Mike Sutherland of YEI Technology talks about the PrioVR immersive body suit, which aims to immerse your whole body into VR experiences. YEI Technology is bringing this technology that they’ve been developing for the military into the consumer gaming market.
They’re hoping to provide the first, consumer-grade motion capture suit with their pro version for $429, and also have a Core full-body option for causal gamers for $369, as well as an upper-body only Lite version for $289.
Mike talks about succeeding with the PrioVR Kickstarter the second time around, their custom motion controllers, game development plans, interest in finger tracking, target time for suiting up, and more details about their 3-Space Sensor technology.
Their website describes these sensors as “miniature, high-precision, high-reliability, Attitude and Heading Reference Systems (AHRS) / Inertial Measurement Units (IMU). Each YEI 3-Space Sensor uses triaxial gyroscope, accelerometer, and compass sensors in conjunction with advanced processing and on-board quaternion-based Kalman filtering algorithms to determine orientation relative to an absolute reference in real-time.”
For one of the most comprehensive reviews about this technology, then I’d recommend checking out this epic review of SVVRCon gear by Oliver “Doc_Ok” Kreylos.
Reddit discussion here.
TOPICS
- 0:00 – Intro. PrioVR first consumer level, full immersive gaming suit. Bring VR into the next stage by bringing your body into VR
- 0:39 – Low-cost motion capture suit. Working with motion sensors for the military, and bringing that technology into the consumer level. Core suit configuration. Pro version for motion capture for indie developers AAA game toolsets into the hands of independent devs. Also an option for upper body suit for seated VR
- 2:07 – Arm controls. Currently have an aftermarket controller, and they’ll be shipping with custom controllers.
- 2:52 – Kickstarter history. Launched unsuccessful Kickstarter. Learned lessons, and focused on improving the suit, and did better marketing.
- 3:44 – Using PrioVR for motion capture. Pro suit with 17 sensors cost around $400. Get rich character animations. They have an existing motion capture studio, and have tooling around that
- 4:36 – Game titles that will be available. Have an in-house dev team, and getting it into the hands of developers as quickly as possible. Some partnerships developing.
- 5:32 – What type of user interactions are possible? Doing full-joint reconstruction rather than inverse kinematics. Keyboards or mice doesn’t work in 3D. Use your hands and reach out, and it’s more intuitive for the non-gamers. Don’t have to remember buttons
- 6:56 – Finger tracking plans? Just focusing on the suit for now, but interested in it.
- 7:19 – Talk about the types of sensors and fusion system that you’re using. Untethered experience and range.
- 8:07 – How long does it take to suit up? Working with design companies to get it easier to get on and off than alpha suit. Target is 15 seconds.
- 8:44 – What type of latency can you get. 9:26 – What’s the roadmap for when these will be available. Later this year for dev kits.
- 10:08 – Price points for the different products. $289 upper body. $369 core suit. Pro suit $429. First time for sub-$1000 motion capture suit will be available. More info PrioVR.com. Available for pre-order now.
Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:11.995] Mike Sutherland: I'm Mike Sutherland, I'm with YAI Technology, I'm the Vice President of Technology there. Really, PrioVR is the first consumer level full immersive gaming suit. We're aiming to bring new experiences into the gaming sector, and in particular, today we're at the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference, so we're really showing how this sort of technology is going to really bring VR into the next stage, by really bringing your body into that presence with you. And that's something that a lot of people have been commenting that's kind of missing from the current VR experience.
[00:00:39.987] Kent Bye: So it looks like you have sort of a low-cost motion capture suit on, and can you just kind of describe to me what you're wearing here?
[00:00:47.232] Mike Sutherland: Right, so what we've done is we've actually, YEI's been working with the motion sensors for some time now. We've got a lot of experience with working with different contracts from the Navy to military, etc. And we're really basically, we're bringing that technology and we're refining it into a suit that's fit for the consumer space for gaming. So this suit that I'm wearing currently now has three sensors on each arm, which is tracking my hand position, wrist position, and upper arm. I also have a sensor on my chest which is tracking my body position and then I have two sensors on either leg for upper and lower legs and we call this the core suit and this is basically sort of the mid-range suit for a full body gaming experience. We also have a pro model which adds an additional five sensors and that's really going to get into the area for character animation for especially for indie developers. Because in particular of interest for indie game development is that you're now able to do motion capture for indie sort of games at a price point that's around $400. So this is sort of now getting AAA gaming tool sets into the hands of indie developers. So we think it's going to really open up a lot of opportunities for development from that standpoint. And at the other end we've got an upper suit, which is the upper body only. This has got a lot of great applications, but particularly if you're doing sort of seated VR applications, which a lot of the initial Oculus titles will probably be coming out for, this is a great way to get your upper body into it. You can lean into the games, you've got full arm and hand movement, and so you can really control the environment around you. So we're pretty excited about all three different suits, and it gives everyone an option to go with.
[00:02:07.160] Kent Bye: And so maybe you talk a bit about the hand controls in particular, like how many sensors are on your arms and then how you would actually, what you're holding to be able to control your VR environment from there.
[00:02:16.443] Mike Sutherland: Right, so right now I'm using one of our Alpha suits. This is an earlier prototype. We actually build these in-house. What I'm holding is a couple of Wii Nunchuck controllers. So this is just an aftermarket controller. The suit, when we actually ship it, one of our stretch goals for our Kickstarter, which succeeded just a few weeks back, was to do custom controllers. So we're really happy to have reached that stretch goal. And so one of the things that we'll be shipping with is some custom controllers that'll be designed more for use with the suit. So right now I just have a couple of joysticks and some buttons. The actual final controllers, we haven't settled on the final design but what we'll do is we'll be looking, getting feedback from our early users and figuring out what the right control mechanism is.
[00:02:52.543] Kent Bye: Now, is this a Kickstarter that you guys had done initially, and then it didn't succeed the first time, then you went to GDC to kind of build up buzz, and then kind of succeeded the second time around? Can you maybe just talk about that sort of journey? Sure.
[00:03:05.474] Mike Sutherland: So obviously, there's a lot of intricacies with a Kickstarter. We launched the first Kickstarter, unfortunately weren't successful in completing our targets. We learned a lot through that Kickstarter, and in particular, just sort of letting people know that it was even on. So in the second round, we really focused on doing a little bit more evolution with the suit, kind of getting it to a later stage where we were happy with where we could sort of take it to mass production. And as well as that, we just sort of let people know a bit more about it. And so by having that awareness of the Kickstarter, as well as having a suit that was a little bit further on, that was really what enabled us to really shoot past our targets and get into our stretch goals. So I mean, the second Kickstarter definitely a huge success and really happy that we sort of did that second attempt.
[00:03:45.318] Kent Bye: Have you gotten any interest in terms of using this suit in order to do motion capture of character animations?
[00:03:53.547] Mike Sutherland: Right, so yeah, so the pro suit, the 17 sensor suit, that's probably going to be the one that's targeted. It's around about a $400 price range, so for some people that might be a bit much just for as a pure gaming peripheral. But for someone that's working on game development, this is definitely well within the price range that you're going to be able to get rich character animations. We're aiming to really tailor that experience towards the game developer as well. So in terms of just the tooling around it, we already have an existing motion capture studio. We'll be definitely looking at doing things like bringing some of those tools into the game engines that you're actually working and building your games in. So certainly something like having a live stream character animation built into the game engine itself is something that's probably on our roadmap.
[00:04:34.085] Kent Bye: I see. And so another big, huge component is the content of gaming and the titles that are even available to be able to use this suit. So can you kind of talk about what you may be developing, but also what other developers are creating for this suit?
[00:04:48.317] Mike Sutherland: So we've been very fortunate. We've actually got a small but it's a really talented content team working in-house. So we're working on making sure that we can get out a lot of great demos and then also we're really trying to launch with a few interesting titles when the suit finally launches. You know, that's all going to be kind of a rolling process. We may not have it all at the very start. But on top of that, we can't produce all the content ourselves, so we're definitely trying to get these suits in the hands of developers as quickly as we can, so that people that want to build these titles have the access to that. And we're already seeing a great response from a lot of developers, a lot of them also doing Kickstarters, looking at using motion controls in their games, and it's been a great response from them to see them want to get the Pre-OVR into their games. So we're supporting them as much as we can, and obviously we're also looking at other partnerships that'll enable more content further down the line as well.
[00:05:32.402] Kent Bye: Can you talk about some of the user interactions that are unique to this suit?
[00:05:35.963] Mike Sutherland: Well, I think this suit's pretty unique in the fact that this does full joint reconstruction, so a lot of motion tracking sort of technologies maybe have one point of reference on the body, and then everything else is essentially figured out through an inverse kinematics engine. That can run into some problems with the character animations. Certain orientations may not be able to be completely figured out entirely accurately, so we kind of do away with all that sort of guesswork. and we're basically tracking every single joint on the body and we know exactly where it is so you get the most sort of accurate tracking of body position. So we have the hand sensor so that sort of lends itself well to be able to manipulate objects especially in the virtual world. So one thing that's been noted so far is a lot of people are having to use game controllers or keyboards or even mice in the virtual reality space and that's a really tricky thing to do. So instead of doing that, just basically see your hands, be able to reach out. Our controllers allow you to have some discrete movements, grab and point and all those sorts of things you need to do. And you can just manipulate the objects directly in the virtual world. So what you see is you start seeing people that maybe are coming from outside of the gaming space trying this sort of technology on especially with virtual reality and They're instantly able to work in this world. They don't have to worry about like remembering buttons or joysticks or anything like that So that's something that's really opening up sort of new areas for a gameplay that are kind of making it more available to people even outside the gaming space as well and have you considered like finger tracking or is the physical button just much more reliable in terms of gesture control and For right now, we're really just focusing on the suit. Definitely finger tracking is something we're really interested in. We definitely think that we've got a lot of opportunity to move into that space. For right now, we just want to make sure we deliver the pre-VR suit to the expectations of ourselves and also our backers and the developer community.
[00:07:19.093] Kent Bye: And what kind of sensors are these? How is that data getting into the computer here?
[00:07:23.347] Mike Sutherland: So we've been developing what we call three-space sensors for some time now. It's a nine degree of freedom sensor and we have a gyro and accelerometer and a magnetometer in each of the sensors and we're basically using our own home-built sensor fusion technology which we've been using in our three-space sensors for some time now and we've basically spun off kind of a more customized version for the Prio VR which is how we've been able to get the performance at such a good price point. And so, yeah, basically all of these sensors are streaming it back to a hub and then we're wirelessly transmitting all of the data back to the computer. So you have a completely untethered experience. You can walk around as far as you want. We have a pretty solid range. I can probably walk 30 or 40 feet in this thing without losing any tracking. So it's definitely kind of a first for getting that firsthand motion tracking experience into the games. I see.
[00:08:08.692] Kent Bye: And how long does it take for you to kind of put all this gear on?
[00:08:12.271] Mike Sutherland: That's a good question because you're obviously looking at an alpha suit so I've got straps all over me, I've got cables hanging out all over the place. This thing takes me about a minute or so to get on. Clearly that's not going to be acceptable for a first delivery so one of the things we're doing is we're working with different design companies to really work not just on the aesthetics of the suit but also just on the practicality of it and making sure that it's an easy experience, it's very easy to get on and off, we don't have a lot of cabling hanging around. We'd obviously want to have it within about 15 seconds to be able to put on and off. It needs to be something that's enjoyable and low barrier to kind of getting in and out of.
[00:08:43.180] Kent Bye: And can you talk a bit about the latency that you're able to get in terms of this suit and how you measure that?
[00:08:48.873] Mike Sutherland: Right, so at the moment we're under 10 milliseconds. I don't actually have exact figures on the exact latency at the moment. As we're still optimizing all the firmware and the software and even some of the hardware, those latencies will be able to come down. Latency is definitely a big focus for us in terms of making sure we get the absolute minimal latency so that your movements attract absolutely as fast as they possibly can be to the screen. At the moment we have a pretty solid performance from a latency standpoint. We're obviously having to deal with additional latencies that come in on the video rendering side. Although we can't control that, we'll do the best on our side to make sure that the sensor side of it is as smooth and as low latency as possible.
[00:09:26.723] Kent Bye: And can you talk about after this successful Kickstarter what the kind of roadmap is in terms of the timing as when these will be available to the general public?
[00:09:34.672] Mike Sutherland: So we're looking to launch our first developer kit a little bit later this year. We don't have an exact time frame on it, but really our focus is going to be around getting a really solid suit out with a really good and solid developer toolkit so that developers have a great SDK to work with. We've got all the documentation laid out, a load of great examples, and it's just really an easy thing to work with and obviously cross-platform support. So that's kind of going to be our first milestone that we're really aiming to hit later this year. And then from then on, it's going to be about getting that feedback from our users, making sure that we're building to the expectations that they have. And then we'll sort of play it by ear from there.
[00:10:08.393] Kent Bye: And finally, maybe you could talk about the different price points of the different products that you're going to be releasing and also where people can go for more information.
[00:10:15.526] Mike Sutherland: So the developer kits at the moment are roughly priced at about $280 for the upper body only, and about $350 for the core suit, and then our pro suit is just over $400. So from the standpoint of a motion tracking system, this is the first time that you've really seen a sub $1,000 system even. A lot of the motion tracking systems that are out there with very similar technology are up around the $20,000 to $30,000 price range. Particularly for the motion capture side of things, it's a really interesting opportunity having a suit for $400 that is really accessible to everyone. So we've got a website, priovr.com. We've got information about the suit there, and if people are interested, they can also pre-order a suit right now, basically. Great, thank you. Great, thanks a lot.
