I’ve been flying a lot on airplanes these days, and it has given me an idea. When you are on a plane, particularly if there is any turbulence, your body is subjected to all sorts of interesting forces of acceleration.
In fact, as I type this, I am on a flight from California to NY, and we are going through a patch of turbulence. When I close my eyes, I can image all sorts of possibilities for how my body might be moving in flight.
It should be relatively straightforward to use your SmartPhone’s accelerometer to feed into a VR program that gives you a fascinating feeling of free flight.
The hardware set-up could be as simple as the cardboard VR viewer developed by Mark Bolas and his research team at USC. I remember getting and putting together one of their kits in 2012.
It’s an approach better known these days as “Google Cardboard”. In 2014 Google borrowed the concept and, to their credit, gave it much wider distribution.
Now you can buy foldable viewers of this type from China in bulk for about $2 a pop. Last Spring I bought 50 of those and handed them out to all the students in my computer graphics class.
It is not obvious what would be the best mapping from phone accelerometer to virtual motion, and there are many possibilities. Depending on your goal, you could convert any given acceleration to either limear movement or rotation.
So your VR flying experience might, for example, involve swooping down near to the ground, following by rapid movement over terrain, then soaring up high into the clouds to bank into turns and do rolling loops. There is a lot of room here for artistic license.
I think this would be really fun. In any case, it would be a lot more immersive than watching some stupid movie on that tiny seat-back screen.