Roller-skates are not VR's missing element

I've seen a few articles making note of this latest patent filing from Google, reported here by AndroidPit:

While the audiovisual side of virtual reality is on track, the more innovative proposals in the technology are now tackling how to immerse our other senses, such as touch and motion. This includes complicated sensor arrangements set up around the room, motion trackers in your pockets and even strapping our VRnauts into special treadmills. 

A new patent from Google, however, points to a solution that seems elegant in its logic: walking naturally starts with the feet, so what about motorized VR footwear?

Google's patent outlines schemes for a kind of motorized VR roller skates that will let the user walk normally, while the motors and wheels work to stop you from actually going anywhere in the real world. This should keep you inside the VR safe zone and stop you from banging your knees against your living room furniture.

Sorry, but this still isn't the solution to VR's locomotion problems.

For one thing, Google's VR-skates are hardly the only similar proposal we've seen so far. While other similar solutions have put motorized platforms underneath the user, or just put really slippery slippers on users' feet, the basic idea has been the same in all cases, and none of them work around the fundamental problem with room-scale VR set-ups: the simple fact that sufficiently immersed users will, inevitably, attempt to lean on, sit on, or climb over a virtual object that doesn't actually exist. Limiting real-world travel is only part of the battle, here, and not nearly enough to make room-scale VR workable.

And then there's the simple fact that all of these solutions are both expensive and cumbersome. Let's get real for a second; do you want to share a set of sweaty VR roller-skates with anybody else? If your answer is no, then you're not alone, which means Google's proposed solution requires that every VR user own a set of these. VR headset makers can't convince consumers to buy a VR headset for every household, let alone for every user in that household; how are they planning to convince those same consumers to spend hundreds of dollars per person on motorized roller skates?

And then there's the awkward, cumbersome nature of the skates themselves. Gizmodo's coverage described them as "goofy," which is pretty generous considering just how clumsy these things appear to be. Who do Google imagine is actually going to wear these fucking things?

No amount of marketing is going to make this look cool.

Rather than looking like a viable solution to VR's room-scale and locomotion issues, Google's patent filings only serve to illustrate just how far we are from actual solutions to either of these problems. And this is Google, remember, a giant multinational (current market cap: US$ 712 billion), one of whose subsidiaries is making self-driving cars, but whose VR solutions look like something out of The Lawnmower Man.

VR is simply not ready for market. There are too many issues that still need to be resolved, and when even Google clearly have no idea how to address something as fundamental as moving people around in VR environments, it becomes even more clear that viable VR systems are decades, not years, away. Sticking a motorized platform under the VR user is literally the same solution that VR researchers were proposing thirty years ago; all Google has done is to move the motors from the platform to the users' feet. If this is the pace of progress in VR research, then consumers can expect to wait a long, long time for VR to be ready for general consumption.