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Handling head clipping

paulleblond
Honored Guest
I've read through the best practices guide, but I don't recall seeing anything regarding handling when someone looks TOO closely at something. This seems like it'll be an even bigger issue with positional tracking.

The only things I've thought of are:

-Allow the head to enter the object, so the player can see inside stuff. Seems like it would break immersion pretty bad.
-Stop the camera from moving too far. This seems like it would work better, but breaks the rule of "head movement always matches camera movement"
-Fade/cut vision to black so nothing can be seen til the player's head leaves the object. This seems like the best answer, but not particularly easy to implement (at least for a newbie like me)

What have you done to handle this problem?

(FYI I don't have a rift. Trying to develop without til CV1, so I don't have experience with demos to see how they've handled this)
13 REPLIES 13

leftbigtoe
Protege
I'm currently playing around with a improvised positional tracking for development. I can only agree that stopping the tracking is simply not an option. Our approach is to let clipping happen (no chance to avoid it in our use case), however we try to give some proper feedback to the user. We just try to tell the user that he did something weird and leave it up to him to go back into a proper position without clipping.
A first idea for this kind of feedback is to switch the model the user is clipping into to a wireframe mode. This way users will not be disoriented or see weird parts of the geo they are not supposed to see.
This is a decent way to go for our demo, but I can already hear you guys scream immersion breaker - and agree that this might be a problem. But imo one that can be solved with clever game design. Maybe you can find an awesome way of providing this feedback that perfectly fits to your game and make this problem a feature, not a bug 😉

ganzuul
Honored Guest
"leftbigtoe" wrote:
...feedback...

Like a speed-dependent 'clonk'. Blood splatter... ;D

Cudos for the research data. Most of us don't have positional tracking set up yet so it's good to know that.


In the movie Ghost the protagonist gets an inside view of things when he 'clips'. When I lucid dream I sometimes 'phase' through walls when I can't find a door, and my brain interprets that with almost identical visuals as those in Ghost. I think audio sounding like you're under water would drive the effect home.

Anonymous
Not applicable
"ganzuul" wrote:
"leftbigtoe" wrote:
...feedback...

Like a speed-dependent 'clonk'. Blood splatter... ;D

I like this. Also, what about pushing the player back a bit? Like the head is sliding down against the wall instead of clipping it, thus forcing the player to take a step backwards.

Anonymous
Not applicable
In my situation, my app is a simulation and all of the workarounds (fading the object, darkening the screen, increasing radius of character controller,...), break the immerse feeling of VR. I needed to stop the user from looking through objects. But stopping the positional tracking completely on collision, is causing motion sickness.

So I ended up using Head Collision VR, which stops the camera from going through the GameObjects. It is using a combination of collision, raycasting and overlapping to sense the collision and stop the camera move in the direction of the collision only. The positional tracking continues in all other directions. And when the collision is over, the camera position in 3D space is restored in sync with the head move.

This way, shaking and pushback is avoided, so cybersickness is not an issue. I had it tested by several people who had tried VR the first time, and they were mostly effected by locomotion but not head collision.