Gamescom 2018 Day 3: Icaros made me exercise with fun in VR, Cybershoes made me walk in VR while seated and much more

Today has been my last day at Gamescom. It has been a long and interesting ride, where I tried cool innovative virtual reality hardware and I met awesome people. It has been really tiresome, but I loved it. This is the summary of this last day, that has been full of surprises. (If you haven’t read the summaries of the other days, you can find them here, here and here)

Icaros

Regarding surprises, Icaros has been the first one. Icaros is that company producing that setup that lets you feel as flying in virtual reality. You lie on it, you wear a VR headset and then you can feel as flying.

I’m depicting it as a surprise because I thought that was just a mediocre device to let people have a more realistic flight in VR just because of the lying position. Instead, it is first of all a fitness device and then it is well made. Explaining while it is a fitness device is not easy if you don’t try it: basically, the position that you have to hold on the machine lets you exercise the lower part of your back and also the steering operations are all based on the balance of your body. Slightly moving your hips you can go upwards, downwards or rotate left or right and your body will work by trying always to stay in balance. The training works: at the end of the session, my back felt as when in the gym I do exercises for my back.

The demos that I tried were a flying tutorial and an ocean exploration experience. None of the experiences were top-notch, but they did their job in contributing to making doing exercise funny. I loved the Icaros: it is well made and it is useful. Really a great idea.

The company sells the device in two versions: one for home use and the other one for professional use. Both are anyway targeted at prosumers since the home version costs $2000 and the pro $8000. But for companies that have lots of people working seated at the PC and that so have all those annoying back problems, I think that it can be a good investment.

Innerspace VR

In the ARTE booth, I’ve tried “A Fisherman’s Tale”, an indie game completely focused on storytelling created by Innerspace VR. The game was all focused on storytelling, and that was great, but we were in the noisiest part of the exhibition, so I wasn’t able to hear anything. I only got that I had to solve some puzzles and nothing more. I can’t judge this game for sure because I tried it in the worst conditions possible, but I can tell you that I appreciated the mechanic that you could press a key on your Oculus Touch controllers to make your virtual hand move forward so that you could reach more easily objects that were a bit distant from you. This was useful for instance to grab objects that were on the floor without having to bend or to make the game usable in a little stand like the one of the exhibition.

Accelid

I tried a racing simulator made by Accelid. It was a full motion chair where you could put your headset on and play a racing game with the chair offering you all the real sensations of the race, feeling the real feedback and movements of the car, as you were really on it. I was interested in trying it, even if someone on twitter defined it “vomit comet”. Well, trying it, I understood why. Please watch the video and then go on.

As soon as the race started, I accelerated and the chair moved completely towards the up direction as if I were on a plane ready to take off. I have never been an F1 driver, but my best guess is that when the F1 cars start, they don’t do wheelies, they don’t try to take off to fly to the sky. After I had this crazy moonshot, I started driving and the chair actually did a good job in making me feel vibrations as I was actually on a real car: for instance, when I went on the grass, the vibrations became stronger. Then suddenly I found myself like 1 meter up from the car, looking at the sky. I was asking “ehm, sorry… I think that the car has actually taken off. I should land in Beijing in 5 hours”. Then I returned back in the car but was in a so low position that I couldn’t see the road, so I just moved randomly the steering wheel and the pedals hoping to do well (it is actually what I do every time that I drive, but don’t tell the police). Then I found myself in the car’s body, then I was again in the car. I guess that SteamVR tracking was having some LITTLE problems today. It reminded me of the VR experiences that I had in China with the Potato 9000 headset.

The chair decided its orientation basically in a random way. It was an anarchic chair. Coherence between the real world and the virtual one is too mainstream, so the vibrations were completely out of sync with what I saw on the screen. The chair steered a bit left or right, up and down, even if I was on a straight road, for instance. The result was that even my stomach started being anarchic and it had this instinct of wanting to puke at the end of the gaming session. Do you remember the name “vomit comet”? Well, it is the best name ever: it is a comet because you fly to the sky in the beginning of the game and while you fly, you vomit, resulting in a comet of vomit (yeah, I know, I’m a poet).

Seriously speaking: the full motion chair seemed made very well by Accelid, but as you can read, the integration with the VR software is something they should work on a lot.

Hologate

Hologate is a company that produces a booth inside which four people can play a VR game. The company provides this 5m x 5m booth, with installed inside 4 Vive headsets + 4 (ASUS) PC and accessories to keep the cables up. Notice that the 4 Vive headsets are installed at the four corners of the booth and every player can only move inside a quarter of the booth, so every player has his little place of competence and can’t move freely inside the booth. On the software side, they also offer some games made by the company, plus all the software to make the system work, TeamSpeak to make the various players talk each other, plus software to track analytics and to offer remote updates assistance in case of any issues. Customers are companies that want to offer an entertainment installation, like for instance cinemas, commercial centers or arcade centers and that thanks to the Hologate can offer in a limited space a place where people can have fun.

I’ve tried the Hologate and I was able to play a Beat Saber clone, while in another companion booth there was a survival zombie experience. These are both popular VR gaming experiences.

The Hologate is nothing new from a technical standpoint: my experience was just… eh, playing a VR game. The cool stuff is how it has been packaged from a business side. It is a complete solution: the customer has just to buy it and without any efforts and technical knowledge, he/she/it is able to start a VR installation and earn money from it. That’s it: it is very practical… and it works.

I’ve spoken with Jürgen Kayser, Key Account Manager of Hologate and he told me that they have already sold 200 installations all over the world for a price of 75,000$ each, with the goal of arriving at 1000 before 2020. Every installation has usually between 1000 and 4000 monthly users and before the end of the year, the total number of people that have played with Hologate all over the world will have reached quota 1,000,000!!! Every user of such an experience usually pays 4-5 euros for a 5 minutes session in the EU and around 8-12 dollars for the same time in the US. Multiply the monthly users’ number for the above numbers and you get that in the mean case, after 7-10 months, the customer gets back all the costs of the installation and starts already to earn money.

That’s impressive: it is a business that works and works well, and all thanks to the fact that it has been designed well. For instance, it is notable to say that the four players have everyone its area and they don’t play all together tracked with a system like Optitrack because it would make the price of Hologate too high and the business wouldn’t be sustainable for the customer. So, few features, but well implemented and well packaged, exactly as in the Oculus Go.

For the future that are plans like offering local multiplayer and organizing e-sports VR tournaments, maybe between players of all the Hologate stations of the world.

Cybershoes

Cybershoes has been the last device that I tried at Gamescom and was a surprise, too.

Basically, these are two little slippers that you put on your foot (wearing shoes or not) and that can make you walk in VR while you are seated by performing a walking movement. Under the slippers, there is a little wheel that rotating while you perform the walking movement can detect if you are walking and at which speed. Looking at the videos online, I was like “WTF is this thing, it is one of the worst VR ideas ever”, but actually the device is not that bad.

I tried it to play Arizona Sunshine and I have to say that:

• Walking while seated is for sure not normal, but once you’re used with it, it can become funny;
• It is an original way to play a game;
• Actually, I felt no motion sickness;
• The walking detection worked quite well.

So, it is not as walking, but can make you play VR games moving in an original and funny way. These shoes can work with every SteamVR game that features natural locomotion, by detecting your walking gesture and transforming it into emulated touchpad movements. The solution is so dedicated to gamers, but also to enterprises: for instance, an architect has asked the company to provide him the solution to let him walk inside virtual houses.

I think that there are also some problems with this company. First of all the device has to be improved: I noticed some problems with the walking detection algorithm and sometimes my movement hasn’t been detected well. I have also to say that I wasn’t able to have the same fine-tuning of movements that I have with the touchpad.

Then I honestly have doubts for the consumer market: the device needs a chair that can rotate 360°, so that you can walk in all directions while moving your feet and not everyone owns one; then it will cost $200 on Kickstarter, so it is not that cheap; and last but not least, teleportation is good enough for most games, so this gadget is not fundamental. Teleportation is especially more precise and when playing action games precision of movements is fundamental: with Cybershoes I couldn’t move exactly as I wanted, so, for instance, I run into my enemies too many times, dying more times than I wished.

I think that at the moment the prosumer/enterprise market is the most promising, with experiences made ad-hoc for this device and its locomotion system, considering its flaws. It is an interesting and promising gadget, but it has to find its place in the VR ecosystem. If you’re interested in it, in three weeks it will launch its Kickstarter campaign, so you can back it and have it at home.

After all these experiences, I and Max went to have a typical German dinner with Scott (Hayden) and had a great time together. And then now, writing these last letters I feel a bit sad that the Gamescom for me is officially over.

But don’t worry, I have a lot of other cool stuff to tell you next week. Subscribe to my newsletter to be updated about them 🙂

See you!