Spent a lot of time with engineers, but am not one myself. Most grinding discs and things that wear stuff down have a surface made to rip in, and higher opposed friction. Think sandpaper, it digs into a surface with those hills from the grit, and uses the friction to then drag through cutting the surface and removing material.
With this floor, it looks like the wheels are smooth, so all though there's some friction, it isn't a cutting action. There's also the fact that their friction is unopposed and can actually move the person, so the energy gets converted into movement, not the cutting force that would grind things down.
They really are just tiny treadmills, the only reason they're discs is so they can be tilted to change the direction the "treadmill" is going to push you. If the disc is tilted to the right, the left most edge is going forward, if the disk is tilted to the left, that right edge is moving backwards. Otherwise exact same principle as a treadmill of creating friction to move the object on it.
Hope that helps some. Diagrams would probably help more.
Muscar@discuss.online 1 month ago
What… they aren’t spinning at high speeds and “grinding” the surface that’s on them. They only spin as quickly as they need to move the surface. Imagine a treadmill, it’s not going quicker than you are running on it, your shoes never slide on the surface, same here.
I really don’t understand how you have misunderstood this so badly.
voracitude@lemmy.world 1 month ago
If you watch MKBHD’s video, you see him spinning himself around on a chair. The chair legs are in constant contact with some part of the cone thingies while they’re rolling, which means frictio, which means wear. I posted a screenshot from MKBHD’s video in another response that shows what looks like debris all over the surface of the cone rollers; the debris is not uniform and is quite clearly not part of the roller material (I put a screenshot in the reply to another comment, so I’ll just link it here), so I assumed that it was from testing the treadmill with various objects.
As well, there was no need to be a dick about it.
GreyEyedGhost@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
Yeah, there’s friction, just like there is friction from walking on marble steps, such as those in the Tower of Pisa. But since they are mostly moving with the object on top of them, wear is reduced. In the end, the little wheels will be working in concert to move whatever object is on them in a given direction, but they are round and so will have a bit of drift in short order, which is managed by putting the wheels at angles so only a portion of one side is touching the object. They are likely made of a moderate friction substance with high durability and are probably replaceable, just like the tires on your car.