The 1st day of AWE has just ended and I’m back at my apartment very tired but also very happy. It’s been a great day: I’ve tried many amazing products, I’ve met a lot of good friends, and I’ve got to know new interesting people. It’s the magic of AWE: every single day is so intense that many things happen.
There would be so much to talk about, but I can not write a super long article today, so I’ve selected one special highlight with you: my hands-on with the Freeaim walking shoes. Then I will briefly tell you about the new gloves that WEART is working on. And I also have a bonus story about a giant chicken…
Freeaim walking shoes
The Freeaim walking shoes are shoes that let you walk in virtual reality. The idea behind them is to let you walk in the real world in a natural way so that you can see yourself walking in the virtual world. I’ve already reviewed two years ago a similar gadget at AWE called Ekto VR (I’ve also recently interviewed them), so I was also very curious about comparing the two different approaches.
When I arrived at the Freeaim booth, I was asked to sign the usual waiver “If you die, you die”, and then I had to wear the shoes. The wearing operation was pretty simple: I had to sit down and remove my shoes, put my feet inside the Freeaim walking shoes, and then secure each one of my feet using two straps. The setup has been pretty easy.
After that, I had to stand up to do the walking thing. But I guess no one in the team thought that if I had to stand up from the chair while having some sort of rolling skate on my feet, I was probably going to die falling down. If you do the demo, too, be sure to sign the waiver “if you die, you die” only after you have stood up… at least if you die while standing up because the shoes are sliding on the floor, your family can get some money.
After I managed to stand up without dying, I carefully entered a little iron cage that looked like a large walker that would have helped me in walking using the shoes while using my hands to support myself to not fall to the floor.
The team then proceeded to connect the shoes via Bluetooth and launch a VR demo on Steam on a computer, which was streamed wirelessly to my Quest. Exactly like Ekto VR, Freeaim is currently focusing more on PCVR, with the idea of coming later to standalone VR.
The principle of working of these shoes is rather easy: they have tiny motors and wheels and they counteract your walking movement. For instance, if you take a step forward and go forward by 50cm, the shoes will activate their little motors to move your foot back of the same distance. This way you can keep walking forward and the shoes keep moving you backward, with the result that you walk in place.
I started walking with the shoes, and in the beginning, my movements were very unstable, I absolutely needed to put my hands on the walker edges to support my body and not fall to the floor. The shoes were also quite bad in understanding when I should stop, and I remember that when I wanted to stop for the first time, the shoes still went back about 1 meter, moving me dangerously toward my back. That has been the second moment where I saw the “if you die, you die” scenario become very probable.
I kept walking with it, and I could see many misdetections of my speed, with sometimes the movements being too slow, and others being too fast. Sometimes I just leaned my body forward without moving my feet and I saw my virtual counterpart taking a step forward. I would say that the walking detection was very prototypical.
But the good thing was that slowly over time I got used to these shoes, and in the end, I managed to walk a bit also without being attached to the walker. I wasn’t running or walking fast: I could just walk at normal speed and be able to walk in the real world to walk in VR. When this worked it was very cool.
I can not resist commenting about the weird choice of the demo, though: to make the walking action more entertaining, I thought they could choose a beautiful landscape you could walk in, or a city at night, or something like that. Instead, they picked a damn application about airplanes, and let you walk in the part of the airport between the airplanes. And I mean static small airplanes, not even flying ones. I mean, when you think about walking, what is the first thing that comes to your mind? Airplanes of course! I relax walking between airplanes all the time, I like to take boring walks around airplanes. And to make things even funnier, sometimes I walked in the real world, but I wasn’t seeing any movement in the virtual world. At that point, I was told that I hit the “invisible walls” of the application. Because this is the second thing that comes to my mind when I think about walking: invisible walls that don’t let you walk anymore, but without you understanding why. If this application won in the internal debates as the best choice, I literally have no idea how the second candidate could be… I honestly suggest the Freeaim people to find a new demo for the exhibitions.
After a bit of walking, the demo time ended. I asked how much is the price for this device, and I’ve been told they are going to sell an enterprise edition of these shoes for around $5000, and aiming at a possible consumer edition for around $1000. To be honest, I expected them to be a bit cheaper.
I came out from the test with mixed impressions about these shoes. On the good side, I love experimental devices and I like what these guys are doing, trying to create an innovative walking device for VR. I had fun trying this device and it has been one of my highlights of AWE. And it also kinda works because at a certain point, I was even able to walk very naturally in VR, which was very cool. But on the other side, I felt the system was still a bit unreliable: the walking detection was not refined, there were too many misdetections, and especially the detection of stopping was problematic. I felt the need to have the walker around me all the time because I never felt completely safe. I really hope that the Freeaim team can work on improving all these issues.
You may ask me how I see them compared to Ekto VR: well, Ekto seems to me bulkier, heavier, and more complex to set up. Freeaim seems much more comfortable and user-friendly. It also seems less expensive. But on the other side, I felt the walking detection and the shoes’ backward movement were working better on Ekto: I had some moments of instability with Ekto, too, but I managed to do my whole demo without having any support where my hands could lean to support my body in case I risked to fall. And this says it all.
You can learn more about Freeaim shoes at this link: https://www.freeaim.com/
WEART Gloves
Italian company Weart has teased its new pair of haptic gloves: called WEART TouchDIVER Pro, they extend the current design of the haptic device to provide haptic sensations to all five fingers of the hand, plus the palm. The peculiarity of WEART is that it is able to provide not only vibration, but also pressure sensation, and temperature emulation to your fingertips. The temperature one is something I’m very fond of because very few gloves today offer that and it’s pretty cool to touch a flame in VR and feel the heat on your skin.
The new gloves were just showcased but it was not possible to try them, so I can not tell you anything about them. I just put them on the hands to have an initial look-and-feel, which was promising. If you are interested in them, the preorders are currently live for €3900.
You can learn more about Freeaim shoes at this link: https://weart.it/
A chicken story
To promote the Kickstarter campaign of the game, the team behind “Blender Start Here” decided that it could have been a cool idea to go around the expo area as a giant inflatable chicken. And so while people from Fortune 500 companies were dressed in suits and walked around AWE discussing potential collaborations, a giant inflatable chicken was just going around talking about an indie game. When I saw the chicken the first thing that I thought was “What the fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck” and then my brain reconnected the Sophia Moshasha wrote on Linkedin something about a chicken and AWE, so I just approached the infltable beast and I said, “Sophia is that you?”. And yeah, she was. I guess that I’m the only person in the world who was able to recognize Sophia as dressed as a giant chicken… by seeing them from behind. I guess from now on, whenever I will see a giant chicken in my life, I will assume inside there is Sophia. By the way I promised you a selfie with the chicken, so here you are!
During the evening, I saw the chicken again at the after-party, and then I saw my friend Finn Staber, who is the CEO of Chicken Waffle. That is the moment I decided I should do the most chicken VR thing ever. So I walked with the chicken girl until we reached the Chicken Waffle guy (still a more entertaining walk than the one between the planes) and I made them meet each other, finally making his life complete. It’s a pity I didn’t have a dress as a giant waffle because this would have been true perfection. Anyway, this is the most chicken picture you will see today.
If you are a fan of chickens, don’t forget to support Blender Starts Here on Kickstarter! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/xrio/blender-start-here
So enough chickens for today! Tomorrow will be Palmer Luckey’s day and my dream is still the one of having a picture with him! Will I succeed? Well, you’ll discover that in tomorrow’s post!