At Sandbox Immersive Festival, I have been able to try some interesting hardware solutions. I have already detailed in another post my impressions on the Pico Neo and the HP Reverb… in this one, I will talk about other hardware manufacturers.
Veer Chair
Popular VR videos streaming service VeeR is planning to enter the LBVR sector with an all-in-one VR video installation. It is experimenting with a chair that will let people spend their time watching 360 videos.
The system is really well packaged, especially for what concerns the Chinese market. The installation is composed of a rotating comfy chair that is connected to a 3DOF VR headset. People can sit down on the chair, scan the QR code on the armrest and so open the VeeR app. QR codes are very popular in China, and I found them a very easy way to connect people with the VR App. Once inside the app, the user can read the instructions of the device and then choose the video that he/she wants to watch. For every video, there is indicated the duration (very useful if you only have some limited free time) and the price. You can select the movie, pay with Wechat and then watch it in the 3DOF headset that you put on your head. As you can see, the process is very easy and doesn’t require any kind of attendant to help you. The whole package offered by the company is so very interesting, because it can be installed everywhere and used easily.
Veer plans to install these special chairs in places where people have typically to wait lots of time (e.g. at the cinema while waiting for the movie to begin), so that they can spend their time doing something interesting and innovative.
I had a good experience trying it. But I think that the deciding factor for its success will be the price of the videos. We all know that 360 videos may be nice, but most of the times they are not mindblowing experiences, so the prices shouldn’t be that high.
Good luck to VeeR for this new concept.
LG Streaming services
There was an LG booth at Sandbox Immersive Festival, where I could see people trying some VR headsets. I so went there, eager to try the new LG devices. Arrived at the booth, I sadly discovered that the two devices were just an Oculus Go and a Pico Goblin.
Speaking with the LG people there, I was confirmed that at the moment, LG is not interested in producing a VR device. I asked explicitly if the PC VR headset we are waiting since years is still in the works, and they confirmed to me that it is not.
Now LG is simply working on platform services, especially streaming. Being a company in the telco sector, they are now more interested in offering VR services closer to their main expertise. So at the booth, they showed me a service to see VR videos on demand that they are providing on LG phones. They give you a cardboard viewer together with the phone and then you can watch VR videos through a dedicated app pre-installed on the device.
They also told me that LG is working on 5G streaming, thanks to the fact that in some zones of Korea the deployment of 5G networks has already started. But they couldn’t reveal more to be shared publicly.
X-Scent 3.0
A company directly from Qingdao was showcasing there its scent emitter X-Scent 3.0, that was aimed at multi-sensorial cinemas, but that can be used easily for VR as well.
It was a U-shaped device that you could put on your shoulders, to sit around your neck. On it, there were some holes, that were able to spray scent particles. Thanks to a full framework aimed at providing scent perception to the user, the system was able to let me feel the smells of the movies I was watching on a big cinema screen. So for instance, if there were flowers, I could feel flowers, if there were people cooking sweeties, I could feel chocolate and so on. The whole system could work with multiple devices at the same time, so that to make possible to set up a whole scent-enabled cinema.
I was told that the X-Scent can have up to 30 scents embedded inside, to be chosen among a library of more than 3000. It comes already with a whole framework that lets you program the scent emission. The price for the device is around 2500RMB (more or less 330€).
My test with it has been positive: the scent emission was synchronized pretty well with the movie and the perfumes were good. The only problem was that they felt a bit synthetic.
If you are interested in this product, just let me know and I will put you in contact with them on WeChat.
Seengene
Chinese AR and smartglasses manufacturer Seengene (that has a website much inspired by Magic Leap) had a booth showcasing its smartglasses for enterprise usage. Currently, in some Chinese areas, the police are experimenting in using these devices to recognize dangerous people.
A Seengene spokesperson told me that they are currently used mainly in security and industrial sectors. For the security customers, features like face and car faceplate detections are crucial, while for the industry, the barcode scanner is more important.
I have tried the Seengene smart glasses for some instants. Regarding the look and feel, they are more or less close to other devices like Vuzix and Google Glasses. The operator at the booth connected the device to the smartphone and launched the Seengene apps. There he launched a face recognition application and then I looked at his face. In the little screen close to my eye, I could see the images framed by the camera, plus some additional information when the system detected his face.
The demo was not bad, but it should be tried in real conditions, when the system should detect like 5000 faces and not only one. Furthermore, there is the problem of the UI to be solved: showing information on such a little display is barely usable… probably they should be shown on the big screen of the smartphone.
And that’s it for today! Stay tuned for more articles about SIF and my trip to China in the next days!