Danny Woodall is the Creative Director at Sixense, and he talks about how the electromagnetic STEM controllers can help to bring full-body presence into VR. He talks about the SDK improvements that they’ve been making, and some of the updates that were made to the lightsaber demo including updating it to UE4.
I had the opportunity to first try their Lightsaber demo back at Oculus Connect in September, and I had another opportunity to try it again at the VR Mixer at GDC. I often mention this demo as being one of the most immersive experiences that I’ve had in VR because it makes all the difference in the world to be able to track your body within a VR space.
Mel Slater’s research into Virtual Body Ownership Illusion has shown that the minimal thing that you need to be convinced that your virtual body is your body is to have a 1:1 correlation between you body movements in real life compared to what you see in VR. With the ability to have a your hands tracked relative to your head, Sixense has been able to create an IK skeletal model that really feels great.
Sixense also had their STEM controllers in the Tactical Haptics demo, and it made all the difference in the world to be able to track a physical representation of the weapon that you’re holding in real life with the weapon that’s being tracked in VR.
After the recording of this interview, Sixense announced to their Kickstarter backers that they failed the FCC testing. They said:
The reason the Base is failing is specifically due to our design of housing the five radio frequency (RF) dongles inside the Base. The RF dongles require grounding, but this grounding interferes with the electromagnetics (EM) of the tracking.
To address this issue we redesigned the Base electronics to keep the RF dongles located internally but not conflicting with the EM. This will require the production of new Base PCBs and further testing to ensure everything is working properly.
This will cause some further delays of the delivery of the STEM to at least back to July, and if they fail again then they’re looking to September to start shipping their units.
The STEM controller may have some advantages of working without having exact line-of-sight, but there are other potential issues of EM drift or interference from other electronics. For more of an in-depth discussion about some of the potential issues, then I highly recommend listening to this interview that I did with Oliver “Doc_Ok” Kreylos at Oculus Connect.
And for more of a background into Sixense, then here’s an interview I did with the founder and CEO Amir Rubin back at SVVRCon.
The STEM controllers are something to keep an eye on, especially considering that Danny mentioned in this podcast that they’re adding Gear VR support. If the price point can come down, then it’ll be a valuable addition to the VR input problem because having your hands in the game with a physical controller and physical buttons will have all sorts of applications that can create an incredible sense of immersion within virtual reality environments.
Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio
