Laval Virtual: Hands-on with Lenovo ThinkReality A3 and Actronika Skinetic!

I have just returned back home to Turin (Italy) after my trip to Laval and Paris, and as usual when I attend an event, here I am reporting to you the impressions of some of the hardware and software I have tried there. In this article, I will tell to you my first impressions of the Lenovo ThinkReality A3 AR glasses and the Acrtronika Skinetic haptic suit that I tried on the Laval Virtual show floor. Of course, don’t forget they are first impressions after a few minutes of usage and don’t represent a reliable and exhaustive review of these products.

Lenovo ThinkReality A3

Lenovo ThinkReality A3 are AR glasses for the enterprise sector. They can work either connected to a PC or to a Motorola mobile phone.

Specifications

• Processor: Qualcomm XR-1 SmartViewer
• Resolution: 1080p per eye
• Brightness: 200 nits
• Weight: 130g / 0.3 lbs
• Camera: 8MP RGB
• Audio: 3 noise-suppressing microphones, Stereo speakers
• Connectivity: USB-C Gen 1, DisplayPort 1.4
• Software Features: Voice recognition, Object recognition, Image recognition, Head / gaze tracking, Barcode reader, High-bandwidth digital content protection (HDCP) for digital rights management (DRM)

Hands-on impressions

Lenovo ThinkReality A3 is not that different from other similar glasses on the market, like Nreal. These AR glasses are quite lightweight and comfortable to wear, with the only little problem being the cable that connects them to the computer, which can become a nuisance if you want to move freely. The design they have is clearly less sexy than Nreal’s one: being an enterprise device, it looks very serious and basic, and it is all black in color. The manufacturing quality seems good, as in almost all of Lenovo’s products.

These glasses have been heavily marketed as a device to have external virtual displays, but actually, they are able to offer full-fledged 6DOF AR too, and I have been able to try both modes. The mode of functioning depends on what application you run on the PC: if you launch a 3D AR app, you will see it in augmented reality around you, but if you launch the specific app for virtual desktops management, you will see the virtual displays in front of you. We can say that the desktop management app is a special case of a 3D AR app dedicated to making you see screens in AR.

I tried the Lenovo ThinkReality A3 exactly as a pair of glasses to see multiple additional virtual screens for your computer. The glasses were connected to a laptop, and looking through them, I could see the laptop screen replicated as a big curved screen in front of me, with an additional virtual screen on the left, one on the right, and one on the top. The colors of the screens were bright, the text was readable, and they were also very opaque, so they were able to be clearly visible on top of reality, at least with the dim lighting of the show floor at Laval Virtual. The Lenovo employee let me see that by playing with some sliders in the UI of the app, it was possible to add new screens (up to five), change their disposition, change their resolution (e.g. he made a virtual screen become a widescreen), zoom the screens in and out, and make them come closer or go farther from me.

I’m a big fan of the use of XR to have multiple virtual screens: when I use my laptop, having a single screen is a bit limiting to me, but I can’t always have additional physical screens with me. With an XR glass like the Lenovo ThinkReality A3, you just have to take your laptop and these small glasses, and you can have up to 5 displays whenever and wherever you want. This is pretty cool. Anyway, given that we are still at the beginning of XR, things are still not perfect as we hope. First of all, I noticed that the colors of the virtual screens, while bright, were slightly different from the ones I expected from a real display: they were slightly darker and “sadder”. Then, given the limited FOV of the glasses, which I would say is around 50-something degrees diagonal, with the vertical FOV very limited compared to the vertical one, I could have in my field of view only one display and maybe a little piece of another one (depending on the zooming) at a time. This felt a bit limiting to me because I couldn’t have a vision at a glance of all displays, but I had to rotate my head to go from one display to another. This is not comfortable: if, for instance, I have to just copy information from one display to another in real life, I mostly rotate my eyes (and slightly my head) to read the content on the other display, while here I had to constantly rotate my head back and forth (and this is not good for the physical health of the worker using it in enterprise segments) to perform the same operation.

Rotating the head has also another side effect: you notice how shaky the positional tracking is. When you rotate your head, the virtual content wobbles, blurs, and lags behind your movements. This is another feature that Lenovo A3 glasses share with Nreal clones: while the visuals are somewhat good, the tracking is still subpar if compared with the golden standards of the industry from HoloLens to Quest, not to mention Magic Leap. I think Qualcomm has to do something to solve this problem once and for all for everyone.

As for the controls, you interact with the virtual screens as if they were the screens of your computer, so with a mouse and a keyboard.

As I said before, virtual monitors are probably the main use case of these glasses. But they can also work as 6DOF glasses that show 3D content in augmented reality on top of your world, either by being connected to a PC or to a Motorola phone (because Motorola belongs to Lenovo now). Since the 3D displays are just a special AR element, even in my further 3D tests I have found the same problems I have described above for the virtual screens: bright colors and opaque augmentations, but not-amazing FOV and subpar positional tracking.

These glasses are like the enterprise version of Nreal glasses. I can’t say I was impressed, but I can imagine some early use cases for them.

Price

Lenovo ThinkReality A3 start at $1500 on Lenovo’s website.

Actronika Skinetic

Actronika Skinetic is a haptic suit with 20 vibrotactile voice-coil motors that can make you feel vibrations on your body to simulate the sensation of haptics. Actronika is actually a company building actuators and can use them to integrate haptics in all objects that may be of interest to a customer: to showcase this, there was in the booth a cardboard cup to which was added an actuator that was able to provide some interesting sensations (more on this later on). Skinetic is the first own product of the company, which is meant to give haptic sensations to VR users.

Hands-on impressions

I was there at the Actronika booth with Maud from the VRrOOm team, and we tried three of the Actronika demos: two were with the suit and the third one with the cardboard cup.

The first demo with the suit was a test application showing you the haptic sensations. I was in a simple Unity scene and there were some little robot balls that shot me, sliced me with lightsabers, and did other kinds of torture things to show me how Skinetic works. During the demo, I could feel the haptic sensations in the part of my torso that was affected by the touch action: for instance, if I was shot in the middle of the chest, I could feel the vibration happening there. There was also a moment in the test scene when there was raining inside, and I could feel the rain on my body. The Actronika employee at the booth invited me to lean forward and backward and it was interesting that I could feel the sensation of the rain only on the part of the body that was actually touching it: if I bent forward, I could so only feel the raindrops on my back, and not also on my torso. The haptic sensations in general were well made and enjoyable.

Another demo was about the conversion of sounds to vibration: there was some music playing, and depending on the frequencies of the sound, the whole suit was vibrating following the rhythm of the music. This could be a nice addition to concerts, for instance.

Honestly speaking, these two demos haven’t impressed me much. Not because the suit was not working well (it was actually), but because it reminded me a lot of the bHaptics suit that I have already used many times. Even the design of the two suits is very similar, and so holds for the demos! Actronika claims that its one is slightly better because it can reproduce more nuanced and accurate haptic sensations, plus it has a better understanding of the pose of the user, a bit like if it was 6DOF (e.g. in the demo of the rain, I could bend, and the suit detected that I bent forward, giving me only the sensation of the rain where I should have felt it). Anyway, I have not had the possibility to make such an accurate comparison to tell you if this is true.

The third demo that I tried was probably the nicest one and it is the one of the haptic cup. There was a cardboard cup with a small black cylinder attached below it, and the cylinder was connected to a computer via USB. It turned out that inside the cylinder there was an Actronika actuator, and it was able to emulate the sensation of the cup being filled with various elements, like marbles, rice, cous cous, and so on. So I could take the cup, shake it, and feel truly the haptic sensation that I would have had if there were marbles moving inside it. It was pretty cool, and it’s a pity that such a system is not for sale, and was just there as a demo device.

All in all, Actronika products, both the actuators and the suit, seem very solid. The only thing that I hope is that they differentiate a bit more from bHaptics.

Price

Skinetic vest is currently on Kickstarter, available at a price between 700 and 800€, with the cheapest early bird being priced at 489€. The campaign is still open, so if you want to buy this vest, this is the time to support it.

And that’s it for some of the coolest hardware I have tried at Laval Virtual! As usual, let me know your impressions in the comments here below or on my social media feeds!