Motion capture suit maker HoloSuit, one of the recent crop of VR focused startups, has exceeded funding targets on its Kickstarter and Catapooolt campaigns with just under a month to go.
The company started crowdfunding at Augmented World Expo (AWE 2018) at the end of May, where it showed its low cost motion capture suit. The suit enhances a VR experience, allowing wearers to experience physical feedback and capture and record body movement. It is wireless and bi-directional and can have either 26 or 36 embedded sensors as well as 9 haptic feedback devices dispersed across arms, legs and all fingers and thumbs. Uses for the suit include healthcare, education, entertainment and industrial operations. (So basically anything you think of that could make use of VR.)
Finding ways to make the VR experience more immersive and lifelike is of increasing interest –our recent reports have included an
“infinite walking experience” and a
vibrating jacket – with a growing number of companies looking to develop products that complement the established audio and visual systems. HoloSuit is quite uncommon in this are because it starts at $999 (about €860). It comes with a jacket, trousers and two gloves, is machine washable and available in different sizes.
“VR and AR are becoming more immersive and natural as field-of-view increase while latency decreases,” HoloSuit’s CEO Harsha Kikkeri said. “But the controller remains the Achilles heel of mixed reality, with cumbersome and unnatural handheld devices only tracking your hand movement in a limited range. We designed HoloSuit from the ground up to provide an unparalleled immersive, full-body and bidirectional AR/VR/MR experience. HoloSuit goes well beyond gaming and is so powerful it can be utilised for real-life, mission-critical situations such as education, neuro-rehab, combat training, surgery, and even filmmaking.”
There’s definitely a space for a product like HoloSuit, which connects to and can be used with a wide range of devices and dedicated VR hardware. It pairs with PCs and smartphones as well as HTC Vive, Oculus Rift/Go, Microsoft’s HoloLens and Samsung Gear VR over Bluetooth LE and WiFi. HoloSuit has also released an SDK to app developers.
Whether it will make waves in some of the critical professional applications that it mentions – see video outlining submarine operator training for one – remains to be seen. In this space as well market consolidation is rife so, if successful, HoloSuit may get snapped up by one of the big VR players soon.