Can I get the Walking tracker’s turning motion while using an Oculus VR DK2 tracker?

[rdkirkden]

I thought I’d add a bit of further information to clarify the sort of turning movement that I’m after. I’d be interested to know if anybody else has an opinion on this, even if there isn’t a simple solution.

The transports seem to implement a particular type of turning, which is based on the physics of acceleration and deceleration. The game controller’s joystick position does not directly control velocity. Rather, it controls acceleration, which in turn affects velocity. In contrast, with the ‘Mouse and Keyboard Walking’ tracker, the turning behaviour seems intended to simulate looking around rather than turning the body, and it does not involve gradual acceleration and deceleration. It is normally controlled with a mouse, not a joystick, and I’m not sure if it would work with a joystick. But mouse movements seem to translate more or less directly into changes in viewing angle, rather than simulating the physics of turning. It’s like some computer games that use the mouse to look around and the keyboard to move relative to the direction faced. The viewing direction changes more or less immediately and the turning process is as fast as the mouse movement. I’m inclined to think that this is more naturalistic, as it like turning your head: you more or less switch from one view to another while barely registering the intermediate views. It seems to me that it produces less nausea.

Googling VR sickness, I’ve subsequently come across the ‘Oculus Best Practices’ document, which indicates that VR sickness has many causes, but highlights acceleration as one of them. It goes on to say: “An instantaneous burst of acceleration is more comfortable than an extended, gradual acceleration to the same movement velocity.” This seems to bear out my experience. The transports simulate the physics of motion for maximal realism, but this has a cost. The document mentions a novel approach aimed at mitigating VR sickness: “Rather than smoothly rotating, pressing left or right on a controller causes the camera to immediately jump by a fixed angle (e.g., 30°) in the desired direction.” This is a more extreme (i.e. less realistic) solution than I had in mind, but the general thrust of this approach (i.e. achieving more or less instantaneous turning) is similar.

If there is not an easy solution (i.e. a way to combine trackers, or a ready-made transport), then I suppose it would be necessary to rewrite some of the code that controls how one of the existing transports works.