PrioVR on kick starter

I backed this yesterday night.
There is still quite some time left on the Kickstarter, but the people at YEI need to showcase why this is a step above other alternatives out there. What convinced me is the new pricing along with the promise of full finger tracking when they get around it.

I think that this might be the only way to track your body perfectly until optical tracking catches up in latency, which could be years away. (and of course we'd need multiple optical trackers to make sure there are never any dead zones)

I think some skeptics have missed some of the point of the PrioVR and its strengths.

I'm personally far more excited by the PrioVR than the STEM, but I actually want to use both together:

* STEM/TacticalHaptics for weapons (pistols, rifles, grenades/bombs dropped on floor or thrown inside a netted playing area, two and one handed melee etc.)

* PrioVR for (significantly more) accurate FULL body tracking

With both magnetic tracking and 9-dof tracking we're effectively doubling the available bandwidth for tracking, and PrioVR have confimed that there won't be any wireless interference between both systems.

But what really excites me is the ability to play games that just don't exist yet - e.g. martial arts games where every part of your body is a weapon - shins, feet, knees, elbows, hands, head etc. Sword/weapon games I'd like haptic feedback, so STEM with TacticalHaptics will be perfect for this. Or with just PrioVR you could play 2-player games in reality - say a 2 person martial-arts sparring contest with the computer keeping track of collision hits and points (no Oculus Rift or screen, mostly audio cues from the computer when certain hits or points are scored, or say if you left the designated area like a Sumo match.

Plus the much higher accuracy of PrioVR means you could do some really interesting and natural body movements while in the Oculus Rift, e.g. lying prone on the floor, crouching or sitting or rolling, jumping with kicks or punches or head-buts etc. Stuff that the STEM just won't be able to achieve, given its limited # of sensors and less accuracy than PrioVR.

Full motion capture of your body, as input to your virtual Avatar in some kind of VR chat room / main-street will be significantly more "real" and natural feeling with the PrioVR than with STEM alone.

I'm sure full body haptics will come down the road with YEI's products, and preferably as a modular suit, but in the short-term I'm betting that STEM will fit this niche very nicely and complement the PrioVR perfectly.

So that's why I'm supporting their KickStarter - for all of the unthought-of options that using BOTH technologies will enable.

STEM's already achieved their goal, so seriously guys it would be really cool if you read through the PrioVR material and watched their videos, try to understand just how revolutionary their technology will be - and how much of a leap it will be from using the STEM alone, just as revolutionary as the Oculus Rift in my opinion.

Come on they've just hit $82k of the $225k goal! STEM's assured, but if we can also use the PrioVR at the same time, both with the Oculus Rift.... it's going to be amazing.

Honestly, this looks like a good way of doing mocap, but its needlessly complicated for actually playing a game with. STEM has it right, 5 trackers. One for each hand, one for each foot, and one for head or chest. If you know the position and rotation of a person's body, and the position and rotation of a persons hand, then you know where the arm is, between the body and the hand. If you want to know where the elbow is, look at how the hand is rotated, its probably on the pinky side and not the thumb. "This sensor data is calibrated, error-compensated, and fused to produce an accurate 3-axis orientation estimate." This makes it sound like they are only getting orientation, not position... If you have position data, you can use look-at constraints on your character, but with rotation alone, it would be much more difficult. Also, the lack of a base station for reference leads me to believe they may have lots of calibration necessary and maybe even have yaw drift. I really don't think they can get the price down much with the amount of sensors they use. Theres no point in developing a game for hardware nobody is going to spring for. Of course, these are just my thoughts on why I chose STEM.

"BlackFang" wrote:
Honestly, this looks like a good way of doing mocap, but its needlessly complicated for actually playing a game with.

Could you clarify what is needlessly complicated with the PrioVR systems for playing games? We had users play some demos we created for the PrioVR prototype sensors at the Central Ohio Gamedev Group last weekend, and no one claimed it to be complicated. Here's a link to some pictures and video.

"BlackFang" wrote:
"This sensor data is calibrated, error-compensated, and fused to produce an accurate 3-axis orientation estimate." This makes it sound like they are only getting orientation, not position... If you have position data, you can use look-at constraints on your character, but with rotation alone, it would be much more difficult.
You are correct that the sensors report orientation and not position, but why would you need to use look-at constraints if you already know the correct orientation? Also look-at constraints can experience gimbal-lock issues and our sensors do not.

"BlackFang" wrote:
Also, the lack of a base station for reference leads me to believe they may have lots of calibration necessary and maybe even have yaw drift.

The only calibration needed is to stand in the T-pose and we have said on our Kickstarter page that they do not experience any drift.

"BlackFang" wrote:
I really don't think they can get the price down much with the amount of sensors they use.

As the components for the sensors go down in price, so will our price for the system.

"BlackFang" wrote:
STEM has it right, 5 trackers. One for each hand, one for each foot, and one for head or chest. If you know the position and rotation of a person's body, and the position and rotation of a persons hand, then you know where the arm is, between the body and the hand.

Not exactly - you can make an informed guess about where the arms, legs and body are, but it's still a best-guess. Similarly, I can't see what complexity you're referring to.

Think about it this way: with STEM tracking your body you're going to experience (now and then, different for every engine and game) situations where your real body is doing one thing and your virtual body is doing something entirely different. That contradiction in your senses is going to snap you right out of the immersive environment - you look down and your brain is telling you that your arm is here, but your eyes are telling you it's over there. I expect it could be worse with legs..?

PrioVR solves all of that, with commercial-grade motion capture at an incredibly attractive price. That leaves STEM to do what it will truly excel at - orientation and position of weapons, with haptic feedback.

Ah well, if more people don't read and understand what the PrioVR is, and what it enables, then I guess the KickStarter won't hit its goal. Our loss :(

look-at constraints if you already know the correct orientation? Also look-at constraints can experience gimbal-lock issues and our sensors do not.

It doesn't matter if if the sensors have gimbal lock, thats almost never a issue. Most game engines use Euler angles, which do. The data will need to be converted to euler angles in engine prior to use, which means the data will have gimbal lock issues at certain orientations. Hopefully the next round of game engines will dump Euler angles for quaternions or some other alternative. Many now accept quats but require conversion before you can actually do anything with them.

When I said needlessly complicated, I meant to develop controls around, not necessarily complicated for the user. The video showed something akin to a Kinect app, maybe a FPS demo would be more convincing.

A bigger issue would be how do you track the player moving through the play-space without position data?

Additionally, the comparison chart on the page looks like it is designed to be misleading.

We have posted an update that has pictures and video of a Prototype and Play of the PrioVR at the Central Ohio Gamedev Group :D

I noticed that the character in the moving block demo seems fixed in place. Is this just a limitation of demo, or does the system not have the ability to track a players locomotion?

Watch kid from 1:25 onwards he definitely moves from side to side and attempts a hand stand :). It doesn't look quite right but that may be the demo. Not everyone is going to have room to move like that so I'm very interested to see it used with a Virtuix Omni.