[TECHCRUNCH] Hidden forces and sliding screens trick the senses to make VR feel more real

This is the best summary I could come up with:

In the “emerging technologies” hall, or cave as the darkened, black-draped room felt, dozens of experimental approaches at the frontiers of VR seemed to describe the state of the art: visually impressive, but with immersion relying almost entirely on that.

While the process worked extremely well for me, it totally failed for one attendee (whom I suspect was a higher-up at Sony’s VR division, but his experience seemed genuine) who said that the optical approach was at odds with his own vision impairment, and turning the feature on actually made everything look worse.

One from Sony researchers takes the concept of a rumble pack to extremes: a controller mounted to a sort of baton, inside which is a weight that can be driven up and down by motors to change the center of gravity or simulate motion.

A rapid-fire set of demos first had me opening a virtual umbrella — not a game you would play for long, obviously, but an excellent way to show how a change in center of gravity can make a pretend item seem real.

Next, a second baton was affixed to the first in perpendicular fashion, forming a gun-like shape, and indeed the demo had me blasting aliens with a shotgun and pistol, each of which had a distinct “feel” due to how they programmed the weights to move and simulate recoil and reloading.

The mechanism is a bit hard to understand, but spinning weights like this essentially want to remain “upright,” and by changing their orientation relative to gravity or the object on which they are mounted, that tendency to right themselves can produce quite precise force vectors.

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