Imagine you’re wearing a virtual reality headset and sitting in a chair or wheelchair. You start playing Job Simulator. In one scene, you need to reach low to open the mini-freezer to take out a burrito. Except, you can’t bend over and reach. Or maybe you can just get to the door handle, but can’t pull it open.
In another scenario, you can’t reach up high. Or maybe you can’t hold the virtual reality controllers or press the buttons.
WalkinVR Driver fills in the gap. It’s a free driver that enhances virtual reality to work with the person’s abilities and preferences. One option is the Xbox Controller Move, which allows you to connect a standard Xbox video game controller to the game.
A second person would use the controller to help the person who is in virtual reality. In this video clip and featured image, Kenji Yanagawa is sitting in a chair wearing the headset and holding the controllers in his hands. Thomas Logan is standing and has the Xbox controller. Thomas can see the scene on a monitor (off-screen) and he pushes the joystick on the controller to move the scene to put the freezer closer. Kenji can now open the freezer without reaching down.
Next, Kenji needs to grab the burritos from inside the freezer. Thomas repositions the screen to bring the burritos closer within reach and Kenji can grab them with little effort.
Transcript: WalkinVR Job Simulator Demo
Hi, this is Thomas Logan from Equal Entry and in this video, I want to show you how you can use WalkinVR to adapt and take an experience that's not accessible and make it accessible so when job simulator was originally released it was designed for six degrees of freedom which means that they expected people to be walking around in a physical room crouching down on the ground reaching up high in the physical space to access things in the game in the store clerk scenario one of the first things you need to do is grab something from the freezer so Kenji turns to his left reaches down to the ground and crouches he can pull open the freezer and we can see that there are some there's a burrito in there there's some hot dogs and some popsicles so this is something
you need to do inside the experience pretty soon right when you start in a later release of job simulator they realized that a lot of people wanted to play this experience seated so they adapted the experience to be able to be done in a seated position let's try doing the same task of opening the refrigerator from the seated position again you can see that now we're not actually crouching down in the room Kenji is having them to lean over quite a bit and reach down to the floor so what do we do if we're not able to have the mobility to reach that far down to the floor what if we have a limited range of mobility that's where a software like WalkinVR comes in one of the ideas of using WalkinVR with an application any application on SteamVR
is people with disabilities want to use these experiences as well so if someone has a limited range of motion say for example someone's unable to reach down to the floor but is able to move their arms up and down say 20 to 45 degrees and also left and right maybe 20 to 40 degrees we still want that person to be able to have this experience and that's where WalkinVR can come in and assist so one of the features of WalkinVR is a mode that is called Xbox controller move and so Xbox controller move allows us to use the standard video game controller to assist someone using a virtual reality experience I'm going to check enable move input emulation with Xbox controller and I'm going to click start WalkinVR again on the screen what we're seeing is what Kenji is able to see inside of
Job Simulator right now and so Kenji is not able to turn to the left at this point to actually see the freezer and so if the first task is to open the freezer and get something from the freezer how's he going to be able to complete this experience well with WalkinVR, I can use the Xbox controller and reposition the viewport of Kenji so now I have shifted Kenji to be looking to the left even though he has not moved in the chair and I can move down the viewport so it's basically like shrinking the height inside of the game experience without Kenji needing to move right so now that I've repositioned Kenji in Job Simulator, he's not going to reach and open the freezer all right and maybe I want to move him closer to
the ... the burritos so they're right in front of his reach great and can you just say the burrito so that's one of the ways we can adapt an experience with WalkinVR so I'm going to now move the avatar back to the original experience and now we're basically back to where we started so the same way that we can use WalkinVR to move very low to the ground, we can also use WalkinVR to move very high up into space as well thanks for watching
WalkinVR works in four ways:
- Play with another person’s assistance
- Allow people with limited motion to move with controllers
- Use controllers to move virtually (also called space drag)
- Interact by using hands instead of controller
Be aware of the possibility of experiencing motion sickness. When someone else is controlling the movements, the user can experience motion sickness. That’s because the person is not moving, but what they see in their virtual reality headset is moving.
Refer back to the video clip. Kenji sat still while Thomas moved the freezer closer to Kenji. This confuses the vestibular system because it’s seeing movement, but the body isn’t moving. There’s a mismatch.
Not all scenarios with WalkinVR are like this. It’s just something to keep in mind when trying it out. Some apps may not have people moving around, but rather they’re moving other things.
Here are the things you may need to use WalkinVR:
- Virtual-reality ready PC or laptop with the following specs:
- GTX 1060 graphics or higher
- Intel i5-4590 or AMD Ryzen 5 1500x or higher
- 8 GB or more of RAM
- SteamVR app on PC
- VR headset that works with a PC
- Kinect 2.0 + Adapter (only for certain scenarios)
- Xbox Controller (only for certain scenarios)
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