So I picked up a Meta Quest 2 the other day. It’s great, it really is. I also returned it the other day. Nah, not because it was bad or anything. I decided it was worth the extra 250 to get the Quest 3. Quest 3 is also fantastic. My main reason for switching is Augmented Reality is extremely interesting to me. I’m really hoping someone does something with it at some point.
The one application I enjoyed greatly that utilizes the passthrough system is The Thrill of the Fight. Lets just say this old man kicked the ass off of all of the available competition in short order. We’ll ignore the fact that I couldn’t raise my arms for the following week. The passthrough system in this game is great because it allows you to superimpose your opponent in your real world which is actually an enormous safety improvement. I wasn’t aware of the passthrough feature at first because I bought this game in Steam. After finding out about it I later had to buy it again in the Meta store because SteamVR apparently can’t utilize passthrough. THAT SUCKS.
I’m Sold
So after just a few hours of goofing around with this thing I knew I was hooked so I went and did something silly. More on that in a bit.
So VR and I go way back. I remember in my youth seeing these giant VR machines, Lawnmower Man/Johnny Mnemonic (or lets be real Neuromancer) style, in shopping malls and always begging my parents to let me try it. There’s a list of things no one on the internet is old enough to remember. Anyway, my parents of course, being the dirt farmers they were, said no way. To be fair I think it was something like $20 for 20 minutes which in those days could feed your family for a week rather than these days when it will get you a single loaf of bread. So I never got to try it.
Sometime later that idea, VR that is, was still firmly embedded in my subconscious. I was more than unattainable to a simple consumer for the majority of my life but I was willing to compromise. Enter Vuzix glasses. A pair of glasses with LCD screens in the lens. Boy were they expensive. I think I got a used pair off ebay for $300 a very long time ago. I was working as a severely underpaid auto-mechanic at the time so that took a long time to save up and really hurt.
So the Vuzix glasses had a bunch of video connectors including VGA. Alright so now we can blast my PC games directly into my eyeballs. What’s next? Of course VR games didn’t exist yet so it was a sort of make your own fun situation. It worked pretty well for first person games like Marrowind. But it still lacked immersion. So how can this be improved?
A Giant Stinking Hamster Ball!
Yeah the next thing I designed was a giant hamster ball. Basically by layer that plastic chicken wire you can get with hundreds of wire crimps you can make a giant ball, ideally 7 feet tall, and there’s your locomotion. Of course we need a bit more hardware for it to actually do anything. We need a base station
So first I came up with a platform with a concave pit in the middle for the ball. Alright, how does the ball move? Well this was a challenge. I actually had to design a custom caster with extremely low friction and 0 degree turning. With a normal caster the wheel is offset from the radial axle meaning you can’t really stop then go in a new direction because the caster has to flip around into the new direction however if the radial axle is directly over the contact point of the ball wheel you don’t have this problem.
Alright great, now how about telling the computer the ball is moving? Simple, mouse trackball. If you aren’t familiar with these before PC mice had an optical sensor in them they had a ball in the bottom that contacted the mouse pad so it rolled when you moved the mouse. There were then encoder wheels that contacted the ball which provided the movement information to the PC. Simple right?
And lastly a laser system to detect if you were crouching/jumping. This last component probably wasn’t a great idea.
Disaster
Well you may have noticed I said “probably” in that last sentence. Unfortunately this is where our story takes a turn. At that $7.50 per hour, under the table, auto-mechanic job I was severely injured in a car fire. Of course non-employees being paid under the table don’t have insurance, or anything else for that matter, and being too stupid to sue the pants off those people I had no effective means to assist in my recovery. So I languished, more or less bed-ridden, for a couple years. During that time I had to sell off practically everything I owned to keep a roof over my head so there went the wonderful pile of crap VR system I came up with, never actually having used it once…
Fast Forward to 2023
I never really took another crack at building my VR system. Truthfully the tech wasn’t really there and it wouldn’t have been that great anyway.
So now with Meta Quest 3 in hand I started doing some research. I found a Youtube channel called Thrillseeker and down the rabbit hole I went. When I finally came up for air a Katwalk VR C2+ was on a Fedex truck somewhere headed my way. That’s not all though. I also discovered SlimeVR motion capture sensors, bHaptics TactSuit X40, The ProVolver pistol with recoil, The MagTube gunstock, and LucidVR mocap gloves with haptics. You might think, “You bought all that crap?”. Hah, not a chance. At this point there was a pallet of parts on a boat somewhere between here and China.
We’re going to make all of it and we’re going to spend next to nothing.
Product Review? It SUCKS
This system doesn’t work very well. Not because I’m trying to use all this crap I cobbled together. I actually haven’t built all this stuff yet. No the real probably is whatever is happening between the Quest 3 and SteamVR.
The Quest 3 does absolutely great by itself. The VR is convincing and bulletproof. Unfortunately that means you can only use any software in your Meta library. That means many of the greats like SkyrimVR (in a playable state due to 300 mods made by people who actually care if a game is playable IE. not Bethesda) and many others are off limits as well as almost any fancy additional hardware like all the crap I mentioned above.
Why does it suck? Well it’s barely functional. Just last night for instance I finally had a few minutes to strap in. Yeah, getting into this thing is a bit of a project. If my webserver didn’t need a swift kick in the face right now there would be images of this hardware but for the moment I can’t upload images so Google these things if you want to see what I’m talking about, specifically the Katwalk VR treadmill.
What was I saying? Oh yeah, I had a couple minutes to dink around. So I first makes sure all the various required software is running on my PC. Change into the Katwalk shoes. Then I strap into the Katwalk. I had to set up a table next to the Katwalk to set the Quest and controllers and my glasses when I put the headset on so I swap all that. You don’t want to walk around in the Katwalk shoes, ideally you want them as slick as possible because this is more a slidemill than a treadmill so I’ve coated the bottoms of the shoes in PTFE/Teflon fabric tape.
Obligatory Heading to make SEO Happy
Finally all set to go and…. SteamVR won’t connect. No error messages, no nothing, just the endless void loading screen in the Quest. Wonderful. So I exit and reboot the Quest. Standing on my ice skates, just waiting. Alright so it comes back up and I try to connect… This time I get a screen that says SteamVR is taking longer than usual to connect, you don’t say. I believe the first failure screen, or lack thereof, was the SteamVR app failing to launch in Quest and the second was the SteamVR app launching but this time failing to connect.
Quick aside. I swear almost every time I use this headset I get different menus. By that I mean I go to the same menu but the layout and options are different. For instance the Quest has its own system called Quest Link (I believe) which can connect to your PC via the Oculus Rift app, yeah that name suggests this will be getting long term support. As if burying this option in the system menu in the setting menu wasn’t bad enough (with no way that I can find to make a home screen shortcut btw) half the time when I go to this menu the “Launch Quest Link” option you click to start the link is just gone!
The SteamVR app has similar problems. Always opening to a different menu and each menu upon revisiting has different options and layout. I don’t know, maybe this is just in my head…
Continue
Back to the SteamVR connection. So it still won’t connect and it’s not offering any information as to why. Alright fine, I’ll restart my PC. This is a chore btw. I have hundreds of browser tabs from dozens of projects in many windows and dozens of text files open and just a pile of software that all needs to be closed out.
So I dismount and decided to ice skate my way over to the PC. Close everything out and reboot. Alright back online. So I get back on the Katwalk, swap back into the headset and controllers and fire up SteamVR. And hey, what do you know, it actually connects. Alright, so I’m at my library.
I had wanted to try something new but at this point my free hour has dwindled to 15 minutes. So fine, whatever, I’ll goof around in VRChat. So I launch VRChat and go to the stupid avatar world I tend to hangout in. And it just runs like complete crap. Constant stuttering, 15 FPS tops. Completely unplayable.
FANTASTIC, THAT WAS WORTH MY TIME
Now keep in mind I’m not using all the crazy stuff I mentioned above. All I’m using is the Quest 3 headset, the Katwalk C2+, and SteamVR. And normally this runs fine. My VR PC is a current gen i9, 64 gb of DDR5, and a 3070ti. I have a network comprised of many Ubiquiti access points, CAT6 or better, my PC is wired, HP Flexfabric switches, software firewall/router (not that it’s involved) in a fat multi Xeon server There’s no excuse.
And this pretty much sums up my average experience. I get a bit of time. I jump on the system. And for unknown reasons it won’t connect or apps won’t launch or whatever. I end up screwing around for half an hour to an hour and finally get it working again just in time to not have time to actually play it.
The Problem? It’s my Car
The most disappointing thing about all of this is the hardware is actually there now. This system could be absolutely amazing. In fact it is, when it decides to work. That means all these issues boil down to software. Poorly implement software makes these amazing hardware advancements look like crap.
Here’s the biggest problem with this though. I can fix this stuff. I can work on stuff like this for hours without taking a hammer to it. Working in IT for decades rewired my brain into an infinitely patient robot.
Your average consumer is not going to put up with this. They are going to write the whole thing off as not working, return it, and never revisit it. VR is just now starting to catch on with the advent of moderately affordable headsets like the Quest 2. And this crap software and related problems are going to destroy that foothold and ensure the whole thing ends up dying for good and in turn ruining my life. Get your crap together Gabe, you too Mark. Signing up for a “Meta” account was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done anyway. If Carmack wasn’t attached that wouldn’t have happened in a million years.
Katwalk C2+
I really like this thing a lot. Really I do. No seriously, a lot. Am I trying to convince myself as much as you? Maybe.
Here’s the thing. The concept is great. This is probably the most realistic or realist approach to this concept. But there’s a couple major issues.
- Compatibility
This really only seems to work with games where you control your movement with the joystick. As far as I can tell it intercepts the joystick input and tacks on its own based on the sensors in the shoes. This works ok’ish but I don’t think it’s a very good solution. However given my interpretation of what KatVR has to work with I don’t blame them. There doesn’t seem to be a good way to add an input to the VR rig you are using. Take the Quest 3 for instance. The controllers connect to the headset and the headset passes its bundle of info to SteamVR. The input part of the process was complete before the PC ever got any data. Then the Katwalk Gateway has to inject its data into the stream.
I think there are probably a couple good ways to fix this but they aren’t up to KatVR.
The biggest thing this industry needs an ISO standard of sorts. Kind of like DirectX for 3D graphics. Basically just a big API kit that every release is compliant with. Something that encompasses complete articulation up to and likely surpassing an actual human form both for read and write operations for all elements in your software. Additionally some kind of haptic OUTPUT mechanism that provides location and type data for all actors on screen as precisely as you feel like delivering. There should likely be much more data but those are just a couple examples.
This sounds like a lot of work to ask of a developer but I don’t believe it is. Think about it, all this data already exists in every VR title, it’s just not necessarily accessible on an API like routine.
The other compatibility probably with the Katwalk is any game that tracks the headset’s location and uses that for movement around an environment like the Rick and Morty game or Thrill of the Fight or plenty of others. The Katwalk doesn’t seem to have a way to manipulate the location of the headset from the games perspective. That sucks.
Now maybe it is possible to use the Katwalk with these types of games. I’ve read a couple reddit posts that imply it is. However I have yet to figure out how and the message I sent to KatVR never got a reply. That also won’t help get this stuff to go mainstream. Did you ever see that movie Surrogate? Still hoping we can get there some day but this isn’t that.
2. Usability – This thing is a chore to use. Again I don’t know how to improve it but sliding around on a plastic disk in slippery shoes is not even remotely similar to walking. Like I said I tried to make my shoes as slippery as possible but it only made a marginal difference. Think about how your legs and feet work when you walk. There really isn’t any resistance, you’re just moving your legs back and forth while keeping your torso above them. You don’t really stick your foot out in front of you and drag your body to it. This is what you do with this KatWalk. It’s weird. I don’t really mind it but I’m already committed to making this work.
Anyway. I’ll have more to say once I build my new VR gear. Subscribe below to get notified.
Planet Mountain Dew for life.