Skating through VR

The first virtual space I spent hours in was Google Blocks. It's wonderland for builders. A blank canvas that extends in all directions, forward, back, up, down. You hold your hand out, squeeze, drag your hand down, and then a cube appears in the air. Add another few cubes, you've made a house. I made huge cities, giant squids, and glowworm caves during my first couple weeks in VR. I felt like a god, being able to draw a mountain then walk around on it. 

I noticed a strange interaction between my virtual space and my realworld space. If I were drawing a palm tree on a beach, and I wanted to see what was to the left of the palm tree (in this case, a surfboard), I could either move my physical body in the physical world a couple paces to the left, and risk bumping into a wall, or I could just drag the digital model in the virtual world over to the right with a simple wrist flick. Head turns were easy to do physically, as long as they were less than about 60°. Turning all the way around was easier to do virtually. And crouching to draw the underside of a beach umbrella burned the quads worse than a corepower workout. Much easier to drag the virtual model so it was in front of me. Leonardo couldn't make the Sistine Chapel's ceiling face up and down like a wall, so he spent months on his back eating paint. But in VR, we can. 

Mixing physical movement with virtual perspective shifts became second nature, and finding the right ways to move in VR became an obsession of mine. Because movement means exploration, freedom, agency, control. Adventure. Mobility is fundamentally human. And VR gave me whole new ways to be mobile. But there was a problem.

In VR, movement makes people sick. 

Every time your perspective moves through the virtual world without your actual body moving through the physical world, your inner ear will scream at you: "HEY. STOP THAT. I DON'T FEEL ANY MOTION, SO WHY ARE THE WALLS MOVING?"  It's similar to being carsick, which happens when you read a book that doesn't look like it's moving, at the same time as your inner ear feels the car rocking. Your well-intentioned ears send a signal to your tummy saying "STUFF DOESN'T MATCH, SHUT IT ALL DOWN" and you get nauseous. Bummer. 

I spent so much time in VR those first few months that I got over motion sickness. But dedicating hours to feel nauseous every day is a tall ask for the general public. So VR developers tried to figure out the least awful way to move through virtual spaces without actually moving through physical spaces. Some decided that you just shouldn't design experiences that allow virtual movement. Others decided that you should only be allowed to move virtually if you're moving physically. One clever guy even figured out how to map your real room and design a game's map to fit your space, so you move around your room but it seems like you're exploring a whole world. 

The most common solution people landed on was called "teleporting." You aim your controller ahead, and a line shoots out from it. Your perspective will move to wherever that line touches the ground, in the blink of an eye. It solves the motion sickness problem because your eyes never see space moving around you, so your inner ear doesn't care that it feels no inertia. You just teleport, and you're there. But it has always struck me as disappointingly un-immersive. We don't move around the physical world by pointing and blinking; we move through the world gradually, by walking on our feet or rolling on wheels, and we get to look at objects shift in our vision as we pass them. If only there were a way to trick our inner ear to let everyone do this in VR.

I was in Tokyo last year at an award ceremony for a VR piece I made about my home, and I met a wonderful developer named Hawken. He too was dissatisfied with teleporting. He'd come up with an alternative: could the user move through virtual space by leaning their body in physical space? That way, their inner ear would get a little activation because it would literally be moving, and it might be enough to keep it from screaming to the stomach. His second insight was that you need a way to tell the VR app that your physical movement is intentional, like by holding a button. Otherwise, any time you shifted weight or looked around, you'd be sliding all over the place. 

I told Luis about it and we came up with a simple UX for how it could work. Luis coded it in an afternoon, and it is *wild*. It's not walking, it's not rolling, and it's not teleporting. It feels like skating. 

Unclear if it solves the nausea problem, because I don't get motion sick anyway, but it feels incredibly intuitive and downright joyful to lean and skate your way through the virtual world. When I took my headset off, I tried to lean my way into the kitchen for a glass of water. With a sigh, I picked up my feet, and trudged off.