Kyle Monti talks about HapTech’s Haptic Peripherals for VR. They have a patent for electronic recoil for haptic feedback using linear motors, and they’re creating a generalized haptic device to be able to simulate everything from pool sticks, baseball bats to tennis racquets.
They were showing off a gun system in a really fun arcade-style robot shooter game at GDC. Having haptic feedback in sync with a positionally tracked object does an incredible job of increasing the sense of presence within VR. They were using the STEM controllers with their demo that was created by Otherworld Interactive.
One of the iterative innovations that came from the GDC experience is that HapTech modified their demo so that the person who was next standing in line could spawn and control the robots attacking the user in the demo. It was a great way to engage and involve the people watching the person in VR, but a human-controlled enemy was also able to do things that would be a lot more difficult to program for.
Kyle also talks about some of the more military-grade haptic weapons that they are involved with helping to create with his DEKKA technologies. They license out the patented recoil system so that they can focus on the haptic technology portion, but also so that they can invest more energy into VR gaming rather than virtual military training equipment. So HapTech is an interesting company in that the founders have a foot in each world.
HapTech was one of the more immersive VR experiences and demos that I got to try out at GDC, and so keep an eye out for their upcoming SDK and information for how to get more involved with creating experiences for their generalized haptic technologies.
Here’s Road to VR’s write-up and video on HapTech:
Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio
Subscribe to the Voices of VR podcast.
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:12.087] Kyle Monti: Well I'm Kyle Monte, I'm the CEO and President of Haptek Inc. It's a haptic recoil company. And basically what we're doing in VR is we're making the experience more immersive. So we've patented the use of using linear motors for haptic effects and for recoil generation. The technology originally came from the military but we're branching off. That's why we branded out of Striker VR to Haptek. We thought that was a more family-friendly sort of branding. And we're really trying to just kind of get out of the whole like little military thing and start doing some really fun gaming experiences. So we're working on several different peripherals. We hope to have tennis rackets, baseball bats, magic wands, not just like gun peripherals, even though like people are really excited that they can finally, you know, like play like action games with their friends at home and like have real feedback and get immersed into the experience. So we're doing really several different haptic demos. This is the first one we've ever done publicly at GDC before. So we're really excited. And everyone else seems to be just really happy about everything that's going on.
[00:01:13.637] Kent Bye: So yeah, you said that you have a patent in technology. Maybe you could tell me a little bit more about what's actually happening.
[00:01:19.463] Kyle Monti: So the linear motor is a very simple device. There's two coils and there's like this little rod that looks like a little cylinder that changes length that you can get in different sizes. It's filled with neodymium magnets and the two coils turn off and on in unison and flip polarity. and they can control that slider within a millimeter worth of precision. So, the technology's been around forever. However, it's recently started to become a big thing in industrial automation because it takes a lot of electronics to actually drive the motor. And those electronics are finally becoming very viable because the technology keeps shrinking, shrinking, shrinking, and things get cheaper and better, right? So, we originally patented the use because we saw it as an excellent way to replace pneumatics. and military recoil training systems. And that's what we did over the past three years. But now we want to make a bigger dent. We want to really bring the VR world out to people. and make Oculus and make Sony Morpheus, even Valve's Vive experience more applicable and more playable for the user. Because that forced feedback, it really pulls you into the world. I see.
[00:02:23.692] Kent Bye: Nice. And so you mentioned the other baseball bats, tennis rackets. With each of these, would you have to have a specific device, or are you seeing a universal device that would be able to transform into a bat or transform into different things?
[00:02:38.698] Kyle Monti: So right now, several of our demos that we're looking at, they're either one thing or the other, right? So we're working on a tennis racket, and we're working on a pool stick, because it's just one motor. It's all on one axis. It's the lower hanging fruit, if you will. And those are all separate entities. But what we're looking to do is we're looking to create a device. It might not look really like much when you're holding it in person, but it'll have several different grab points. one common grab point for one hand, whatever handedness you happen to be, either left or right-handed, and then several grab points for your other hand, right? And then when you grab those different spots when you're in the VR world, the peripheral that it's mimicking changes. So you could be grabbing a baseball bat or a tennis racket. It all depends on where you're grabbing it. And since the grab points feel real, then your brain's tricked into thinking it's real because you see that object in VR. So those are the things we're working on. We don't want to just keep selling peripheral after peripheral, all single use, single purpose. We would like to sell something that's generalized, that has multiple purposes, so it can really bring together a lot of people, and they don't have to keep going purchase, peripheral after peripheral.
[00:03:44.995] Kent Bye: Yeah, and one of the things about a baseball bat versus a tennis racket, say, is just the way that the weight is distributed as well. And so would there be a way to, beyond just the grab points, have variable weights that you would add on to it?
[00:03:55.870] Kyle Monti: That's actually something that's in our patent. So the motors themselves, like the sliders, the things that are actually doing the moving, they can change in length. And you can also attach weights to them. We're working on an API, but by varying the lengths and varying how far or where the user's hand grab is to where the weight actually is, you're varying the center of gravity. So you can mimic a lot of different effects. So we already kind of do something similar again for the military. It's basically there are plastic barrels instead of actual metal barrels. And to mimic the actual weight of the barrel, we park the slider in the barrel. So all the weight's up front, then it comes back and delivers the recoil, but then it goes right back into the barrel. So when you're just holding it and the gun's not in motion, it feels like it's all weighted properly. And then when you're firing it, it actually gives you more recoil by moving the weight backwards into the user.
[00:04:48.322] Kent Bye: I see, so you wouldn't have to add any physical things. It sounds like this is something that, within the construct of the motor, be able to sort of dynamically start different points based upon what you're holding.
[00:04:57.970] Kyle Monti: Right, and the motor knows its absolute position up to a sub-millimeter. So you can move it about a millimeter at a time, and that's very accurate, it's highly repeatable, but it knows its position very well. So you can program it. We're working on an API, like I said earlier. And you'll be able to directly tie to the motor and do any kind of arbitrary movements you might want to do. So you go into Unity. We plan to put this in the Unity Asset Store. You can download it and then stick it in your game and then graphically program the motor to go through whatever movement for whatever event you might want. And then you play your game and the motor does the thing. We're just trying to get that in place before we stick out dev kits because we really want to have the hardware supported so people can build on it.
[00:05:37.183] Kent Bye: Yeah, I was just talking to Sixth Sense and they were saying that they're collaborating with you in terms of putting stem controllers on different things as well to be able to do positional tracking on top of that. So, talk a bit about the impact of being able to actually positionally track some of these objects as well.
[00:05:51.238] Kyle Monti: Well, it's very important and specifically in the demo that we have right now in any peripheral demo really. The actual peripheral right now needs to be tracked relative to your face. That's why you can actually take the peripheral and pull it up to your face and look down the scope and look on the side and see all the little cool effects we put on it. And you can actually aim with the peripheral. So you can look one way and then actually shoot the other. because you're not using your vision. You're not using the Oculus to track where the gunshot should go. So Sixth Sense has helped greatly. It's a great experience so far using their tracking system with our booth space, because it's limited. It's only a 10 by 10. But we are tracking agnostic, so we can do optical tracking, any kind of tracking, magnetic tracking, whatever kind of tracking we need to do to get the job done.
[00:06:36.124] Kent Bye: Awesome. Is this something that you're also integrating with the OSVR API to be able to use their standardized interface as well?
[00:06:43.769] Kyle Monti: That is something we've talked about, but we don't have any plans for it at the moment.
[00:06:47.450] Kent Bye: OK. Maybe we could go back to the origin as to how you first started to get into this with Striker VR.
[00:06:54.072] Kyle Monti: Yeah, yeah. So about three years ago, I was under a company called Deca Technologies. It was an R&D company. I was one of the founders of that. There was another company that was in our incubator that was doing stuff for the military. They were doing visuals. And they used the pneumatic system that we're currently employed. And they said to me, if you can make an electronic solution that can solve us having to have air-driven hoses and compressors and all this miscellaneous equipment that we just don't want, like gasket seals, like this whole maintenance cycle. If you could just get rid of that and have a simple electronic solution that can solve that, it would be great. So DECA, like the members in DECA, we put our heads together, we really thought about it, and we came up with a solution, and we patented it. And we're making headway in the military now. We just signed our first exclusive contract with Lasershot out of Houston, Texas. We're also working with Mega Training Systems, and we're just kind of, you know, getting rid of pneumatic systems. So we're basically licensing the technology to them and consulting to, you know, make it feel kind of realistic. But they're building all of the actual simulators. Like, our motors are just going in there and then hands off. We really want to make an impact in gaming. Military training, you know, it's been around for a while, it will be around for a long time, but gaming is going to be fun, really, really fun.
[00:08:08.090] Kent Bye: So these are in military training situations that are being developed by other shops, it sounds like, but how are these sort of military-specified versions of Striker VR, how are those being implemented, and what type of use cases do they have?
[00:08:21.975] Kyle Monti: Well, there's like a couple different classes of motor. So they use larger motors. This is like a smaller motor. For gaming, you don't need to produce the type of recoil they want to produce. They want to produce like the realistic kick from all of the weapons that they train on. You know, because the more realism it is when they actually get to fire the real thing, they're not scared or, you know, shaken up by the sound. And, you know, there's a lot of different factors in it, but they don't want to do any negative training, what they say, by having something that is not producing a real effect. right on their training weapons. So that's their own thing. We are one part of a very complex cog that produces those sort of things, but like I said, gaming's where it's at and we want to have fun building like Harry Potter wands and tennis rackets and baseball bats, you know.
[00:09:04.932] Kent Bye: So it sounds like this is a little bit more of a less intense version of the military version that's sort of watered down a little bit, you could say.
[00:09:12.295] Kyle Monti: Yeah, absolutely. For instance, if we actually, and we could do this, but if we put the level of recoil that these things are capable of, the actual motor, you wouldn't want to play. It wouldn't be fun. It just wouldn't be a fun experience, and it'd be loud. So.
[00:09:28.042] Kent Bye: Great. And so are you also developing a lot of software for this or do you have other third party software developers that are coming in and helping create experiences for this?
[00:09:35.363] Kyle Monti: So currently, we actually, and you'll see it on the, there's an omniscient screen there, so you can actually see the character. It's not just the two googly eyes, like the stereoscopic view that the user's seeing in the experience. And currently, you'll see a little logo that says Otherworld. They developed the game. We worked in collaboration with them, and we gave them basically the 3D print file for our prototype peripheral, and they skinned it and made it look really cool in VR. And, you know, they put, like, a little, like, counter on it and, like, Yeah, they gamified it and made a really cool arcade game. I mean, really, working with other worlds has been a great experience.
[00:10:08.834] Kent Bye: Yeah, it just reminds me of Ready Player One, where there was such, like, you know, emphasis on haptic gloves. But to me, having a haptic and touch feedback is a key component to feeling really immersed into virtual worlds. And so, yeah, maybe you could just comment on your own experiences of creating and cultivating a sense of presence with this type of haptics.
[00:10:28.108] Kyle Monti: Well, you know, for instance, while we can give you, like, shock and, you know, some force feedback, some vibrations, things of that nature, you know, recoil is basically shock. You know, when you don't have it, for instance, if you go to any arcade game, like, or any arcade, you go to a bar, for instance, you'll see Big Buck Hunter. That's a great example. People are sticking $5 bills in this thing and they're going around to different scenarios to hunt, essentially. And they have these toy orange plastic guns and they pull the trigger and it fires on screen but they don't feel anything. You can see that while they're enjoying the game that they want it to kick. The new users that usually go up to it, they're expecting when they pull the trigger to feel some sort of vibration. They even had that in the 80s with just using solenoids with all their disadvantages because they overheat and things like that. But, you know, they got rid of it and then nobody seemed to really complain. But now it's become a huge deal in VR because you actually need some sort of feeling to feel present. So having that peripheral is that gateway, that bridge, so you can feel something and be more immersed and more present in that world, in that VR world.
[00:11:36.963] Kent Bye: And with your SDK that you're developing, what type of interactions would a developer be able to integrate with the future of this generalized haptic solution?
[00:11:47.587] Kyle Monti: OK. Well, it'll be a generalized solution. So you'll be able to do any kind of arbitrary movement under the sun that the motor's capable of. So the whole length of the slider, however long it is, whatever kind of weight you want to attach to it. And there'll be a graphical representation in Unity. So you bring down your dropdown box. You pick the length slider you have. And, you know, you just like program the movement and how fast and the deceleration and the acceleration values you want. And you can, it's all event driven. So, say I have a peripheral in my hand and we're in the VR experience and I have, I glance over somebody's shoulder with my peripheral. Well, depending on how that strike happens, you can give arbitrary movements to the motor to make it feel more real. You know, how hard I hit that object or, you know, how soft I tap it. And the motor will respond accordingly.
[00:12:34.265] Kent Bye: And so what type of VR experiences are you looking forward to experiencing?
[00:12:38.483] Kyle Monti: So, I mean, we kind of, like, I mean, as you saw, we kind of, like, arcade-ified, you know, like, the really immersive experience that you had, like, you were shooting, like, little robots, little robots that had rockets, and they're gliding around and everything. We want to see some Nintendo stuff, like, you know, we want to see, like, you know, you have a tennis racket, and you're, like, playing tennis, you know? We thought those were really fun Wii experiences. So we want to kind of, like, harp on that a little bit, and those are kind of, I guess, lower-hanging fruit for us to, like, kind of, like, capitalize on, really make an impact, we think. But we were looking for the high-end AAA gaming experience stuff, too. We know that the computing power right now required to have a smooth Oculus experience, it still takes a lot. It still takes expensive machines, but we want to have experiences that the average user could have in their home.
[00:13:22.906] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you see as the ultimate potential for virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?
[00:13:28.247] Kyle Monti: The sky's the limit. You have virtual reality, then you have AR closely following behind. It's going to be wild.
[00:13:35.661] Kent Bye: Great, well thank you so much. You're welcome.
