Seamless sitting and standing

[horizone]

Many of us VR players use some form of HOTAS and obviously sit down to play Elite but many first-person VR games uses standing in the centre of the VR playarea as the main way to play and in this standing scenario you usually walk forward with the stick and the world moves around you and you turn to change direction (different locomotion solutions is another discussion).

With everything pointing to space-legs coming, I would like for it to be possible, to go from sitting in your cockpit (on your chair) to standing up in your playspace without the need to take of your headset and with the minimum amount of hassle AND to go from standing to sitting down again without the need to even peek out under your headset to locate your chair.

How could this be done?

Inside your defined playspace, the VR-drivers know exactly where you are as long as you are using a room-tracking solution. My suggestion is that it is possible in some way to register exactly where in this playspace, your chair is located and in what direction it is facing.

In the game world, when your character are near a designated surface to sit on, a chair, probably your cockpit chair, but could be inside a space bar/café, public area, on a crate in the hanger bay as well, there is a control binding that will quickly fade out the world, move and re-orient it to match the nearest in-game chair with your real chair and fade in again (with a small marker to which chair in-game is matching your real chair) and now you can sit down in the virtual world effortlessly.

Have any other game done this before?

 

[horizone]

Shameless bump of my own thread (with no replies) over a year later, since VR is so debated right now.

 

[Misty_Dark]

You seems to have missed the no VR for spacelegs at launch... and then FDev response to that ourcry over that, that they do not know how this should work...


But I do not see how your suggestion would work in practice. Not only do you need a chair then you need to have your Hotas/K+M/etc mounted on that chair or on a "table". So not only do you want to leave your chair, and then use room scale VR to move around, you then expect to find your way back your chair... and all of this without bumping into chair/table/etc while walking/wing about.

I assume you expect to use the VR hand controllers when leaving your chair, so you are now expecting to put these on aswell, and several of thee hand controllers are now not held as a wand, like the HTC ones, but instead they are strapped on your hands, so that you can have finger tracking.


I know from first hand experience, that it is a bad to combine standing VR and sitting VR at your desk. Fruit Ninja had me buy a new monitor...


So I do not see this as a feasible solution to most VR setups, as either you have big space for room scale VR, with enough room so that you can move around and swing your arms without hitting anything, or you have opted for the seated VR setup and then you are less likely to have enough room for standing VR without risking your monitor etc.






And this is before we even get to the multiplayer aspect of mixing VR players with regular 2D players. One simple thing, movement, there is a reason why many VR games use teleportation to move around, as that has proven to be better in terms of motion sickness. So unless you have good VR legs and can move around effortless with an analog stick/etc, then this could be a very bad experience.

Then we have stuff like using equipment/weapon/opening doors etc. Here we have two main approaches. we can use the 2D way with press button X to open door, press button Y to fire, press Z to reload etc, etc, or we can do what many VR games now experiment with, and that is to use our VR hand controllers in a more natural way, so you need to push the button next to the door, you have to eject and put in a new magazine to reload etc.
Here Half Life Alyx have done a tremendous amount of work to immerse players with the environment. They are of course not alone, other games have their take on how this can work and it is evolving.

I have not tried No Man Sky in VR with my friends, only played alone, but their VR implementation is very interesting and many times pretty intuitive, and then also totally confusing at other times. It feels good to sit down i a ship and be able to "grab" the throttle. or reach for the exit leaver and pull it to leave the cockpit, or bring up your tool and use the other hand and change settings on the tool, etc. Grabbing the flight stick is another story in frustration... can take quite a few tries to get off the planet... or trying to drive around the ground vehicles and all of a sudden, you realise that the big lumpy and rather slow "truck" is the most comfortably one to drive...



There is quite a big difference between playing som games in 2D and in VR. My own impression is that in VR mode you tend to prefer a slower game play, expecially if you are using the VR hand controllers.