Control methods in a supernatural flight simulator

Abstract

This video presents the experimental setup of an immersive flight simulation system, which combines body tracking with a headmounted display. Users are hanging freely in a climbing harness in order to improve the impression to fly. The base system was created by a group of students during one semester as a bachelor project. A study revealed that a high degree of presence is achievable by the combination of body-posture based control and 3D visualization via a head-mounted display while hanging freely in a climbing gear. Furthermore the results of a study that compares two different steering methods are presented. Both control methods seem to be quite interesting and intuitively controllable but show individual preferences among the participants of the study. In our experiments very frequently strong vaction effects were reported when flying turns to one side. The setup very likely causes simulator sickness, especially if a participant was bad in controlling his flight.

Giant Finger: A Novel Visuo-Somatosensory Approach to Simulating Lower Body Movements in Virtual Reality

“…As a response, alternative methods incorporating bodily movements for VR actions have emerged, providing a realistic visuo-somatosensory congruence for flying actions using full body motions, such as wing flapping-based control [31,32,42,60], body-leaning-based control [34,38,47,61], and Superman-style locomotion [39]. Some studies have even added the sensation of floating through additional hardware like cables [24,38], or air currents provided by propellers [40]. Nevertheless, these methods often either maintain a sensation of groundedness or pose challenges in precise control due to the reliance on full body movements [5].…”

Lean to Fly: Leaning-Based Embodied Flying can Improve Performance and User Experience in 3D Navigation

“…To provide at least some of these essential body-based cues, a variety of systems have been proposed and investigated, including large omnidirectional treadmills for ground-based locomotion and full-scale VR flight simulators Groen and Bles (2004), Ruddle et al (2011a), Krupke et al (2016), Perusquía-Hernández et al (2017). Although these simulators provide a more believable experience of walking/flying using vestibular/proprioceptive sensory cues, the cost and maintenance needs of the equipment, complicated setups, required extensive safety measures, and weight and space requirements of some designs make them unfeasible for general VR home users.…”