Above: Trying out the Holosuit, a full-body tracker for AR and VR platforms. Image Credit: Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat
Full-body tracking was once the stuff of movie studios and theme parks, but thanks to the proliferation of low-cost motion sensors, gyroscopes, and accelerometers, it’s finally beginning to trickle down to the consumer space. Trackstrap sells a product that works with the HTC Vive virtual reality (VR) headset, as does Perception Neuron. And for the most part, both capture joint and muscle movement just as well as their Hollywood counterparts.
The trouble is, they’re designed with stationary setups in mind. You’re pretty much out of luck if your VR or AR platform of choice happens to be mobile-first, like Google’s Daydream View, Samsung’s Gear VR, or Facebook’s Oculus Go.
That motivated Harsha Kikkeri, a former Microsoft engineer who helped to develop the Seattle company’s motion-tracking Kinect sensor, to build something a bit more flexible. His solution is the HoloSuit, a patented full-body tracker consisting of a jacket, a pair of gloves, and pants embedded with sensors that track movements, haptic motors that provide force feedback, and programmable buttons that correspond to computer, smartphone, wearable, and tablet controls.
Kikkeri calls it “motion tracking for the real world.”
“VR and AR are becoming more immersive and natural as resolution and field-of-view increase while latency decreases,” Kikkeri said. “We designed HoloSuit from the ground up to provide an unparalleled immersive, full-body and bidirectional AR/VR/MR experience.”
The HoloSuit is available for purchase on Kickstarter, and won’t begin shipping until later this year. But I got a sneak preview of it in action this month in New York City.
Body tracking
As I stepped into the wood-paneled conference room that’d been booked for my demo, Kikkeri greeted me enthusiastically. He wasn’t hard to spot — two motion-tracking base stations flanked him on either side, and a gaming laptop sat on a table nearby.
He was wearing the HoloSuit Pro — the pricier of the two available models — which packs a total of 36 embedded motion sensors (9 on the jacket, 22 on the glove, and 7 on the pant), 9 haptic motors, and 6 buttons. (The cheaper version has 10 fewer motion sensors.) It feeds a constant stream of angle, acceleration, and force data to a PC or mobile device wirelessly, via either a Bluetooth or Wi-Fi connection — the HoloSuit is compatible with Android, iOS, and Windows, Kikkeri told me, with OS X support soon to come.
Altogether, it took five years to develop the hardware, software development kit, and plugins for popular game engines including Unity and Unreal Engine, according to Kikkeri. And almost every element of the HoloSuit was designed and fabricated in-house, including the jacket’s textile work.
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Above: Harsha Kikkeri demonstrates the HoloSuit’s flexibility.Image Credit: Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat
Kikkeri, not one to waste time, kicked things off with one of his favorite showcases: a third-party digital avatar viewer. As he moved his right hand slowly upward, so too did a digital doppelganger on his PC. And as he turned from side to side, the avatar rotated on its axis.
I was struck by the HoloSuit’s low latency — Kikkeri’s movements were reflected on the PC nearly instantaneously — and equally impressed by the fidelity. Even subtle motions like a flick of the wrist or shrug of a shoulder didn’t escape the sensors’ notice.
That fine degree of precision makes the HoloSuit ideal for VR, Kikkeri said, because it’s incredibly immersive. The first of several experiences he’s prototyping is a submarine simulator that tasks players with operating knobs, buttons, and levers in a cramped control room. The suit’s buttons come in handy here: During the demo, Kikkeri used one stitched into the glove as a selection tool. (On Windows machines, it also serves as a left mouse button — the HoloSuit team is working on generic input drivers.)
The HoloSuit can also control objects in the real world, such as humanoid robots:
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Source: Venture Beat