Strolling in Room-Scale VR: Hex-Core-MK1 Omnidirectional Treadmill

TL;DR

This paper introduces Hex-Core-MK1, a compact, lightweight omnidirectional treadmill for VR that offers natural walking experiences in small spaces with low latency and high dynamic performance.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel omnidirectional treadmill design using mirror symmetrical spiral rollers, achieving full-degree freedom in a small area with improved size, weight, and performance over existing systems.

Findings

Provides real walking experience in 1.76 m^2 space

Achieves latency of only 23 ms

Weighs only 110 kg, enabling broader VR applications

Abstract

The natural locomotion interface is critical to the development of many VR applications. For household VR applications, there are two basic requirements: natural immersive experience and minimized space occupation. The existing locomotion strategies generally do not simultaneously satisfy these two requirements well. This paper presents a novel omnidirectional treadmill (ODT) system, named Hex-Core-MK1 (HCMK1). By implementing two kinds of mirror symmetrical spiral rollers to generate the omnidirectional velocity field, this proposed system is capable of providing real walking experiences with a full-degree of freedom in an area as small as 1.76 m^2, while delivering great advantages over several existing ODT systems in terms of weight, volume, latency and dynamic performance. Compared with the sizes of Infinadeck and HCP, the two best motor-driven ODTs so far, the 8 cm height of HCMK1 is only 20% of Infinadeck and 50% of HCP. In addition, HCMK1 is a lightweight device weighing only 110 kg, which provides possibilities of further expanding VR scenarios, such as terrain simulation. The latency of HCMK1 is only 23ms. The experiments show that HCMK1 can deliver on a starting acceleration of 16.00 m/s^2 and a braking acceleration of 30.00 m/s^2.