Strolling in Room-Scale VR: Hex-Core-MK1 Omnidirectional Treadmill

The natural locomotion interface is critical to the development of many VR applications. For household VR applications, there are two basic requirements: natural immersive experience and minimized space occupation. The existing locomotion strategies generally do not simultaneously satisfy these two requirements well. This article presents a novel omnidirectional treadmill (ODT) system named Hex-Core-MK1 (HCMK1). By implementing two kinds of mirror-symmetrical spiral rollers to generate the omnidirectional velocity field, this proposed system is capable of providing real walking experiences with a full-degree of freedom in an area as small as 1.76 m ², while delivering great advantages over several existing ODT systems in terms of weight, volume, latency and dynamic performance. Compared with the sizes of Infinadeck and HCP, the two best motor-driven ODTs so far, the 8 cm height of HCMK1 is only 20% of Infinadeck and 50% of HCP. In addition, HCMK1 is a lightweight device weighing only 110 kg, which provides possibilities for further expanding VR scenarios, such as terrain simulation. The system latency of HCMK1 is only 9ms. The experiments show that HCMK1 can deliver a starting acceleration of 16.00 m/s ² and a braking acceleration of 30.00 m/s ².