AWE 2023: Hands-on with Campfire AR headset, and with HaptX gloves’ backpack

I’m pretty busy lately, so I’m writing very slowly my articles from AWE… but even if slowly, I’m keeping going forward. So today, like last week, I want to talk to you about a headset and a pair of haptic gloves I’ve tried there. Which ones? Well, you have to read the article to discover it…

Campfire AR headset

I have always been very curious about the Campfire AR headset, and for a good reason: the device is in some way derived from the old Meta AR headset. And no, with “Meta” here I’m not talking about Zuck’s creature, but about the original startup that produced augmented reality glasses which attracted the interest of the whole XR community. The startup had to shut down because of a lack of funding, so its patents have been sold. A venture capital firm acquired many of these patents and made the project re-live as Campfire with Jay Wright appointed as CEO.

2 years after this announcement, I’ve finally been able to try a Campfire device, even if for just a few minutes. And the experience has been quite good.

I’ve been provided the headset, and the first thing I noticed is that it looked a bit like a modded-up Project North Star. It also reminded me a bit of the original Meta Glasses. I guess the optical principles are similar, because the shape is very similar, and so is the quite large FOV (to be an AR device). What surprised me is that, exactly like the North Star devices that I tried at the house of my friend Noah Zerkin, this headset looked a bit 3D printed, too. I say that because the plastic it was made of looked a bit rough on the surface. I know this is a released product and the pictures on the website do not show this issue, so maybe this “3D printed effect” was only presented on the demo units I tried.

A Campfire employee (who actually was Roy Ashok, COO, and cofounder) helped me in wearing the device and tightened the headset to my head, securing it by rotating the classic knob on the back. He tightened it a bit too much, and I complained that the device was a bit pushing too much on the forehead, so he loosened another knob on the front and after that, the headset fit very well on my head. Checking better the product later, I noticed it had 3 knobs to customize the fit, and the result of these various fitting knobs is very good because the device in the end can sit very firmly but also comfortably on the head of many people.

I was put in a simulated collaboration experience, where I had to collaborate on a 3D model of an engine together with another employee from Campfire who was in the room with me. The demo was very characteristic of what Campfire does: Campfire is not interested in the consumer market, but only in the enterprise one, and in particular, in facilitating local and remote collaboration among people thanks to the powers of AR. Its main product is the collaboration platform, and the headset is just one of the many ways people can enter it (besides PC and tablet).

The first thing I noticed when putting the headset on was that the FOV was not bad at all to be an AR headset: in fact, I’ve been told it to be 92° degrees diagonal, which is much larger than the one of many other AR glasses which are around 50°. The visuals in general were good, too: the colors were very bright, and the resolution was also good: here the key metric is 22.5 pixels per degree for the visual density. I have to say that I wasn’t expecting much from this headset, but the experience was instead good. Its only problem is that (exactly like North Star), this is a tethered headset, meaning that you have to connect it to your desktop PC or laptop, which limits a lot of its usability. On the good side, a powerful PC means that complex 3D models used in the enterprise world can be visualized without any problems.

What didn’t convince me much was the interaction scheme: I could only interact with objects by pointing at them with the phone. Campfire has a little add-on you can add to the smartphone to use it as the controller of the experience. Basically, this limits the interactions to point-and-click, which is very limiting for a 6DOF AR headset.

But the smartphone has the advantage that the Campfire app running on it can be used to select what you want to do: you have the toolbox on the phone screen and select there what you want to do with your controller (e.g. use it to select, or zoom, or explode 3D elements, etc…). This way you don’t have to learn complex gestures or work with weird XR UIs: you just use your phone, select there what you want to do, and then you point and click to do it. This is very efficient for enterprise applications, but again, I think sometimes having dual-hand interactions would be important, especially when interacting with 3D models.

At the end of the day, I’ve found the interactions a bit limited, but the headset is quite good. If you are interested, you had better know that also the price of this device is for enterprise: $15,000 / year for a pack including 5 Enterprise Users, 2 Headsets/Packs/Consoles (Pioneer Edition), and 1 Studio Console.

“Portable” HaptX Gloves

I’ve met at AWE again my friend Joe Michaels from HaptX and of course, I had to try the experience that HaptX was offering together with Varjo and Lowe’s Innovation Labs.

I’ve already reviewed the HaptX gloves a previous time I attended AWE, so I’m not going to review them again, because what I tried was basically the same model. If you are interested in a review of them, you can check out my previous article. If you are too lazy to read my whole review (shame on you!), the long story short of it is: HaptX is a very innovative product, and I love that it can give you the touch sensation on all parts of your hand. Of course, we are still early stages of the technology, so the device is pretty bulky, the haptic sensation is not totally realistic, and the force feedback needs a lot of refinement. But for the current status of the tech, they are really probably one of the best gloves in their category.

Actually, little improvement this time with HaptX: the gloves did not need a big box on the desk anymore, but there was a big box I could carry on as a backpack on my shoulders so that I could use the gloves in room-scale mode. This is a little but big improvement: all the previous demos of HaptX were pretty static because they needed the box on the desk, but now I could finally have an immersive room-scale demo with fantastic haptics! Well, my joy for it lasted a few seconds, from when I discovered that I could have a room-scale demo with HaptX to the moment I’ve been put the backpack on my shoulders. It weighs something like 12 kg (24 pounds), which is like… a lot. It’s easy to complain about 100g less or 100g more on your headset until someone puts 12 kg on your body and you realize what weight in VR really means. I wanted to complain, but all my machismo prevented me from doing that and I just suffered in silence, while I imagined all the souls of dead bodybuilders looking at me and saying “Bro, do you even lift?”.

Regarding the experience that I tried, I think the mix of the Varjo XR-3, which is one of the best headsets around, and HaptX, which offers superior haptic gloves, was great. Lowe’s worked on the experience, which was about entering a house that had inside many products sold at Lowe’s and performing some actions using them. For instance, I entered a kitchen, and I could take the ingredients in the fridge, mix them together following some instructions, and then cook them using Lowe’s home appliances.

The experience was nice, nothing special for us that have been in the XR field for ages, but still nice. And the fact that was powered by hand haptics was cool, so for instance I could feel the water stream of the faucet on my palm thanks to HaptX haptics and I could feel the resistance of the eggs while I was trying to break them with my fingers thanks to HaptX force feedback.

Also, the sensation of cooking with a dead sheep on my shoulders was very realistic thanks to the heavy backpack :). Of course, as usual, when I try these haptics-powered experiences, the haptic sensation added some level of immersion and was very fun playing with it. But it also added a bit of disconnect when the haptic sensation was wrong, or triggered with too much delay. In the end, the immersion had a net positive, though.

That said, I think that Lowe’s would do a great job in showing this in their malls. First of all, it’s a mind-blowing experience for those who have never tried real VR before (I mean, haptics + Varjo is amazing). And then with all these gadgets on, you have a very cool cyberpunk cyborg look and it’s easy to make GIFs out of it, so customers would be happy to try it…

Joe also showed me what will be the future of HaptX next year, with the full kit that will be totally wireless (no cables that exit from it and have to be connected somewhere), the gloves that will be a bit smaller, and will finally let the user move his wrist (because the back part of the glove will be divided into two parts). And the price will be a bit cheaper, too. While seeing it, I got excited to try it, but unluckily, it was only on the mannequin for now.

I can’t wait to try it next year…

And that’s it also for today! I hope you liked this post and you are feeling the irresistible urge to share it on social media with all your VR peers… 🙂