V of War Dev Blog No.4：Consideration About VR Movement and Control Mechanism

Since the last blog was posted, it is been a long time. We throw ourselves into a mountain of work but I never forget I promiss to share our development progress with you. Today I am gonna talk more about the movement design which has been mentioned in the previous blog already.

I bet you already knew the common movement of the VR games, teleportation and the control pad, you must have tried some game controls like these. And in V of War 1.0 version, we have explored developing different moving mechanisms.

     

In the very beginning, we have designed two mechanisms for VR, one is the KAT running machine which you might have seen and attracted by during the VR exhibitions. We adopts the 16IK simulation system to reappear the actual action of the VR players. In the system, the headset is control of the direction, while the sensors on the feet are made for movement. The handsome machine is very eye-catching in business scenarios, however it’s too large for customer market, also keeping running in the machine would be challenge for players. (P.s. the equipment shown below is a very fantastic machine for our colleagues to keep fit, it is very popular)

The other one is even more handsome. we were awarded with the 2017 Red Dot Award with this concept. It shall be considered as the simplified KAT version that we just mentioned, while we change the direction sensor from the headset to the waist belt so as to free the sight of the player. What’s more we take the sensors of the feet out, instead, we detect the movement by the vibration of the headset led by nature human movement. When the player steps on the mat, our program would know it and the character it controls also moves.

Later this kind of moving mechanism was transformed to nodding while sitting on a chair during the inner test in our studio. It seems a little bit silly(LOL), however we thought it was a progress because we found that sitting while playing might better fit the necessity of repeated playing and longer time. And that shall be the foundation of a game facing customers. Another bonus was releasing the motion sickness as well.

It led us to think, what would be a game that customer would buy. The game as well as the equipment the customer would buy shall be simple, light and repeatable, otherwise why take it home? Think from this direction, we tried a lot VR operation styles that can be fit on a chair. Combined with the feature of virtual reality that a user would not experience well if he sees a standing body inside the game while he’s actually sitting on a chair, we developed the mech as the carrier, and the VR handles stand for the control sticks, so the player become the driver of the mech, which is strong and handsome. So everybody likes it.

 At first, it was just a concept raised, but it gained the agreement of our studio members. We surprisingly discovered a few mech fans within the group, and that was the start of our trying. We brainstormed and tested in white box, then it was a great trying, we found that the motion sickness can hardly be felt with this mechanism. That was the embryo of our movement mechanism.

                                                ( a review of our movement mechanism: )

Well, after we developed this mechanism controlled by the leaning of the handles, we truly freed the eight direction buttons on the control pads, as well as the overly large extra equipment. V of War 2.0 version shall be seen as a very important step for us to VR personal customers. 

While we look to the past, we were very proud of our innovation. Last time a business partner came to our office, and left a comment that I would never forget: “Your NINED is always a VR pioneer”. Yup, we all agree that innovation is the life of us.