Groovy Moon Boots

just got this scratching through. It's a bit of a shame because she's the one who actually pitched this episode topic, wasn't she. I think so so, Jonathan, I have a question for you. Asked me, did you remever did you ever own a pair of moon boots? I I can honestly say, with on conviction that I have never owned a pair of moon boots. You're aware of what I'm talking about. That not not the actual boots that astronauts wear. I'm so you mean the style of boots known as

moon boots. Yeah. No, I I had never owned a pair of those. I have warned things that I suspect we're equivalent to moon boots, at least in their the clunkiness factor. But I personally have never owned any Oh that may be what I had when I was a kid. I had some puffy boots that I referred to as moon boots. I don't know if moon boots is a brand, that a brand. Well anyway, I don't know one way

or another. But I had some puffy boots that were quite beloved to me, and I wore them out in the snow, and I wore them out in the summer also just because I thought they looked cool. Wow. Okay, well, you know it just tells me a lot about you, Joe, and and be proud of who you are. But we wanted to talk today about a specific type of of approach to designing shoes for astronauts specifically, but there are implications beyond that that addressed some problems that they've encountered

in the past. So let's let's talk about why we would even have this conversation in the first place. What is the big issue? What is the problem astronauts face. The problem is astronauts are always too intoxicated to walk around properly. No that's not true, No, not at all. That we we are. But however, if you were to watch certain videos, you might get that impression. Because Jonathan, did you watch the astronauts falling over? So did I? Even? I even have a little little note that I put

on there. Okay, So Joe decided to kind of watch this video and then he shared the video in our notes of astronauts having difficulty standing upright while walking about on the Moon's surface. And that's really what this episode is all about, Like, how can people design uh a system that allows astronauts to walk around on a surface like the Moon's surface without the danger constantly falling over, because based upon the YouTube video you've sent, it looks

like that is a common issue. Well, it's kind of funny, isn't it, Like they walking can be hard when you're on the moon, you know, yeah, I I wrote. My comment on the video was this is majestic. You really get the sense of achievement and grandeur as you watch chubby figures fall about in the dust. It really is like watching little toddlers fall over in a sandbox a lot. But it's not the fault of the astronauts. It's just

really hard to get around in bulky spacesuits. And once you're down, it looks like it's pretty challenging to get back up again. Yeah, they kind of try all these little moves to sort of pop back up, but they keep falling over and they look like crazy breakdancing moves at some points. Because there's one point where you see a guy who is holding himself up in a horizontal position, like like parallel to the Moon's surface, on his hands and just trying to push himself up so they can

get his feet up underneath himself. It's pretty incredible. And of course this isn't just the Moon. This is presumably true for other space environments like Mars and other foreign planets as well, where asteroids as well. That kind of probably even harder on asteroids, the lack of i mean almost you know, no negligible gravity. Yeah yeah, so, uh so space suits are bulky their pressurized environments, and they can tend to cause a feeling of perceptual segregation from

the outer atmosphere. You know, you're like you're living in this interior world and just sort of vaguely bubble buoying through. Yeah, like your perception is thrown off. Yeah, so they have to be bulky, of course, because if you know, they have all these built in protections, shielding regulatory systems. But this often leaves the astronaut with a sort of limited ability to sense their surroundings both by sight and by touch.

Right and then with that reduced gravity that I would imagine adds another element of uncertainty and and and kind of clumsiness to the whole thing. I imagine that walking around on the Moon is a lot like have you ever gone up a set of stairs that you've gone up and down a thousand times and you're not really paying attention, and in your mind you're thinking there's either one more or one fewer step than actually are there on the stairs, And that is a a really alarming

thing to have happened to you that moment. You either take an extra step on a stair that's not there, or you fail to take that extra step and you

miss a step that actually is there. I argue often that it's worse going down than going up, Like I've tried to step down at the bottom of a set of stairs when I thought there was one more to go, and it is the most jarring experience to try and step down where you cannot because there is solid floor there, though, I imagine it is much more jarring to step down thinking you should be experiencing about you know, point eight more g s than you are, right, and then you

end up falling over as a result because you have either underestimated or overestimated. You couldn't really tell when you were making contact. You didn't really know when you could shift your weight, and so you either do so prematurely or you're not quite ready to do so when you need to. All of these factors come into play, and it explains why we get this wonderful sequence of astronauts falling over as if they're just completely helpless on the

surface of the moon. But of course, when you were on a literal moonwalk falling over, despite how funny the video is, that's not a good idea. You don't want to be doing that. Number One, space suits are pretty well shielded, but there's always a chance that you could damage or puncture something vital. That's just pretty much everything on the space suit. Yeah. Then on top of that, there's just the waste of limited time and oxygen resources

lying stuck on the ground like this marshmallow man turtle thing. Right, If you have a specific set of goals for your moonwalk. You don't want to get stuck for ten minutes trying to get up. Yeah, becausebviously, whenever any of that stuff gets planned out back on Earth in the initial stages where you've you've got your mission parameter set, you're gonna build in extra time. Right, You're never going to say, let's let's really cut this to the wire, right that

that makes no sense. However, if you fall over, then you start eating up that extra time that was built in, and and this is a real concern. Yeah, So the story that made us want to do this episode today is about a particular response to this kind of problem. So the story refers to some work done by M I. T. S. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics or Aero Astro and the Charles Stark Draper Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I love the fact that's in Stark Labs. Yes it is, but they're

not that Stark because he works alone. It's a Stark contrast, I imagine it is. Now. So they've been working on this potential solution and it is space boots with environmental swerves and embedded haptic motors. So it works like this. Imagine you are an astronaut on the surface of the Moon and you're shoveling up some barrels of lunar regular to transport back to Earth, where it has become a

wildly popular flavoring agent in hot cuisine, of course. But of course you are walking through a shallow dip on the lunar surface and you feel a sudden vibration on the outside toe of your left foot, so you stop, you take a step back, You look down, you see, oh, there it is. It's a rock, or maybe it's a little room bus sized robotic rover sitting deactivated in your way, whatever it is. Having avoided tripping over it, you go around scoop up some more of the ultra fine particles

of cash money. Pretty simple, right, So you don't have to depend on your eyes. You've got a tactle sensation, this vibration that warns you to stop moving and reach out your course. And that's exactly what we mean when we talk about haptic feedback. If you're not familiar with the term haptics, it really means engaging your sense of touch in a way that gives you more information about something, whether it's your environment, or a virtual environment or something

along those lines. A very basic example of this is you likely have a smartphone or cell phone that has a little motor that vibrates when you get a call or a text. That's a haptic feedback system telling you, hey, you've got an alert. So maybe it doesn't make an audible alert so that you know if you're at work, you're not having your phone go grouper or whatever. Well,

here's one. If you have a touch screen keypad on your phone, very likely the phone vibrates ever so gently when you correctly press a key, so that so that you know you did hit the key instead of sort of going off the side and not registering the the input right, or that you just start typing you know, h h h h h h h for hello, because you haven't figured out if you're actually, you know, making

that contact with the screen or not right. And I found out when when my phone's power saving features go on when it's low on battery and it stops doing that that response. Yeah, I find it disturbing when I'm typing with my fingers, I'm like, wait a minute, am I am I typing? I don't know if the letters

are going Yeah, I've gotten used to it. I had turned mine off when I was at home, um after a certain time, Like I could, I could create parameters of when haptic feedback was turned on or turned off, and that was specifically so that I didn't disturb either my wife or my dog whenever I decided to look on something on my phone and look something gup, because every every time I would type, you get this little

haptic buzz and it would be distracting. But I also found it very difficult to navigate on my phone without it because without that feedback to reassure me that yes, indeed your touch has been has been registered, I felt like I wasn't properly activating my phone. So haptic is a very powerful kind of disciplines of a very powerful technology or strategy. I guess you could say to engage

our senses in another way and give us additional information. Yeah, it's a it's a way of repurposing information that you would get through one sense and feeding it through a

different one. So in July of this year, researchers presented their findings on on these haptic feedback boots boots for space at the International Conference on Human Computer interaction, and specifically they've been studying what types of sensations applied to which regions of the foot do the best job of keeping people from tripping over things, or actually that that part would be inferred, because really what they're looking for first is like when people can feel the sensation and

how well they can feel it right, and and can they identify from what direction it's it is coming? So that way, like if we were to have the outer left edge of your foot, uh, buzz, would that translate in your mind, Oh, there's something forward and to the left of me that I need to look out for. Yeah, uh, And and there are lots of different options for how

you could provide haptic feature right. So you know, our nervous systems are kind of quirky for reasons of evolutionary happenstance, and so they respond better to some stimuli than to others. So they actually looked into what works best. So scientists Alison Gibson, Andrea Webb and Leah Sterling conducted this study to find out exactly how good people are at detecting different kinds of sensations on their feet under various conditions.

On my feet, my feet were tingling reading about this. Yeah, and it's interesting to hear about the experiments because they included everything from kind of a straightforward approach where they said, are you gonna feel a buzz? I need you to tell me, like, on a scale of maybe one to ten, how strong was that buzz and where on your foot

did you feel it? And then they start and making it a little more complicated by making people like do things while they're administering the buzzes and try and see like, well, can they still accurately describe the intensity and the location because this obviously that would be important. You know, if you're walking around the surface of the moon, you're probably not just completely focused on how are my feet feeling right now? No, you're trying to get that delicious regulars

back to your back to your transfer. Emerald will not wait for his for his moon spice bam. So if you want to look up their their presentation, it's it's called user abilities in detecting vibro tactle signals on the feet under varying attention loads. Vibro Tactle is amazing, what a great word, And yeah, varying attention loads obviously that's

the reference to what I was talking about earlier. But you know, sometimes you have to create some distractions, nothing of real like importance or or urgency, but rather just something to occupy the person's mind. So that example is one of the independent variables they tested attention state whether you're distracted by other stuff. Another one was vibration locations of tow or heel in step or outside, etcetera. And

then the third was vibration signal type. And this is not correct, but I wish this meant good vibrations versus bad vibrations bad vibes manuh no. In actuality, the different vibration types were high, low, increasing and decreasing, increasing and decreasing. Matter because of something I'll get to in a bit, well, well before before we get into that, just for a clarification on my own part, because this was something that I missed when I was reading it. When they say

high and low, are they talking about frequency or intensity? Oh? Well, actually I think it's intensity, But I'm not positive because I was it's intensity. I would think so too, because to me that would just mean like, is the motor vibrating at a greater intense stealer as in, is it making heart of great bigger vibrations is the ample alitude increased as opposed to is the frequency increase. I would

imagine the same thing. That was my interpretation, but I didn't actually read Yeah, okay, co uh So these could be delivered to six different places on each foot and that results in twenty four unique different kinds of signals. And then they also, like you said, they ran a distraction test, so they were like, let me know if you can feel anything on your feet and uh and what it is, where it's coming in, and what it

feels like. But then also do that while I show you a random number and you start to count up by threes Jonathan twenty four, thirty thirty three, thirty six. I gave you an easy one. Let me get a hard no no, no, no no, don't don't have a liberal arts major. Uh So, But it turns out even with a pretty simple test like this subject has had

some difficulty. They they had trouble identifying when the vibration, for example, was steadily increasing, so that that's not just the on and off high and low sensation, but when it's slowly getting more intense and even in the undistracted condition, so even when they're not trying to do the counting. People did not do a great job of detecting when vibration was decreasing in intensity. Uh. And also no surprise here, but some parts of the foot are just more sensitive

than others. You know, the middle of the outside of the foot was pretty dumb. By the way, A little side. Now, do you ever play that game where you touch somebody's back with different numbers of fingers and asked them how many it is you should you should agree beforehand with the person you're playing, right, there's consent is absolutely don't don't surprise somebody with this game. I've I've played variations

of that, like as a kid. There's also the I'm gonna draw something on your back, tell me what it was you I drew and I, uh, it's difficult. Yeah, people don't realize how dumb their backs are. The tactle neurons back there is just I don't know, you know, I'm touching your touch somebody with three fingers and they're like, oh one right, yeah, let's say. And so you think about it, like, there are definitely gonna be areas of the foot that will be more responsive to to haptic

feedback than others. And when they were talking about increasing or decreasing the intensity, I could easily imagine that being a difficult thing to uh, to detect even so much. Is like, even if I have a phone in my hand and I'm increasing the motor intensity until you get to like unless it unless it does does it in big jumps, the differences can be fairly subtle, And then I think, well, what if I felt that on my foot, and what if that were the important determining factor. Like,

as I approach a potential stumbling block, the intensity increases. Uh, if it is to settle, then that becomes kind of useless. It just is going to be a constant distraction as I look around, and maybe I can't identify what the thing is because it's not quite close enough for me to notice that it is something I'm going to stumble over. Uh. And then next thing, you know, I start to ignore this this buzzing because so frequently it's not helpful, and

then I'm falling all over again. That exactly is a problem people are worried about. Okay, so how do you keep people from tuning out the feedback? Yeah, you have to have it be urgent enough that it's meaningful, but not so urgent that it is that it's misleading right there.

It's a delicate balance, but you can see where it could become really useful if you have the sensors in a boot and you have the alert happen where it's not gonna be so sensitive that it's it's it's set off by everything, because then you're just like, well, all I can tell you is being on the moon is crappy because all my feet are just buzzing. These dogs are buzzing. In other words, that's an alternate title for

this episode. Yes, so of course this technology it's still got a lot of ground to cover as the study, but a lot of moon ground. Because while a simple on off vibration might be somewhat helpful, one thing about the world around us is it's best represented by continuous data,

not on off analogue rather than digital. Yeah, so the the increasing and decreasing quantities would probably be the best way to represent something like proximity or even like the the size of the potential obstacle, because again we have you have such a limited field of view inside a space helmet, right like it cuts off your field of

view significantly. Uh, you might want to use intensity to indicate perhaps not the distance to the obstacle, but perhaps the the size of the obstacle, like whether or not it's a sizeable rock that's ahead of you that you might stumble over, or a drop down that's been you know, that's your boot has uh detected where you know you don't want to have that next step forward be four

inches lower than what you had anticipated. Yeah, exactly. So the mn T news piece that covered this particular research also, I thought this was interesting. Spoke to a doctor, Shirley right Dick, professor of Health and Kinesiology at Perdue, who specializes She specializes in like falling down. Basically, so do I, but not not. I don't have the credentials. I just have the experience America's Funniest Home Videos professor. And but she pointed out that this would be useful for more

than just astronauts. I think that that's clear. But for who, Well she gave the example of how about firefighters. So for firefighters, you go into a burning building, there's flames, there's smoke. Environmental navigation inside a burning building is a well known problem. Uh, And so this could be very useful for them too, And I imagine maybe deep sea divers. Maybe you know there there are lots of conditions where you don't want to be tripping over stuff and your

personal visibility is going to be limited. And the even beyond that, we started talking and in fact articles have also been pointing this out. It's not just Joe and I have come up with this idea, but we've talked about how these sort of haptic feedback systems could be used for people in everyday situations, particularly people who may have uh problems with their vision. Yeah, exactly, So one

obvious application would be for people with visual impairments. So at a certain level, this is harder than it sounds, because you can give somebody a vibration in their shoe if they're about to kick something, But how do you communicate more complex navigational information about a person surroundings without visual information. The thing about the astronauts is they should be able to see generally what's going on around them. The problem is they might not notice there's a rock

at their foot. But but imagine you're completely blind and you're trying to use haptic feedback to give people navigational information about what's around them. You can you can give a kind of dumb and form, but it gets more difficult the more info you're trying to encode, right, So, so indicating that there's a possible surface that you're going to come into contact with right there, that's that's one thing. But to get to a level like the way, how about there's a street and there are cars on it

right right. One of the things I thought about when we started talking about this is it's a a step toward spiky sense, but perhaps a better representation would even be Daredevil's heightened senses. That Daredevil's capable even though he's blind.

Matt Murdoch spoiler alert is blind, he's capable of sensing through this this crazy heightened ability to almost see vibrations like he can he can sense sound at such a level that he can and he knows shapes of things and whether something is coming towards him or moving away from him. That level is well beyond a little motor vibrating against you to indicate that there's something you might

be bumping into in the very near future. And um and while I think that this technology definitely has the potential to increase a person's environmental awareness, particularly someone who perhaps has has just become blind, who hasn't had hasn't been dealing with an impairment over the course of years. Uh, this might be something that is more helpful. Yeah, and this is something that is also under development. In fact,

more m I T research. There. There's research on the hardware behind a wearable device that uses three D camera data to provide navigational feedback to people with visual impairments. It's been known as the Virtual Guide Dog. Interesting. But you know, Jonathan and I were talking before we came in here about the idea of of expanding this even

farther with something that Jonathan dubbed pedestrian assist. Yeah, kind modeled after the driver assist systems that were familiar with things like you know, the lane assist, parking assist, breaking assist, acceleration, you know, cruise control. But in this case, obviously I'm not talking about your your shoes magically taking over for you, Like, hey, shoes, I want to go to the mall and they just start stepping and you're just like, hey, I can go

to sleep now. Yeah, So it would be self powered, but it would be uh, sort of like a not self driving car for your feet, but self navigating car for your feet or or at least giving you Yeah, that driver assists that warning accident prevention right like you're going to hey, buddy, stop playing Pokemon Go for three freaking seconds. That is a thing, because you're gonna run into that street lamp. People have walked off of ledges, haven't they? I I have personally like I I play

Pokemon Go, so full full disclosure. I play the game. I do not disclosing your conflict of interest, Yes, exactly, well, I want to make sure that people know that I'm not making fun of folks who play Pokemon Go. I'm making fun of myself, a person who does play Pokemon Go.

So subtle difference. I have made it a point when I started playing, and i've I've stayed true to this that I will not pay any attention to my phone whenever I am crossing streets, because I know I would be that person who stumbles over a curb and causes danger to myself, to others, to you know, giving drivers a heart attack, maybe possibly suffering a massive injury or perhaps even death because I'm not paying attention to what I'm doing, Because I am aware of this, and I've

had situations where I have made contact with stationary objects because I was looking down at my screen and not up. Now in in my case, that stationary object was a tree branch that in my neighborhood. There's this one tree where the branches is slightly uh lower down to the ground than my height is. So if I don't duck, I will bang my head against it. But if I if I'm looking down towards my screen, it's out of my view, my field of view. So I have hit on more than one occasion the top of my head

against this branch. Now, it hasn't always been because of Pokemon. Sometimes it's a real monster, that being my dog. So I'm often looking down at him, and I frequently nearly not quite close line myself. It's not quite low enough, but I do get knocked right at the crown of my head. Oh, I thought you were going to say that you were on the way home and face timing with him before. If my dog learns how to face time,

it will be the end of times. But because I will never do anything ever again other than FaceTime with my dog. But no, it is definitely one of those things. Where if I were to have some sort of of sensor on me and clothing, they could say hey, dude, heads up, then I would not have that experience. Now, in my case, that was a very minor inconvenience. I was never hitting it so hard that I was causing myself real injury. It was more more than anything else.

I was feeling embarrassed about clocking my head because I wasn't really paying attention to where I was going. But this could really end up being something that prevents injury and death if if actually rolled out to and incorporated in a larger number of of wearables. Yeah. And of course, Jonathan, you were mentioning something about the way haptics would be incorporated in uh in virtual reality and augmented reality environment. Yeah,

so this is not unusual either. It's something that a lot of In fact, I would argue that the video game world has pushed the haptic discipline forward more than anything else as an effort to create more immersive experiences

for gamers. So a very simple version of that is the rumble pack that you find in a lot of game controllers, right, that gives you that So like like when there's thunder in the game, the controller vibrates and gives you that sensation something that you don't even really necessarily register after you've played a lot of games with that kind of functionality. But when it's gone, you're like, oh, yeah,

that is that does make a difference. Well, in virtual reality, obviously you're in you're interacting with the world that doesn't exist, right, It's it's purely digital. It is over is replacing the physical world around you. Um, and it may mean that you need to do things like interact with certain objects in the world. When you include haptic feedback in that world, it increases that sense of immersion that you are really in that virtual environment. Uh, this is tricky to do, right, Like,

we don't have a whole lot of examples. I've seen some stuff like I wore a vest at c S one year that was a haptic feedback vest for video games that would have lots of little actuators and motors in it so that when you got shot in a game, it would map. It would give you a good thud at the location of the shot, so if it was a like a shot in the shoulder, your shoulder would actually go thud. And yeah, that's not pleasant. They also

had helmets. I did not try one of those on. Um, being a bald guy, I'm not thrilled about putting on helmets that other people have tried. Uh, you're the least susceptible to headlines. Well, I don't want to make other people think, oh, the sweaty bald guy just took that helmet off. Now I gotta put it on. And I don't like to share those kind of things. But yeah, it's it's it's one of those things that again increases

your sense of immersion. It could be very valuable. I've seen some really cool prototype devices that give that haptic feedback to create that that more convincing situation, which can be really useful whether it's a game or some other experience. Like have you seen the gloves that it looks like you put your fingers through a set of rings and each ring is attached to what looks almost like a piston.

I'm not sure I have, so, so each finger is on again they look like little pistons that that look like almost like pneumatic pistons, right, And the idea is that it creates resistance so that when you are picking up a virtual object in a game. It increases resistance as if you were actually gripping that object, so and you could you can adjust the level of resistance so a soft object has less resistance, so you can you know,

you you definitely feel it. It's more than if you were to just open or close your hand, but a hard object would have greater resistance, hopefully mapped so that it would kind of like, quote unquote, feel like your hand is closing around an object of about the same size as what you're seeing on the screen. Now, that doesn't solve the problem of the fact that everything is weightless right like it's or or it's rather just the

weight of whatever the actual glove you're wearing happens to be. Well, they need to make things in the gloves that adjust their mass and suddenly so it just converts energy to mass or releases an equivalent amount of energy when you drop it. You know, you set off a nuclear bomb

every time you drop something from your inventory. No big deal, uh, I mean, you know there are other ways of doing that, but it mostly involves turning your game room into like a crazy system of pulleys and restraints that are going to raise some questions in your average household, I imagine y. Yeah, But at any rate, the having this haptic feedback UH for for augmented reality or virtual reality very important because we are trying to marry a real experience with a

digital one to some extent, you know, uh, replacing the real experience with a digital one in the case of virtual reality, augmenting in the case of a R. But either way you need to have or at least it it has been official to have that additional haptic feedback to make the experience more meaningful, powerful, memorable, uh, and

even easy to navigate. Right Like, when you have that that force feedback and it reinforces the idea of this is a will experience, then it is easier to to create something that a user is going to find gratifying. If you don't have that there. Ultimately you have people who go through that experience who want to test the boundaries of what is what it's what is possible to do in there? And as soon as you find something that's not possible to do, you get that sense of, oh, well,

that's disappointing. I was really hoping I could do this thing, which is why like like there's um a game, the job simulator game for VR. We talked about the previous episode. Now there's haptic feedback doesn't really fit into this, but the the idea that you know, you start coming up with a concept like what would happen if I did this? Did they think about that? And whenever you try something and you realize, oh, they did think about it, and they created a funny outcome for this thing that I

just came up with. It delights you because I mean someone has thought the same goofy stuff you thought and they built it into the experience. I would argue the same thing it's true with with haptic feedback is building the stuff in. It reminds you that other people are really thinking about these weird you know, outside the boundaries cases, and they're accounting for it. And that creates a really fun experience on your end, a discovery that is enjoyable.

So there's not just the practical aspect of this can help you avoid getting hurt while you're walking around a physical space but you're in a virtual world. It can also enhance that experience itself, so they're not getting hurt matters. That doesn't matter. And we talked about this before we came in here too, about how some of the systems out there, like HTC vive rely on you moving around

a physical space while playing in a virtual environment. You're not just sitting in a chair wearing a headset and holding a controller. Well, that does seem like the crucial next step. I mean, if you are inhabiting a virtual environment in which you can move your head as if you're really in the environment, you can't move the rest of your body as if you're really in the environment. I don't, I don't know. I mean, I don't have much experience with virtual reality. I haven't I haven't used

any of this new generation or anything. But that seems like that would be a kind of frustrating disconnect or half measured. It can definitely, uh, at least in my case, make you give you a little bit of that motion sickness feeling. Not because usually it's that's due to latency, but if if it's because you are moving about using a controller, but you are moving your head as if you're in the space, there's a disconnect between Hey, this is not how I really navigate my environment in real

meat space. So my my brain is saying this is weird because you're sitting still, you're and you don't feel an emotion from the chair. You are and you're feeling no sense of acceleration, and yet you are accelerating and decelerating based upon the visual stimulator giving you know what. That's it. Everyone in the stomach get out right, Like you just start to feel kind of sick to your stomach. Whereas with the HTC vibe and and similar products, you

are actually moving. You you can physically move into space, but then you're you're you have the question of well, how do we make sure a person moving in a physical space doesn't slam up against the wall or trip over a chair or bang up against a desk. As we've talked about before, this introduces all kinds of other problems, Like it would be even cooler to have virtual environments where you could move with your body throughout the space, but you'd have to have a dedicated real world space

it seems like, and of a decent size. Yeah, And it would also in some way have to have to match the virtual space, Like what if you want to go uphill in the virtual space, Either the virtual space would have to be completely flat, or you would have to have like real world objects that are mapped to virtual objects, which I've seen, and at that point, like it's almost like why yeah, Because I mean like like I've seen some examples of let's have this this post

here and we map it in the game. So it's a tree. So if you were to walk up, you could reach out and you could touch, and there would actually be a thing there where the tree is. It wouldn't necessarily feel like a tree that would be there.

Um that kind of thing or uh, you know. I've also seen some interesting studies about how you can guide a person so that it feels like they're walking down a straight pathway but in reality, through visual cues, you are you're making them curves, so they're walking in a circle, but to them it feels like they're walking in a straight line. That kind of stuff is interesting, but ultimately you still have the concerned what happens when they get too close to the wall with the HTC vibe. The

solution is to give a visual cue. Because you're using two sensors called lighthouses that are able to map out the room that you are in. You're supposed to put them in in diagonally opposite corners, and when you get close to a wall, there's an indication on in your

view that you're getting too close to a wall. But you could do the same thing with haptic feedback, where you get a little bit of a of a pressure against some part of your body, not necessarily uh linked to gameplay, because you don't want to You don't want to create confusion, right, You don't want to make people think was that because it thundered in the game, Or am I I'm about to break my nose because I'm

getting too close to the wall. But if you're able to differentiate, differentiate, and use that haptic feedback, it is kind of like having that spiky sense of Oh, I gotta I gotta be careful or I'm gonna I'm gonna totally uh smack my face against the door any second, now,

you know. I wonder if in the in for navigating virtual worlds, what people are going to have to have is is not dedicated flat rooms, but a combination of the omnidirectional treadmill paired at the same time with a sort of actuated version of those coffee table art pieces people have where they've got all the pins in them, and you can create a three D contour of your hand by sticking them under the pins. First time I

ever encountered that was at the Imagination Pavilion at Epcot. Really, I thought it was the most mind breaking thing I'd ever seen. I mean, they are pretty cool. I like to play with them. Whenever I see one, I'm impressed. But anyway, wait, where is it? I used to encounter one all the time. I can't remember. For me, it was the early eighties when Epcot first opened. I was a kid, and I was easily impressed. I think one of my friends had one. But anyway, imagine something kind

of like that. So you're on an omnidirectional treadmill, but also under your feet you've got you know, actuated things that can rise up in program contours so that you can you can climb, you can descend, becoming like the mini bots and uh in Big Hero six. Yeah, I see what you're saying. Where you've got this um so, so it's not just flat, featureless landscape that you're running across, but you can you can have elevation uh and and

encounter that and have it change. Yeah, or I mean another way of doing it would be just a tilt like a a tilting omnidirectional uh treadmill, which we're starting to get We're starting to get into some pretty complicated

territory here to have all this work out properly. But it is interesting, um you know, and these are these are real questions, like at what point do you just say, all right, now I'm outside, Yeah, this is this is too complicated, Let's just build a theme park or uh we can we can get away with this minimum amount of sensory input and create a really compelling experience because honestly, it doesn't take that much to get lost in a virtual experience and start to think of it as a

real experience. What you need is low latency and high agency, Like you need to have very little lag between your actions and you need to actually be able to enact change in your environment. And the more you're able to bring down latency and increase agency, the more immersive the

experience tends to be. And it doesn't matter how high fidelity the graphics are at that point, or how many different points of feedback you have, um other than you know, as long as everything supports what you're doing and doesn't detract from it, right, like you wouldn't want to have a haptic feedback that that contradicts the other sensory uh input that you're receiving. That would that would be detrimental

to the overall experience. But yeah, this was um a fun thing to just explore and and I love the idea of utilizing it in a practical sense for space application, but also then to see what other potential applications we could uh find for it here on Earth. Uh, mostly because you know, I like to play with technology. I don't know if you saw it, but I put on a suit that made you'll feel like a real old person.

Yeah I I if I didn't like technology, I never would have allowed them to strap on that extremely snug outfit. So Lauren, thank you for the suggestion. Wish that you could have been here to chime in because this was a fun one. But we do expect her to be back for our next episode and of course, listeners out there, if you have any comments, questions, you have suggestions for future topics, please send them our way our email addresses f W Thinking at how Stuff Works dot com, or

drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter. On Twitter, we are FW thinking on Facebook. You can search FW thinking in the little search bar our profile to top up right away and you can leave us a message there and we will talk to you again really soon. For more on this topic and the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot Com, brought to you by Toyota. Let's Go Places,