Linda Lobato is the CEO and co-founder of OBE Immersive, which is a wearable tech start-up that is part of the current Rothenberg River Program. She previously raised $77,000 to kickstart a MIDI Controller Jacket, and after seeing an early Oculus prototype in Korea she decided that VR was the next frontier for wearable technology. I caught up with Linda at a Rothenberg demo day where she talks their progress for creating a jacket that turns your body into an immersive input controller within a first-person shooter. It’s still within the early stages of development, but they hope to launch a Kickstarter later this year.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:12.015] Linda Lobato: My name is Linda. I am one of Obi's co-founders and CEO. Obi stands for out-of-body experience, and we're practically a groundbreaking garment that turns your body into an immersive controller using virtual reality. Just to get a clear image, our demo runs right now with a one-person shooter game. and you get to navigate through the game using your body, your arms. Next year we will work on a pair of pants, so you will have your legs being part of the game as well. And we also have haptic feedback. So it isn't stressful enough to know that you're going to get shot. Now you will know exactly where you got shot, if it's in the back, in the chest, or the arm.
[00:00:51.290] Kent Bye: And maybe you could talk a bit about the history of some of the products you were making before and then how you got into VR.
[00:00:56.957] Linda Lobato: Sure, we've been doing wearable technology for the past four years. Our most successful product was called the MIDI Controller Jacket. It was focused to the music industry and it's a jacket that was used to make music with your body movements. It was perfect for DJs, producers, dancers, musicians. It was actually named the most beautiful wearable tech by Wired Magazine. And we raised $77,000 on Kickstarter on it. And it was our first experience with a wearable. After that, we did other wearables focused on the music industry as well. We've sold around 12,000 products in total of our company. And how we started in VR is because this is the evolution of our technology and design. We design and develop from the jacket to the hardware, software, mobile app. So what we saw is that when you are wearing a VR headset, we all tend to feel disoriented. Everybody who has tried a head-mounted display just knows that this is the case. So what we wanted to do is that by natural instinct, you looked at your hands or you feel motion sickness. And that is because what you feel and what your brain sees, it's very different. So we want to bring your whole body into the game and have a full immersive experience itself.
[00:02:12.324] Kent Bye: Talk a bit about the sensors and what that is enabling you to do in VR.
[00:02:17.127] Linda Lobato: OK. It lets you navigate. You can turn all directions 360 degrees. You can also jump. You get to load a gun. You get to save your gun. And that's about it for now. We also want to do other kinds of applications for other kinds of games, like, for example, Tilt Brush. We were now thinking about making, design or drawing a tilt brush using both hands to see what the result would be. But right now we're focusing to have like the perfect demo on the person shooter.
[00:02:48.692] Kent Bye: You can actually move your hands around and when you're moving your hands around, talk a bit about that connection between how you're actually tracking your movement and then how that's getting translated into VR.
[00:02:58.160] Linda Lobato: Okay, you have two sensors, one on each sleeve, and those sensors have individual buttons, like two buttons, one that's A and B, per se, and that is to go back to familiar, back to controllers of gaming, and the idea is that you get to personalize each button. Because what we want to do is that each user personalize the experience to what they are looking for. We decided this because from some of the feedback we had in events, some people complained that, for example, if they're left-handed, they wouldn't start using the priority gun with the right hand and kind of things like that. So that is mostly what we want to do.
[00:03:38.086] Kent Bye: Tell me a bit more about the haptics in terms of how you built them and what you actually feel in VR.
[00:03:43.685] Linda Lobato: Okay, for the haptic feedback we're working with different kinds of vibrators that we found. And what we're doing and what we're working on right now is work on the intensity of the vibration. So maybe you will have an arachnic effect. Let's say that your enemy is approaching. You will start sensing in different parts of your body in different kinds of level of intensity according to how close you are or how far you are. you also have the choice to turn that off because maybe some people will find that taking stress to another level. But at the same time, you will have a feedback from whichever game that you might be playing, all because we are open to have different kinds of applications. So, for example, let's say that you use the game to practice golf, and that's just like an example. So maybe you can start measuring the swing also with the motion sensors. But at the same time, when you hit the ball, per se, you will feel that feedback. By our next step in wearables that would be like having the gloves, we'll have a vest. And at the end of the day, OB is all of these modular components that will have the full immersive experience.
[00:04:53.671] Kent Bye: And so what have been some of the biggest lessons that you've taken from your previous projects that you feel like you're applying to this virtual reality project that you're working on now?
[00:05:02.950] Linda Lobato: I think the hardest and the most interesting lessons that we're learning right now is about the haptic feedback. And why is that? It's because not everybody looks for that kind of experience as we expected it to be. People do look for an immersive experience but it also depends on the game. A few days ago we were trying a demo on a horror Unity game. And having the haptics feedback, most of the people who tried it on found it very, very stressful. So I guess it depends on the application and it's something that we didn't expect. So now we have to find a way on how to market that feature for our product.
[00:05:40.510] Kent Bye: And tell me a bit about being a part of the River program here and what that's been like.
[00:05:45.265] Linda Lobato: We've been part of the River Program since mid-September. It has been a very intensive and incredible experience. It feels like it just started like a week ago. We get to meet a lot of interesting people every single week. We get from big power companies, from founders, to their CTOs, to CEOs, and all of that gives us an opportunity to have feedback from people who are already part of like the ecosystem or they have had experience. And that also has been a very interesting approach for us because it has changed our business model in some important ways. For example, from all of the people that we've learned and from all the beta testing that we've done with users from events, like this one, or TechCrunch, or among others, we created a mobile app, something that we didn't expect when we first started the River program. And all of this, I think it's what has more value from being part of it, and it's all the connections you get to have.
[00:06:46.425] Kent Bye: Great. So what's next for you in this project then?
[00:06:49.847] Linda Lobato: What's next is that we are going to launch a pop-up shop where people can try our demo live and we will also launch a Kickstarter campaign and right now we're working with like a partnership with a big power company to have discount access to our product. So right now we're working really hard on the launch which will be done next year around April or May. So that will be like our next big step and we are already thinking about OB second phase which is either the gloves or the pants and start making all the modular parts that will come from the product.
[00:07:27.015] Kent Bye: So yeah, it sounds like the MIDI jacket, it sounds like you're able to already detect motion and then translate that motion into creating music, it sounds like, in terms of integrating with Ableton Live or something like that, right?
[00:07:38.422] Linda Lobato: Yes, that's correct.
[00:07:40.163] Kent Bye: Tell me a bit about how did you get into VR? What were some of your first VR experiences and when did you know that this is going to be a good direction to go in?
[00:07:48.022] Linda Lobato: It's a funny story. I traveled to Korea to present the Midi jacket, actually, and there I met the CEO of Oculus Rift in that time from Korea, local Korea, and he told me to try the Oculus Rift for the very first time, and I thought it was a real immersive experience indeed, but I got really, really dizzy, and I felt like really bad after that, and I thought it was because I wasn't a gamer myself, or maybe I couldn't understand the product quite well, But then, like, I flew back home, I had to let everybody know that I tried the Oculus because it wasn't even out yet. And after that, we started seeing, as a team, that people constantly got dizzy or they have these funny reactions to something that, even if you're in a physical world and seeing something differently in another world, your body still reacts. so that's when we saw the problem and also because I think the big tipping point for all of us mostly that are now working on VR is when Facebook purchased Oculus Rift because that's when it makes you think that obviously there's something there and at the same time I was reading one of Ray Kurzweil's books about the machines and that's when I started, like it literally blew my mind because it starts talking about wearables and it transitions to like embedded electronics 100% and then it turns like to virtual reality. So it just seemed like the next big step for us and the perfect evolution of our initial products.
[00:09:17.225] Kent Bye: Great and finally what do you see as kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?
[00:09:24.031] Linda Lobato: that it will be a multi-platform. I think people right now still don't get the potential that it is. It's something amazing that I've seen here being in San Francisco, is that some people already see that you can not only use it for gaming, but eventually you can use it for medical labs, use it for education. And at the end of the day, that is disrupting different kinds of industries that maybe are already dying. I think education is a very good case of it. Also, another good case would be media. Now that the New York Times released all that Google Cardboard for all the users, So I think it's the different industries that try to apply virtual reality and do this mix. I think that is something that's mind blowing. And eventually how we see virtual reality right now is what the smartphones are today, like in a couple of years, because it will be eventually something very natural.
[00:10:21.646] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, thank you. Thank you. And thank you for listening. If you'd like to support the Voices of VR podcast, then please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com slash voices of VR.
