Getting back on topic..
Assume for a moment that driving is a solved problem; ie. we place the observer in the cab and let them manipulate the controls. The next question becomes how you interact with the rest of the world beyond the immediate confines of the Train. Even if we allowed you to get out of the cab and walk around, there are a number of limitations:
* From everything I've seen of VR so far, you'd need to use teleports to cover any distance; moving through the world using "game" controls would make most people ill.
* Trainz routes are big. You are small. Getting anywhere apart from the immediate surrounds of the train will take forever.
* Train routes and content are built to be viewed from the middle distance. Get too close and there simply isn't enough detail in most routes, and on most objects. While this could be solved in time, it's a longer-term content issue and not something that the technology can help with.
* If you're talking about Surveyor, most of the things that you would want to interact with are far larger than you are, which makes manipulating them a bit of a challenge.
An interesting question is whether it might make more sense to view the world as a model layout; eg. scale everything way down so that you stand above the world and can view or walk around large areas without having to rely on teleports, etc. - or at least only using teleports over large distances (eg. multiple kilometres per hop, rather than multiple meters). To keep things manageable, we'd probably want the route raised off the floor; around desk height.
Objects get a lot smaller this way, and are easier to manipulate. Some objects might even get too small potentially, but that sounds less of a serious problem and more just something that we'd need to solve.
Thoughts?
chris
Assume for a moment that driving is a solved problem; ie. we place the observer in the cab and let them manipulate the controls. The next question becomes how you interact with the rest of the world beyond the immediate confines of the Train. Even if we allowed you to get out of the cab and walk around, there are a number of limitations:
* From everything I've seen of VR so far, you'd need to use teleports to cover any distance; moving through the world using "game" controls would make most people ill.
* Trainz routes are big. You are small. Getting anywhere apart from the immediate surrounds of the train will take forever.
* Train routes and content are built to be viewed from the middle distance. Get too close and there simply isn't enough detail in most routes, and on most objects. While this could be solved in time, it's a longer-term content issue and not something that the technology can help with.
* If you're talking about Surveyor, most of the things that you would want to interact with are far larger than you are, which makes manipulating them a bit of a challenge.
An interesting question is whether it might make more sense to view the world as a model layout; eg. scale everything way down so that you stand above the world and can view or walk around large areas without having to rely on teleports, etc. - or at least only using teleports over large distances (eg. multiple kilometres per hop, rather than multiple meters). To keep things manageable, we'd probably want the route raised off the floor; around desk height.
Objects get a lot smaller this way, and are easier to manipulate. Some objects might even get too small potentially, but that sounds less of a serious problem and more just something that we'd need to solve.
Thoughts?
chris