Holosphere
More actions
| Holosphere | |
|---|---|
| Information | |
| Type | Seated, Standing, Room-scale |
| Required Devices | An input device; the 2015 demo used an Xbox 360 controller or a headset-mounted Leap Motion controller |
| Description | whenever you move or rotate, a geodesic sphere appears around your entire view point and blurs everything else in the environment. The geodesic sphere disappears when you stop moving or rotating. |
| Pros | Designed to reduce nausea by giving the user a fixed visual frame of reference during artificial movement |
| Cons | Geodesic sphere appears when moving / rotating; the surrounding environment is blurred during movement |
| Creator | Tomáš "Frooxius" Mariančík |
| Examples | Neos: The Origin |
Holosphere (presented by its creator as "The Holosphere") is an experimental Locomotion Method for virtual reality (VR) devised by the developer Tomáš "Frooxius" Mariančík and shown publicly in December 2015.[1][2] While the user moves or turns artificially, a geodesic sphere is drawn around the virtual viewpoint and the rest of the scene is blurred, with the aim of giving the brain a fixed frame of reference and reducing the nausea associated with artificial locomotion.[1] Mariančík released it as a modified build of the Oculus Tuscany Demo for the Oculus Rift DK2 and asked players to report how it affected them through an online survey.[1][2]
How it works
Created by Tomáš "Frooxius" Mariančík, the developer of Sightline: The Chair and World of Comenius,[1] Holosphere is a VR locomotion method designed to move the user through a virtual environment without inducing nausea.[1][2] In Holosphere, whenever you move or rotate, a geodesic sphere appears around your entire view point and blurs everything else in the environment. The geodesic sphere disappears when you stop moving or rotating. This action gives the user a fixed view point and the user's brain a consistent frame of reference.[1] According to Road to VR, the method is based on the theory that such a consistent frame of reference should ease the disconnect that arises when the sensations of movement perceived by the brain do not match the information coming from the body.[1]
The technique is not tied to one input method. In Mariančík's demonstration video, the user reaches into the virtual world with a Leap Motion hand-tracking sensor and "pulls" themselves through it by clenching a fist; the same video shows Holosphere controlled with a standard Xbox 360 gamepad.[1] Road to VR reported that Mariančík hoped the technique would be adaptable to most input forms, and that he speculated the hand-based version could be carried over to motion controllers such as Oculus Touch and the SteamVR Controllers.[1]
Development and public demo
On 12 December 2015 Mariančík published a YouTube video titled "The Holosphere - VR Locomotion (Nausea-less)", whose description presents the technique as a VR locomotion method developed by "Frooxius from Solirax".[2] Road to VR covered the release the same day and noted that Mariančík had turned his attention to the question of how to move around virtual spaces without causing nausea.[1]
To test whether the technique worked for a wide range of people, Mariančík made a special build of the Oculus Tuscany demo that incorporated Holosphere locomotion and invited fellow developers and VR enthusiasts to join an open beta experiment.[1] The build was distributed as a download from Solirax, and the video description labels it "Tuscany with Xbox 360 input".[2] Participants were asked to play it with an Oculus Rift DK2 and either a headset-mounted Leap Motion controller or an Xbox 360 controller, and then fill in a short Google Form about their experience with Holosphere; the video description labels the questionnaire a "Nausea form".[1][2]
Mariančík was later a co-founder and the lead designer of the social VR platform Neos VR.[3]
Related techniques and research
Holosphere's two components, a visual reference that stays fixed around the viewpoint and blurring of the surrounding scene during movement, correspond to approaches that have been studied separately in research on VR sickness. The studies below examine those general approaches; none of them tested Holosphere itself.
The first idea is associated with the rest frames hypothesis described by Prothero (1998) and by Prothero and Parker (2003), which holds that the brain's choice of a stationary reference is strongly influenced by what it perceives as the visual background.[4] Rest frames are virtual elements that remain stable in relation to the physical environment, such as the cockpits used in many commercial VR games.[4] In a 2018 paper on static and dynamic rest frames, Zekun Cao, Jason Jerald and Regis Kopper found that rest frames can alleviate visually induced motion sickness.[4][5] An earlier CHI 2001 paper by Henry Duh, Donald Parker and Thomas Furness reported that an "independent visual background" reduced the balance disturbance evoked by visual scene motion, and discussed its implications for alleviating simulator sickness.[6]
The second idea, limiting the visual motion a user sees while travelling, is used by dynamic field of view restrictors (see Tunneling). Ajoy Fernandes and Steven Feiner of Columbia University presented such restrictors at IEEE 3DUI 2016, where the paper won the Best Paper Award; their software partially obscures each eye's view with a virtual soft-edged cutout during virtual motion. In a multi-day study with 30 participants, people using the restrictors felt more comfortable and stayed in the virtual environment longer, and most of those given the subtler restrictors did not notice them.[7] Such restrictors reduce peripheral visual flow during travel but can also reduce peripheral awareness.[4] Blurring has also been studied directly: Budhiraja and colleagues proposed "rotation blurring", which uniformly blurs the display during rotational movement in first-person shooter games, and found that it reduced overall sickness levels and delayed the onset of symptoms.[8]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 Paul James (2015-12-12). "'Sightline' Dev Wants Your Feedback on Experimental 'Holosphere' Locomotion". Road to VR. https://www.roadtovr.com/sightline-dev-wants-your-feedback-on-experimental-holosphere-locomotion/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 Frooxius (2015-12-12). "The Holosphere - VR Locomotion (Nausea-less)". YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSP5sjg9TIs. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
- ↑ Scott Hayden (2019-02-18). "'Neos VR' Update Brings "massive improvements" to User Friendliness, Social Features & More". Road to VR. https://www.roadtovr.com/neos-vr-update-brings-massive-improvements-user-friendliness-social-features/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 Zekun Cao, Jeronimo Grandi, Regis Kopper (2021). "Granulated Rest Frames Outperform Field of View Restrictors on Visual Search Performance". Frontiers in Virtual Reality, vol. 2. https://doi.org/10.3389/frvir.2021.604889. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
- ↑ Zekun Cao, Jason Jerald, Regis Kopper (2018). "Visually-Induced Motion Sickness Reduction via Static and Dynamic Rest Frames". 2018 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR), pp. 105-112. https://doi.org/10.1109/VR.2018.8446210. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
- ↑ Henry Been-Lirn Duh, Donald E. Parker, Thomas A. Furness (2001). "An "independent visual background" reduced balance disturbance envoked by visual scene motion: implication for alleviating simulator sickness". Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2001), pp. 85-89. https://doi.org/10.1145/365024.365051. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
- ↑ "Fighting virtual reality sickness". EurekAlert!. Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science. 2016-06-14. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/825213. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
- ↑ Pulkit Budhiraja, Mark Roman Miller, Abhishek K. Modi, David Forsyth (2017-10-06). "Rotation Blurring: Use of Artificial Blurring to Reduce Cybersickness in Virtual Reality First Person Shooters". arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.02599. Retrieved 2026-09-27.