old second dimension" dance happily in VRChat.

SlimeVR also opened up the code. The picture is from SlimeVR. A few months ago, I posted my own video on the Internet and randomly received a lot of followers. Of course, that's not what excites me the most. Two months after the "SlimeVR full body Tracker" video was released, the price of the most important component, the BNO-080 (nine-axis sensor module), rose from 90 yuan to 300 yuan on Taobao. (before that, no one taught the homemade SlimeVR full-body tracker, so let's just say I inspired the love of the old two-dimensional people. )

Sensor module? the author provided the picture, of course, I did not receive all the "praise". I printed a model that could fit a small fan in 3D and put it on the head to solve the muggy problem.

Self-made VR head display fan, provided by the author, but this time, because the fan used is too cheap, my scheme was ridiculed for making too much noise-"like an airport".

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: fruit Shell (ID:Guokr42), author: Lulu Mikuru, Editor: Shen Zhihan

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