My Taiwanese XR Chronicles part 1: Cave, zSpace, Brogent hands-on

Two weeks ago, I had a fantastic trip to Taiwan together with my Chinese assistant Miss S. I had the pleasure of participating to the “VR Visionaries” event in Kaohsiung and then I headed to Taipei to meet some XR companies (like HTC) and people. I had really a great time there, both from a personal and professional side, and I want to thank Michael, Sandy and Kei for having made this possible and for having helped me with travel, accommodation, and all the other necessities.

In this series of articles, I want to talk about my experience there, giving you some highlights about the hardware I tried, the companies I met, etc… I want to let you feel as if you did this VR travel with me. Are you ready for immersing into Taiwan?

Taiwan

When I tell people that I have been in Taiwan, the first questions that I get are “How is Taiwan?” and “What are the differences with the Mainland China”. Let me try to answer you these common questions…

How is Taiwan?

To answer the first question: Taiwan is wonderful. I loved both Kaohsiung and Taipei. It is an island, so the sea is everywhere… and I love the sea. In Kaohsiung, we were even taken to the rooftop of a building to see the sunset and it has been maybe the most marvelous moment of the whole trip.

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The food there, oh, it’s so special: I’ve drunk maybe the best papaya juice of my life and eaten the best dumplings in the world (thanks, Steve Wang!). I’ve also eaten a mountain of ice cream that seemed like mango-flavored snow. I loved going to night markets and eat all kind of street food… even if sometimes it was better not to ask what I was eating (I’ve even eaten something made with the blood of I-don’t-know-what-animal).

People are very kind and always willing to help. They are also very practical: during the B2B meetings that I had there, the spokespeople of the other companies didn’t want to waste time chatting, but they did get always straight to the point of “why are we here and how we can collaborate”.

Regarding if people speak well English… well, let me tell you a story. The first night there, while we were having dinner, I asked Michael (one of the organizers of the event) if people speak well English there. He answered me “let me show you” and then looked at the waitress and asked her “Hey, do you speak English?”. In that moment, I saw pure terror on her face. She started screaming “aaaaaaaaaah” and run away from our table. I think I got the idea.

But at least, when we met with the local companies, the founders there were all able to dialogue in English.

It is a very smart island: the economy works very well and there is almost no crime and no unemployment.

What are the differences with Mainland China?

From my point of view, Taiwan and Mainland China are very similar and for sure stem from the same cultural background. At a first glance, Taipei is not that different from Shenzhen, for instance. Some attitudes of the local people (like for instance, the kindness) are the same.

But the more you stay there, the more you notice that there are differences. Taiwanese people are more chill and more open towards the West. In Taiwan, all western websites work and so you don’t need to set up a VPN just to use Google. This also means that there is more contamination from the West and also from Japan, considering that this island was part of Japan various years ago.

If you have a company, workers are more loyal and care less about money and personal advantage. There’s a little more attention on quality. The competition is less extreme. There’s IP protection, so patents here are respected.

I was also able to travel there without a visa. While for the Mainland, I always need to fill a lot of documents.

Taiwan looks to me like a little version of Mainland China, a bit less Chinese and a bit more Western. This is for the good or for the bad, depending on the case. Personally, I enjoy going to both places 😉

How is XR (and technology in general) in Taiwan?

Generally speaking, Taiwanese technology adoption has not blown my mind. While in the Mainland all people are running, competing and making technology go further at a crazy speed, here there is not that attitude. This means that people are more chill (and this is good), but at the same time, it means that evolution is slower (and this is bad).

For instance, in Taiwan, I had to use cash a lot of times: to buy a SIM card, to take a taxi, even to take a hotel room (!!). In the Mainland, everyone is super-tech and pays with WeChat or Alipay: if you use cash, you look like a caveman (I used to pay with cash in Shenzhen, and a friend of mine commented that with “here in Shenzhen, only very old people use cash. And even my grandma uses WeChat to pay”).

I met various XR companies and associations, and I loved the passion of people in working with new technologies. Most VR things I’ve seen were “nice” or “interesting”, with only a few ones amazing me. Brogent was one of these companies: its products really blew my mind (more on this later on). iStaging also offers a very high quality service for virtual tour creations (and you can also find a special 10% discount in the lateral banners of this blog, if you are interested).

The good news is that the Taiwanese local government has decided that VR is one of the key technologies for its future development (exactly as the central government of Beijing has done). So, it is going to create a VR hub in Kaohsiung and is ready to help entrepreneurs (local and foreigners) opening a company there with funding and support. Its hope is to create an excellent VR ecosystem in 2-3 years.

For sure, there is an enormous expertise on semiconductors in the island (companies like HTC, Acer, Msi, ASUS have born there for a reason), so if you want to manufacture VR hardware, it may interesting to establish a venue of your company there.

XR Experiences

In my visit, I tried a lot of AR/VR experiences, most of them just for few minutes. In this and future posts, I want to tell you some words about the most interesting ones.

Cave

At Digiblock, I had the pleasure of trying a Cave for the first time. As soon as our guide asked “who wants to try it?” I immediately proposed myself.

It was a multiplayer training experience about work safety where I (the trainer) could do the experience in VR and all other people could watch me while I did it. I wore a pair of lightweight glasses with some optical markers on (probably Optitrack or an equivalent system) and I could move freely in this 4m x 4m room where on three walls and on the floor were projected some images that, looked from my glass, appeared as 3D.

I have to say that I was skeptical about the CAVE, but after having tried it, I can say that it is not that bad. The 3D effect for me was very nice, the illusion was good. I expected a terrible 3D illusion, but I was surprised by the quality of 3D elements, and by their ability to follow my movements. The FOV was not bad at all, it was quite immersive. And the fact that I had just to wear a pair of super light glasses without any tether and I could walk normally in the room together with other people was incredible. HMD VR doesn’t offer this comfort at the moment. I could also see all other people around me, so it was easy to have a very natural collaboration in VR. This was the best feature for me: it was really like all of us were in this virtual environment, all together.

Now for the downsides (that are the reasons why CAVE systems are destined to die). It was for sure incredibly expensive (Optitrack is like 100,000$ for a setup). The 3D emulation was not that perfect, so I felt some sickness while using it. 3D objects had washed out colors, a bit like when you see AR objects through HoloLens 1 and Magic Leap One… they appeared a bit semi-transparent. The Interaction was through a gamepad, and so it felt unnatural. The environment was multiplayer, but I was the only one having the right perception. Since it is projective VR, it can represent only one environment, and from only one point of view (it is impossible to project the environment from the point of view of different people on the walls of only one room…). So all the other people had to follow me and try to look at things from my point of view. It was strange and impractical.

After this test, I understood that CAVE systems have still some room for applications, but sooner or later, they will be replaced in most cases by XR glasses.

zSpace

Another gadget that I am very happy to have tried is zSpace. It is like a tablet with a stylus and some lightweight glasses. If you wear the glasses and look at the screen of the tablet, you can see 3D objects popping out from the tablet and you can interact with them with the 3D stylus.

I think that it’s a great piece of hardware: the 3D effect is solid and the colors are very good. You can also move a bit the head, and the virtual elements still visualize in the correct way. And with the stylus, you can easily manipulate them: for instance, you can put the tip of the pen on a 3D object, press the little button with your index finger and then move and rotate the pen to move and rotate the object.

What I loved most of zSpace is that it is incredibly simple to be used: I had never used one, and for my first use, I needed no explanation. I just put on the glasses and manipulated everything in a natural way. Then the glasses are very light, and are transparent, so you can still see your surroundings and the people around you. It is perfect to educate kids so that the children can learn by interacting with 3D element while still seeing their teacher and their classmates.

The disadvantage with regard to AR/VR glasses is that functionalities are very limited: you have 3D emulation only if you look at the display of this “tablet” and you can only do simple manipulations. So, it is good for instance to show you the various parts of the human body, but it is not good to simulate a full surgery operation.

I see enormous potential for it in the educational sector, especially of children… and in fact, zSpace is already being very successful in that field.

O-Ready

I also tried a demo that employed Taiwanese gloves and scent emission hardware. The company showcasing it was OReady and the demo was a marketing experience for a whiskey brand.

The scent emitter was a box that was at like 60cm from me. It worked well: the smell seemed to me to come directly from my headset, so I couldn’t perceive the distance at all. And the fact that there were scents, added another dimension of realism to the experience.

The problem was the same I had with all scent emitters until now: they all seem fake to me. My brain easily spots that the smell I am feeling is not real, but I can’t tell you why. Maybe because it is “out-of-sync” with the experience, maybe because it has not the right intensity. In any case, while I like research on scent in VR, I have still to try something that goes beyond the “uncann valley” of smells.

The glove instead was quite rough: it was made with rigid rubber and so it was not much comfortable to be used since it applied resistance to hand movements. Even worse, it wasn’t able to track my finger movements well (it was worse than Leap Motion… and Leap Motion doesn’t have worn sensors!). The positional tracking was provided with a Vive Tracker, but it was not calibrated well, so there was some mismatch between the real and the virtual position.

Here I have a funny story to tell you about it. As soon as I started the experience, I was told to reach out for the virtual bottle on my right. I looked on my right, and I saw a virtual bottle on a barrel, together with some apples. I moved my hand towards the bottle and I grabbed it. It was not exactly in the position I expected it (as I told you, it was not calibrated well)… but I could feel its consistence (haptic feeling) and even its weight.

I was in awe… with only a glove, this company was able to simulate the haptics and weight of objects (maybe with electrical stimulation of muscles?). I so started to lift the bottle a lot of time, super-happy of this realistic feeling. It felt like magic. Then, since I love to take things at the extremum, I thought: “I want to throw this virtual bottle really fast and see how the physics emulation of the glove works well in this simulation!”.

I was going to throw the virtual bottle, when the attendee decided to make me see all the animation of the demo, so the launch was aborted. After some minutes, at the end of the demo, he removed me the headset and I looked at my right. There was a real barrel WITH A REAL BOTTLE ON IT. There was no haptic and weight emulation, just a Vive Tracker on a real bottle. I was touching a real bottle, and that’s why the simulation was so good. And this means that I was on the edge of throwing a real bottle!

I almost killed a lots of people by launching a wine bottle on them thinking it was all virtual! VR is dangerous…

Brogent

Brogent has been one of the companies that have really surprised me the most. I have tried their “Ghost In The Shell” demo at a local event and then we all VR Visionaries have visited the company in Kaohsiung.

Brogent creates hardware for location-based entertainment, like for instance car simulators for arcades. Thanks to high-quality software created by some partners, it can offer complete high-quality LBE systems. It is a company mostly working on traditional entertainment, but it is really betting hard on VR and experimenting a lot with it.

I’ve tried two different solutions of the company. The first one is the Hexaride, that is like a big triangle-shaped column with some motion chairs on each side. You can sit on one of these chairs, put an Acer WMR headset on and live a VR adventure. The headset gives you the visuals while the chair, moving, oscillating and trembling, gives you more realism with sensations of movements.

I’ve tried the “Ghost In The Shell” demo (that is otherwise only available in Japan) and I found it fantastic. It was pure adrenaline, pure emotion. It wasn’t interactive at all: it was just an experience going on a predefined binary. I started from the point of view of a person, that started going very fast with a motorbike on a highway while shooting at enemies, then I found myself being a sniper that shot a bullet, then I became a pilot, and so on. I continued switching the person I was in and all around me there was always shooting, car races at high speeds, explosions, etc… It was pure action. And the graphics and the sounds were really of high quality.

The trembling and oscillation of the chair increased the sense of immersion because it added another dimension of realism to the experience. It was especially good to convey a sensation of speed of movement. But I have to say, as always in these cases, that it was not very realistic. With this moving chairs, I have always the impression that the movements are a bit random, absolutely not relatable to the real sensations that I would have on my body in that situation.

The only problem of this demo is that due to the high speed of the virtual experience, every user risk to feel some dose of motion sickness. And the movements of the chairs didn’t help with that.

The other demo employed the same dome system that I tried in Disneyland Shanghai. We all sit on a bench in a big dark room, fastened our seatbelts, and then this big bench moved until it stood floating in the air in front of a gigantic white dome.

At that moment, a movie about Taiwan started: we could all see together it in front of us. It depicted a flight over different places of Taiwan, in different moments of the year. It had some kind of 3D sensation and was immersive, since it was all around us even if we weren’t wearing glasses. Since we were floating in front of this enormous dome, it covered most of our field of view.

The shooting was wonderful, and we could see everything of Taiwan: the sea, the mountains, the celebrations, the markets. There were also wind, mist and scent emulations, triggered at exact moments of the movie (for instance the mist was activated when the movie simulated the viewer entering the sea). The flying benches oscillated to follow the movements of the images show in the video. It was just WONDERFUL. And all of this without wearing a VR glass.

Talking with the company, I could really feel the passion for what they do and their true interest in VR. But I also got to know how doing this is hard and expensive. Just some takeaways:

• That amazing video of Taiwan required 3 YEARS of shooting. They wanted to show Taiwan during different moments of the year (summer, winter, etc…) and this required a lot of time. Imagine the final cost of this;
• The Ghost In The Shell experience required 38 of the best Japanese 3D animators working for 8 months. An order of magnitude of the cost for this short experience is 1M$. Creating high-quality VR experiences is very expensive. Remind this every time you criticize an indie for a game that is not good enough;
• Brogent is betting on famous IPs, targeting them for the areas where they are most popular, so that to leverage the brand to attract more people. Ghost In The Shell is being shown only in a specific point in Tokyo. They plan to leave it there for 3 years to be able to earn the money back. They bet on quality a lot and the fact that even the Japanese people are liking it is a sign that the experience is very nice;
• They made some tests and discovered that if the VR experience is below 4 minutes and a half, then the sickness is bearable by most users. If you go beyond this magic duration, some of your users may feel uncomfortable, especially if they are not used to gaming. Keep this in mind when developing your LBVR experience;
• Brogent car simulator device costs $60-70,000. For the same money, you can buy a true BMW!
• They were one of the first companies experimenting with the StarVR One. They tried to render a movie ready for the full resolution of the StarVR headset with Houdini in their render farm… and the render farm crashed! :O This showed them that while having 3K per eye is cool, our current hardware and software is not ready yet to exploit that resolution. They so resorted to using standard Acer WMR headsets;

• Lightfields are cool, but they increase the final costs of a movie by two orders of magnitudes.

I was really impressed by Brogent and I loved all its demos. I also enjoyed talking with one of its managers, that taught me all the above lessons.

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And that’s it for today! Tomorrow I will continue telling you about my amazing Taiwanese XR adventures!

If you have questions regarding my experience, or you want me to introduce you to Taiwanese companies or want me to help you in integrating some XR hardware in your business, feel free to contact me in the comments, on my social media channels or via e-mail so that we can talk about it!