Ethan Schur is the Chief Marketing Officer for ImmersiON-VRelia, and they produce three different virtual reality HMDs. “The GO” is a mobile mobile HMD for either iPhone or Android phones, the PRO G1 has higher resolution and some AR features, and the Blue Sky Pro version has some extra ruggedized features for the military or for use in digital out-of-home entertainment applications.
In my interview with Kevin Williams, right after he announced ImmersiON’s collaboration with VRelia in order to produce a mobile HMD that is suitable for the Digital Out-of-Home Entertainment market.
For more information on VRelia and AlterSpace, then be sure to check out their website here.
Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:12.078] Ethan Schur: I'm Ethan from Immersion Varelia and we make several VR HMDs as well as the Ultraspace platform for distributing VR content.
[00:00:20.822] Kent Bye: Great, so tell me a little bit about some of your products that you have.
[00:00:23.763] Ethan Schur: Sure, well, okay. On the HMD side, what I have here in front of us is the GO from Immersion Varelia. And the GO is a head-mounted display that is powered by your smartphone, but it can use any smartphone, iOS, Android, any four to six inch phone works. There's adjustable dioptrics for your focus and eye separation. So it's a universal smartphone powered head-mounted display.
[00:00:48.742] Kent Bye: And so maybe compare and contrast, like does it have extra sensors and what's the difference between this and say the Gear VR?
[00:00:56.408] Ethan Schur: So we use the sensors from the phone and we don't see the need for adding external sensors to the device. It adds a lot of costs and there's already sensors on the phone.
[00:01:07.196] Kent Bye: I see. So what's the price range for the GO?
[00:01:10.098] Ethan Schur: This is $89 for standalone. And if you would like the bundle with our gaming controller, that's $119.
[00:01:16.650] Kent Bye: OK, great. So tell me a bit more about some of the other products that you have.
[00:01:20.532] Ethan Schur: Sure. So this is the Go. This is for when you're on the go and you can use your smartphone. We also have a device that's called the Pro. And the Pro has dual HD displays, 120 degree field of view, and built in stereoscopic cameras on the front for gesture recognition and depth sensing.
[00:01:38.643] Kent Bye: I see. And so what's the context that someone would use the Pro version?
[00:01:42.632] Ethan Schur: Well, the Pro, you can connect it to your PC, you can use it for hardcore gaming, you can use it for professional use cases, medical, military, architectural.
[00:01:53.249] Kent Bye: Great. And so I know that some of the standards for ruggedizing a mobile HMD are a lot higher if you use it in the military. And I know that Oculus has said that they're not really necessarily interested in doing all the extra higher ruggedizing specs that you may have to have if you're having it used by the general public or by the military. So maybe talk a bit about what you've had to be able to do to kind of create this pro version.
[00:02:17.387] Ethan Schur: Sure, well, you know, we enable features that the other guys won't do. Maybe they don't have the resources or they refuse to do it. So we're big in the out-of-home entertainment sector as well with our Pro and Pro Blue Sky unit. The Blue Sky is similar to the Pro. It's a bit more ruggedized and it has built-in headphones and stereo sound. But yeah, we do a lot of work to get, you know, as close to what they would call mil-spec as possible. And, you know, we kick these things clear across the office.
[00:02:45.807] Kent Bye: So maybe talk about, if you can, some of the more use cases for the problem. I'm really curious about some of these out-of-home entertainments and what type of places are starting to use them.
[00:02:55.467] Ethan Schur: Yeah, well, you could think about theme parks. You can think about a new generation of movie theaters. You can talk about military uses to make things more accurate for the military so that there's more precise war fighting. You can talk about being able to tour apartments before you move in. You can talk about doing a heart surgery where you can see all the arrangement of the veins, what's in front of what, and making things just that much more effective for these professional uses.
[00:03:26.570] Kent Bye: Now I know that Oculus Rift has talked about like 20 milliseconds of latency and you know since you're using a lot of this mobile phone technology I'm curious if you track the latency and what numbers that you guys target for doing these mobile HMDs?
[00:03:39.882] Ethan Schur: Yeah, so let's compare apples to apples. So with our professional version, we have a built-in nine degrees of freedom motion sensor, and we also have the stereoscopic cameras to sense motion in the visual field. So it's very accurate, and it's within those specs of 20, 20, or less than 16 milliseconds of latency. For the Go version, we depend on the sensors that are built into the smartphone, which are quite good. I think right now, The Android may limit the sampling rate of the motion sensors. But that's changing very rapidly. For example, the Google Cardboard doesn't have motion sensors in there. So they also rely on the sensors of the phone. So they're aware of this issue. And that will be resolved quickly. But the MEMS gyroscope and accelerometer, they have certain features. And the same ones that you'll find in very custom devices are the same ones you already see in the smartphone. And there is a technology curve for those anyway. And the ones in the smartphones are actually quite advanced.
[00:04:36.969] Kent Bye: And tell me a bit more about the augmented reality applications with this, if you have pass-through cameras and what people are able to do with that.
[00:04:43.631] Ethan Schur: Sure. So with the Go version, we have augmented reality option by activating the camera on the phone. And with the professional version, of course, we have the dual color stereoscopic cameras. And I think, you know, that gets very interesting when you apply that and merge it with our alter space platform. The Ultra Space, we call it Ultra Space AVR because it's both augmented and virtual reality. So if you imagine a sort of an interface where you're inside of a virtual world, you never have to touch the phone, but you can work, you can play, you can interact, you can share content, watch content, talk with your friends, all from the same virtual environment. And I think that augmented reality has a big part to play with that so that we can sort of merge these games and experiences with the world around us.
[00:05:27.612] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I know that I also did an interview with Kevin Williams, and he's been partnering with you, and maybe talk a bit about some of the insights that he's bringing in terms of the digital out-of-home entertainment sector.
[00:05:38.638] Ethan Schur: Sure, well, Kevin, I subscribe to Kevin's reports and they're voluminous and he's very dedicated and he sort of unearths all the different information about the out-of-home entertainment sector. And, you know, working with Kevin has been great for us because he's been able to take our Pro Blue Sky unit sort of around the world and let people know that now there is an option from a company that will support you for your needs.
[00:06:04.111] Kent Bye: And so yeah, what type of stuff are you the most excited about? Some of the stuff that's coming down the pike or that has already launched that you've seen these pro units out in the wild?
[00:06:12.958] Ethan Schur: Yeah, so I think a lot of people want these for sort of theme parks. A lot of people want these for they have a cave room that costs a million dollars, but maybe instead they can use these pro units. You know, you can imagine movie theaters with awesome, you know, previews where people can see 360 previews of the movies. So we're sort of shifting the paradigm on the way that people consume content.
[00:06:35.783] Kent Bye: And what's the price range for the pro version?
[00:06:38.662] Ethan Schur: The pro version price range is unannounced right now. We're going to be announcing the price for the pro in about six weeks from now.
[00:06:46.673] Kent Bye: So does that mean that there has not been any production units that have been out there yet or is this version one or maybe talk about the different versions and iterations that you've had to go through?
[00:06:56.280] Ethan Schur: Sure. So right now we've been supplying to private third parties. So for the public to be able to get the pro that will be in about six weeks. Yeah. And the go has been available for the past few weeks on pre-orders and we're shipping in a couple of weeks.
[00:07:09.810] Kent Bye: And maybe tell me a little bit about the panel that you were just on and some of the discussions that were happening here at GDC.
[00:07:16.547] Ethan Schur: Sure. Well, they were talking a lot about the future of virtual reality and also how we can learn from lessons in the past. I mean, there was a few interesting questions. One question is, how is VR now different than it was in the 90s? And, well, I mean, we're not in the 90s anymore. I think that's a little bit of a silly question. The technology is way better now. And we have the smartphones, mobile phones, we have better motion sensors, we have Unity game engines with beautiful rendering, so completely different situation. I think even back then, HMD was more a helmet-mounted display than a head-mounted display, and quite heavy as well. But they also talked about looking forward, what's going to drive the more massive adoption of VR, and how can we learn from the lessons of 3D and the mistakes of the stereoscopic 3D to the home craze a few years ago. And I think a couple things that I wanted to stress from the point of immersion of Varelia is that it's all about choices. It's a free country. So any smartphone that people have, they should be able to use this to enable VR. We shouldn't say, OK, you can only use LG phone or Samsung phone or this type of phone to do it. People should have the freedom of choice. And when you distribute content, That content should be able to be displayed on any VR display device, not just ours, not just any of our competitors, all of them.
[00:08:27.822] Kent Bye: And maybe you could tell me a little bit more about the ecosystem of the Google Cardboard, because it seems like that would be a lot of the actual VR experiences that people would be using here on the go.
[00:08:39.130] Ethan Schur: Yeah, so I mean, Google Cardboard is a development kit to stimulate more massive adoption of VR. So we've for sure made sure that we are compatible with the Google Cardboard apps, and there's a lot of ones that are quite good. I think we add a layer on top of that, which is an SDK, that can do a few things. So it could say, okay, what type of phone is this? And it can sort of set the level of detail based on the capabilities of your phone. And then it can also know sort of what kind of device you're using and be able to do the warping to the lenses of that particular device to display it properly. So if you look at the perspective of a content provider, when they work on our UltraSpace platform, they just have to say, okay, am I going to give this away for free? Check, no. Do I want to sell it? Yes. How much? What's the content rating? What's the description? They upload that APK up into the system, and then the user can sort of browse and select this content and enjoy it.
[00:09:30.434] Kent Bye: And so is this SDK integrated into Unity?
[00:09:33.777] Ethan Schur: Yeah, so we have a Unity plug-in and seeing that people can get with our SDK. So when they get our SDK, if you're working with Unity, you can get a lot of really cool features like the ones I just mentioned. Also, dynamic convergence, where the virtual cameras are converging dynamically based on what you're looking at, sort of how the human eyes verge based on distance, which is exciting because it means that you can be in the VR space for a long time, and it really mitigates some of the human factors that you see with VR sickness.
[00:10:03.517] Kent Bye: How do you control what the focus is if you're in a room? How do you determine that convergence?
[00:10:09.512] Ethan Schur: Well, I mean, there's many ways to do that virtually with ray tracing and just using the geometry of the environment. And also, just little tricks. I think earlier they were talking about how eye tracking was really important to know what people are looking at in a scene. But in my experience, personally, I never move my eyes left or right unless I'm trying to be sneaky. I think me and most people, we move our heads when we want to look at something. We don't necessarily move our eyes.
[00:10:37.886] Kent Bye: And finally, what do you see as the ultimate potential for virtual reality and what it might enable?
[00:10:42.330] Ethan Schur: Oh, that's a wonderful question. I think what people want is to be able to fly, to be somewhere else, to ride a dragon, to go to China. And I think that the closer that we can replace the real senses with these virtual ones and make people feel like they're somewhere else, I think there's a lot of potential. Like back in the time of Da Vinci, when they started making paintings with perspective, that influenced the way that we perceive the world. So I think by using VR, we can not only change the way that people perceive VR, but we can change the way that people perceive the whole world around them, which is going to be very exciting.
[00:11:18.240] Kent Bye: And is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say?
[00:11:21.720] Ethan Schur: Well, I think you guys should check us out. We're at immersion-vrelia.com. You can check out the Go and the Pro. And you can sign up to be a developer. And when you're a developer, there's all sorts of perks. You can get an SDK. We have some loaner units. And you can talk to us about making your ultimate VR use case dream come true. Awesome. Well, thanks so much.
[00:11:43.118] Kent Bye: Thank you.
