WCVRI Day 1: Hands-on RealMax AR glasses and Droolon F1 eye tracking!

I’ve just had my first day in Nanchang, China. I’m here to attend the WCVRI, a very big event about Virtual Reality in China, where I am exhibiting HitMotion: Reloaded, the mixed reality fitness game of my agency New Technology Walkers (contact us if you need some VR development!).

And since I’m here, of course I’m spending also some time to try some cool stuff before the exhibition starts on the 19^th (after that, I will be forced to stay at my booth). And as I promised you, I’m sharing with you all my impressions, so you will feel as if you were here with me…

Today I will talk with you about the WCVRI event, the RealMax AR glasses and the Droolon F1 eye tracking accessory!

WCVRI

As everything happening in China, the WCVRI sounded a bit mysterious to me and to many of other VR innovators: how is it big? Is it really important? And… how is Nanchang?

I have not the time to tell you everything, because I am really exhausted this evening, but I will give you shortly my first impressions.

First of all, the city of Nanchang is for sure not the most advanced in China and that’s why it is almost unknown in the West. The local government is trying to push it to make it become a very big hub for the VR industry, and that’s why it is organizing such a big event. This goal could become reality maybe in some years, but only if they will manage to attract many companies here, developing an ecosystem that is favorable for VR startups. This is not an easy task. Let’s see what will happen…

In Nanchang you can’t live without knowing a bit of Chinese. No one speaks well in English, seriously. Even with the organizers of the event, I have to speak mostly in Chinese (hence my headache) and use a lot of Baidu Fanyi (the Chinese counterpart of Google Translate).

The same holds everywhere… and when people speak fast in Chinese, I just say “yes yes yes” without having any idea what they are saying. This evening I have just drunk a bubble tea that I don’t know what contained inside. But it was delicious, so the “yes yes” strategy is paying off. If you come here, be prepared. The good news is that Chinese people are usually very kind and will do the best to help you using the 4 words they know in English and some gestures. So, if you need help, they will do the best to support you.

Regarding the event, it seems having its importance here. Today I have seen a rich political delegation of the Jiangxi province that visited the most important booths. And there are booths of many important companies: Lenovo, Microsoft, HP, Huawei, GoPro, etc… so this event has cool stuff to showcase. The pavilions are a few, and so the expo floor is quite big. And last year there were tons of people… I have seen some videos that were a bit shocking… people were so many that it was almost impossible to enter!

Anyway, it is not THAT big spatially speaking: it is like 4-5 pavillions. Mega-events like the Gamescom in Germany occupy far more floor space. And the problem is that it attracts mostly people from China or surrounding countries (e.g. Korea): I think that if China wants to propose itself as the lead of VR, it should work more on attracting people from all the countries of the world, a bit like the US does with its big events like CES.

And regarding the writings about VR being everywhere that I saw on social media last year… well, this year I am not noticing them. I don’t stay in the official hotel of the speakers, but in a location a bit de-centered, and here around my place there is nothing about VR. Around the event venue, instead, there are many writings about VR, and many references around the tech.

Summarizing: it seems a cool event, and I am happy to be here, and I am happy to have been invited to have a booth among all these important companies. But I think that the WCVRI needs to make various steps forward if it wants to propose itself as being one of the most important worldwide conferences on VR.

Hands-on Realmax AR glasses

One of the AR devices that I wanted to try out since the moment I talked about it on my post about CES 2019 is RealMax. I was excited about it because it promised an AR glass with more than 100° FOV, 6 DOF tracking and the ability to switch to VR. Today, thanks to Nigel of RealMax, I have been able to give it a fast hands-on session. I can’t write a full review, because I just used it some minutes, but it’s enough to give you my first impressions.

As always when I try experimental stuff, my impressions are mixed. There are some things in which I really love the Realmax, but also some major flaws. Let’s start from the good things:

• The device is very light and pretty balanced. From the pictures, I thought that it was quite heavy, instead it is super-light… I was amazed. I could barely feel it on my head;

• The field of view is just “wow”. It’s like having the FOV of a VR headset on an AR headset. It’s bigger than the one of any AR glass I have ever tried. The virtual elements spanned all my FOV until the frame of the glasses, and this was another smart thing, because my brain was ok to see that there were holograms only inside the frame of the glass, and then after the frame there was nothing anymore (it is the same trick of Magic Leap). You have no AR “window” here;
• The tracking is actually 6 DOF and can work both with markers and without markers. Markers can be used to define where to show virtual elements, and in the demo that I tried were used to show virtual Chinese artworks in a room;

• RealMax can mount a Leap Motion device, so you have the power of using naturally your hands to interact with AR elements. In the demo that I tried, the possibility to use my hands to interact with the UI was something that I truly loved. It made the interface so good and natural;
• You can transform it in a VR headset super-easily. There is a magnetic add-on, and if you put it on your lenses (on the outside), bam, you have a VR headset! It’s like a 3-seconds operation. I was astonished;

• Ah, and it is a standalone headset: I had to wear no computational unit and no cables!

Now it’s time for some drawbacks:

• The headset was light, but I couldn’t find a perfect fit on my forehead (maybe because of the limited test time);
• The design is far from being sexy, it looks like a devkit;
• The holograms were semi-transparent, and this is a common pain of all the AR glasses. Colors were good, but a bit washed out: nReal in my opinion has slightly more vivid colors;

• The upper part of my vision was actually black, so my vertical FOV was weirdly cut out on the up side (I could see the virtual elements, but not the real world);
• The 6 DOF tracking is really the Achille’s heel of this device: it was absolutely not in par with HoloLens or Magic Leap, it was more similar to the one of nReal. Holograms were very shaky, and vision becomed blurred if I rotated my head fast. If you need some headset with a stable vision, this is not for you. This was even more evident in VR mode, where I am used to the fantastic positional tracking of devices like Oculus Rift S.

All in all, it seems a very good devkit to me. If Realmax manages to find a way to improve its tracking (maybe thanks to some magic by Qualcomm), then this can become an amazing device for the enterprise segment.

UPDATE: Nigel Burton, CEO of Realmax Inc and CTO of Realmax Global, has kindly answered to my critics, explaining that the company has already addressed them. This has been the message he sent me:

Hi Tony, thanks for trying our Realmax-100 glasses. I thought your review was fair but have two comments. First, the glasses you tried were made to fit asian skulls – we have adapted the padding for the product we sell in the US and Europe and know that people find it more comfortable. Second, we recognized that there were issues with 6DOF tracking accuracy, and worked with the Qualcomm team in California to address these for our international product. Inaccuracies are always more obvious in AR compared to VR, but we think that mathematically, at least, we are as precise as Oculus ‘inside out’ tracking. I look forward to testing my assumptions with you and your readers at CES!

Hands-on Droolon F1

I have finally tried the Droolon F1, the addon by 7Invensun that offers eye-tracking for all HTC devices (from original Vive to Cosmos, not to mention the standalone Vive Focus Plus). As with all the products by 7Invensun, I came out impressed by it.

With regard to the aGlass DK II, that I personally owned, this device is a big step forward:

• The setup is very easy and fast: adding and removing the eye-tracking inserts on your lenses is plug and play, you just need to pull or push the gadget on the lenses of the HMD. With the devkit, you needed to perform some weird maneuver, but with this CV device, you just attach and detach it from the lenses as you want;

• The eye tracking seems more reactive to me;
• The precision is a big step forward, and the system could detect where I was looking at even when my pupil was in the peripheral regions of my eyes. I tried a demo where I had to look at some specific fruit in a group of fruits that was coming towards me and it worked really well. I was surprised;
• Blink detection works like a charm, and could also detect the exact position of my eyelid! This is great for avatar emulation
• It works with Vive SRanipal SDK, so you don’t need to use a custom SDK anymore;
• It supports foveated rendering in some dedicated enterprise demos;
• It supplies you an additional USB-C port. Since the device uses the USB port on the headset, it gives you another one that you can use. This is handy if you want to use the Droolon F1 together with another accessory (e.g. Leap Motion) on the same headset.

I liked it a lot. Of course, it is not perfect and there have been moments where my gaze direction was detected with a little error that prevented me from using my eyes as a perfect pointing device, but we are on the right road. It really felt like black magic to me most of the time. Since there are some little errors, it is not ready for consumer adoption (consumers need something working perfectly 99.999% of the time, this works in +90%), but for enterprise and prosumers adoption is perfect. And it costs only $150!

Vive Cosmos…

Yes, you have seen it well. I have tried a Vive Cosmos, but my tests were mostly focused on eye tracking, so I can’t judge this device yet. But be sure that a review of mine is arriving in the future 😉

For now, the very first impression is that when it works (when you find your sweet spot), it is really good. It has very sharp visuals, and with eye tracking, it is super-powerful. The flip-up design is nice. But there are some things where it could have been better: ergonomics (the halo strap) and lenses (peripheral vision with aberrations), as you have already read in other articles. Regarding positional tracking… it worked well even with the mediocre illumination of the booth. I can’t say anything on the controllers because I have not tried them.

Again, when I will be able to test it more, I will come out with a full review on it. “Give me some time”, like the M2M used to say…

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And that’s it for this very tiresome day in Nanchang! If you have some questions on the devices that I tried or with the WCVRI or China, feel free to ask them in the comments here below (or on my social media channels)!