Movement with the Vive and room scale works (walk around small area and teleport to new small areas). I think it solves the problem and feels pretty intuitive.
To add to this point - I personally only buy/play Room-Scale games for this reason. And with HTC expected to sell additional LightBox sensors, it's quite possible I'll be able to expand my play space from the current HTC Vive max of roughly 12x13 to pretty much fill my entire basement. Of course you are limited by the cabling right now but HTC has a wireless module already announced for release during the first half of this year.
Exciting times for VR after decades of false starts.
> with HTC expected to sell additional LightBox sensors
You can buy additional base stations right now[1], mostly for replacement purposes, but the biggest limitation to using more than 2 has been in the software simply not supporting them.
I've wondered if scaled movement was possible or if it would really mess with our brains. For example, 1m realspace = 3m in VR. Would your body adjust to smaller/slower movements, or would there be a disorientation?
Not scaled movement, but there was research done in the 90s about having the computer subtly "distort" (I can't remember how it was really done) things being displayed to in effect make you walk in a curve to keep you away from walls (I think it was similar to how you can attempt to walk a straight line in a forest - and without a compass, actually find yourself walking in an orthogonal direction compared to where you started - simply due to ground level differences, motion cues, etc). I'm not sure how well it worked, but it was a workable system.
There's also the more expensive idea of an "infinite 2D treadmill" - which was first implemented by a guy named Rudy Darken; iirc, he did it for the "dismounted soldier" VR/AR training project for DARPA:
'redirected walking'. This has been used in practice by some of the big VR applications and in research since them. As I understand it, the problem is that it doesn't solve the 'small living room' effect because you can only distort by a few degrees and this produces a circle of like 15 meters - so works in a sort of warehouse setting but not in normal buildings.
That works for some people but not all - but for those it does work for, it works very well.
I've added exactly that - scaled movement - as an option into my VR game, Left-Hand Path, and so far most of my users are very positive about it. I love it personally - it feels very much like it doubles my available play area.
One of my playtesters hated it and found it made him nauseous, though, so like many VR locomotion options it's a YMMV situation.
I'd love to read/hear more about your experiences, as a fellow gamedev and looking at VR but not ready to take that plunge yet (couple projects first).
I Tweet a fair bit currently, and I've written about my VR work a fair bit over at strangecompany.org over the years.
I'm actually about to start doing more writing or videos on the topic of VR development and my experiences in it, so keep an eye on my Twitter, blog or YouTube if you like - they'll be up there starting in the next few weeks.
