WATCH: Disney's HoloTile Points to Solutions Around VR's Motion Sickness / Headset-Centric Challenge

In case you missed it, watch king tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee being the first person to get a hands-on (feet on?) demo Disney's HoloTile, created by Imagineer inventor Lanny Smoot. Basically, it's a grid of little motion-detecting treadmills on the floor, that enable you to walk in any direction, and have that motion integrated with a virtual space.

Brownlee does a deeper dive technically into how it works, and as he explains, it offers a pretty powerful solution to VR's ongoing motion sickness challenge, where a mismatch of what your eyes see (virtual movement) contradicts what your inner ear experiences (not actually moving). That's one key source of nausea reactions from VR, and as I've reported often, females have a stronger reported propensity to experience it. Tech like HoloTile may be a partial solution to this.

I'm really excited to see solutions like these emerge, opening up new possibilities of expanding virtual world-type experiences to larger audiences. While HoloTile can definitely work with VR (Brownlee demos it with a Vision Pro), we also see it demoed as a headset-free experience, where the user(s) interact in a virtual world displayed on large screens around them. I actually think the HMD-free version is the more scalable use case, especially for use in theme parks by a large line of guests. (Anyone who's done VR headset demos to groups knows how time-consuming and frankly unsanitary they quickly get.)

HoloTile isn't the only headset-free VR tech I've seen lately, by the way:

Above: HoloTile inventor Lanny Smoot (left) demoing his invention in a multi-user experience.

Just last month, I got to try out a pretty impressive 3D experience integrated with an exercise bike, basically turning the rider into an avatar exploring multiple long winding roads. But more on that later!