VR boundary limit movement

[Neil_Cross]

I just had the worst experience of my life, 5 of our executive board members from our Chinese parent company just tried Vred VR and it was the most frustrating experience I've endured in a long time.  It's amazing how some people can make even the most simple of mechanics look like they're badly designed.

It would appear that "non-technically minded" people really struggle with the movement/teleport feature in Vred.

Are there any scripts out there to prevent you from teleporting outside and beyond the dome environment? All 5 of these guys, even after three demos from me and clear instructions, kept spam pressing the thumbstick and teleporting off into Australia causing me to have to reset their position several times per minute.  This was by far the biggest issue.

Are there any scripts which change the movement trigger? i.e. instead of thumb pressing the button to move, which seemed to really perplex these people, is there a way to move when the thumb stick is pushed in a certain direction? So fluid movement instead of jumping to position? It seems that some people who dont have experience in video games/VR can't grasp the concept of a "jump to a location" marker.

I've no idea if you (the reader) have ever handed over a VR headset and Vred to multiple random people who've never used it before, but I'm not joking, they all look at you like you've just punched their mother in the throat, then given them the most outrageously over-complicated backward cruddy experience ever, even though it's objectively easy to navigate it just doesn't appear to be intuitive to fresh eyes.

I know the software isn't the problem, just looking for a way to make it less difficult for new comers.

[MattH_Work]

I complety agree...

Jeff from engineering & 16 year old apprentice Dave from the shop floor 'Get It'

Clive and Marjorie from accounts, well that's a different matter all together

The Play Station generation have this sort of thing embedded in their DNA, Office users do not...

MattH

[Christian_Garimberti · Accepted solution]

Hi Neil,

I feel sad reading your experience...

I made demos many times, in my office, in some company events, big expositions...

I know that the first time someone approach for the first time the VR it could have a not so good experience.

Every time i make some little training with the headset and a controller in my hand, and then I repeat the same with the headset on the viewer (1minute is enough).

And normally after some couple of seconds, the viewer feels ok.

A little advice for first time people: keep the scene simple. The more you put functionalities like touchsensors, interactive animations... the more is difficult to learn and navigate. 

To answer your first question, there is a setting in the preferences that manage the maximum distance the teleport works. Maybe the default (I think 15000mm) is to much for your scene.

To change how the teleport works you have to use python api. For the vive controller (I have only vive) it is possible to use the teleport on the trigger instead that on the touchpad.

Fluid movement instead of teleport for me is not good. Every movement in ve that is not a “real” movement, risks to make you sick...

Hope the next time will be a better experience!!

Best

Chris

[marc.arends]

Hi,

to work with first time VR users you might try some of the following suggestions.

If you have a collaborative session running, you could give only headsets to your users and no controllers. Then you could guide them through your scene. In VRED's python examples you will find the script vr/groupTeleport.py (it is also described in the docs in more detail), which allows you to teleport a whole group of users.

If your users are alone in the scene and the teleport button is a major problem you can easily switch the pointer and the teleport button, which means the teleport is now on the trigger (maybe that is preferred by some users) with the python command vrImmersiveInteractionService.setControlMode(vrImmersiverInteractionTypes.ControlMode.ButtonPointer).

You could also disable the teleport and setup some meaningful viewpoints, which the user can jump to, using the VR menu. You can deactivate the teleport with vrImmersiveInteractionService.setInteractionActive("Telelport", False).

Implementing your own movement with a stick is possible but I would not recommend it as this might cause nausea, especially if a user is new to VR.

Regards,

Marc

[seiferp]

With geometry teleport enabled you could also duplicate the dome from the environment, scale it slightly bigger and assign a dummy plastic material. This would at least prevent people from jumping outside the environment without any scripting involved but than allow users to jump onto objects which you probably also don´t want 🙄

[Neil_Cross]

Cheers guys, I'll try that limits thing.

@seiferp I had a really important client meeting this morning which we were showing them their vehicle in Vred VR... and an hour before I was setting up and in major panic mode because Vred was running at 9fps.... on dual 2080Ti's in SLI... it was unusable, but it had been perfect just yesterday.  After a while I figured it out, it was geometry mode! That geometry mode absolutely kills Vred performance on big scenes.  Thing is, I actually do want to let them jump on top of objects as their vehicle is 10 metres tall and they wanted to climb up it to inspect things up a height! But I had to disable it unfortunately.  I can understand why though, there's 130 million triangles and 392 million vertices... I assume that's an unreasonable amount of calculations for where you can jump to.

[Neil_Cross]

I used that script to change the teleport trigger button, how do I change it back?

It worked, but for reasons that I don't have time to understand it activates the teleport when the trigger button is 40-50% depressed rather than a full press of the trigger... where's the logic with that?? I just need to put it back to normal as the joystick/touchpad is far less confusing to explain than telling someone a function happens when they pull the trigger only half way.  Baffled.

[marc.arends]

You can change it back with vrImmersiveInteractionService.setControlMode(vrImmersiverInteractionTypes.ControlMode.TriggerPointer).

[Neil_Cross]

Cheers man.

There was an extra "R" in one of the calls there, just putting the correct one here for anyone coming across this in the future.

vrImmersiveInteractionService.setControlMode(vrImmersiveInteractionTypes.ControlMode.TriggerPointer)