A year and a half ago, at the 2014 SIGGRAPH Conference in Vancouver, I first tried out Birdly<\/i>, a kind of virtual reality experience in which you put on a VR headset and get strapped into a contraption that looks vaguely like a bird. When you flap your arms, you find yourself “flying” around San Francisco, like a bird soaring through the air.<\/p>\n
Today I was thinking about this experience because our current “Future Reality” research at NYU involves using Tactonic Technology floor mats as a kind of magic flying carpet that lets you fly around in virtual worlds merely by shifting your weight — much as I imagined doing as a little kid, when I first learned about magic carpets, and wondered why I couldn’t have one.<\/p>\n
This in turn made me think about the flying dreams that I still have from time to time, and which are always completely delightful. In my flying dreams, I am often soaring around cityscapes, swooping gracefully between buildings and generally having a grand old time.<\/p>\n
And in all those dreams, I have never once hit anything. Whenever my flying self gets near to a building, I merely veer to the side, or cleanly soar up over it. In the moment, this seems ilke the most natural experience in the world.<\/p>\n
In contrast, the first time I tried Birdly<\/i> I kept crashing into buildings. That just didn’t seem right to me, since I know quite well that I can do better, from all the extensive flight time I have put in while in slumberland.<\/p>\n
I guess that’s one of my motivations in wanting to use the Tactonic floor mats to allow us to soar through the air in our VR research at NYU. Why should my magical flying self ever need to crash into a building? It’s one of those situations where I know it can be done better, because I’ve seen it done better.<\/p>\n
Even if I was sound asleep at the time. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A year and a half ago, at the 2014 SIGGRAPH Conference in Vancouver, I first tried out Birdly, a kind of virtual reality experience in which you put on a VR headset and get strapped into a contraption that looks vaguely like a bird. When you flap your arms, you find yourself “flying” around San … Continue reading “Flight done right”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16763"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16763"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16763\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16765,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16763\/revisions\/16765"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}