On Friday I was in Prague to attend the Somnium Connect 2024. There I had the opportunity to meet with some amazing friends from the VR community and to try very interesting pieces of hardware like the Somnium VR1 headset (hands-on impressions coming soon!) and the Teslasuit haptic suit. Let me tell you everything about this event and my hands-on with Teslasuit!
Somnium Connect
Before telling you about my experience with the Teslasuit suit, let me say a few words about the Somnium Connect, since you may be interested in attending it in the future.
Somnium Connect is the annual event by Somnium Space, the Czech company building the eponymous Web3 social VR platform. The event is held in Prague, which is one my favorite cities in the world because its city center is full of art, there are various interesting museums, there is good food (including the trdelnik, which is my guilty pleasure), and its prices are affordable. Then there are also shady people in the central plaza who, as soon as they hear that you speak Italian, immediately invite you to some nightclub, but that’s another story… (I guess we Italians have a reputation there).
Unluckily, the Somnium Connect was not held in a nightclub, but in a Marriot hotel. It took a full day, where during the morning there were the keynotes with the announcement of the official launch of the Somnium VR1 headset and of the 3.0 version of Somnium Space, and during the afternoon the sessions where all the Somnium partners talked about what they do and what are their future plans. After that, there was a party with people DJ-ing in the physical venue and in Somnium Space at the same time. At half the event and at the end of it, there were two sessions where it was possible to try the Somnium VR1 headset and the products of the partner companies. Some of the demos were pretty cool because they involved simulators: for instance, I was able to drive a racing car with all the haptic effects on the steering wheel inside a simulator.
The partners’ network is in my opinion what makes this event more valuable: Somnium has been very smart in the last few years in strategically investing in many companies in the XR sector, creating a complete ecosystem around it. Just to mention a few names, Somnium invested in VRgineers, the Prague-based PCVR manufacturer behind the XTAL-3 headset; Lynx, the French startup that is building a standalone headset; Hypervision, a smart Israeli-based company that is inventing some optical systems (especially lenses) that give very wide FOV to XR headsets; Teslasuit, one of the leading companies in creating haptic suits. Besides the investments, it has also various strategic partnerships, like for instance with Prusa Research, a 3D printing company; TG0, which manufactures the Etee finger-tracking controllers; and Ultraleap, which has the best hand tracking algorithms out there. So as you can see, Somnium Space is not just a small European startup with a social VR world, but it is creating a whole XR ecosystem around it. That’s in my opinion what gives great value both to the company and to the event. In fact, not only there were all the people from these companies, but it was also possible to try all their products: so if for instance, you had never had the occasion to try the Lynx headset, you could do that at Somnium Connect.
Talking about the attendees, there were mostly people from Somnium Space and its partners’ network; some creators for Somnium Space; and some journalists and influencers of our space, like Tyriell Woods, Scott Hayden from Road To VR, David Heaney from Upload, SadlyItsBradley, and Robert Scoble. The event was managed by Artur Sychov, the CEO of Somnium Connect, who was doing everything to make the event succeed: he was presenting, doing talks, moderating panels, cheering people during the party, getting feedback from the demos, solving the technical issues, preparing the food, cuddling the attendees, helping old women to cross the street… he was everywhere doing everything.
You may wonder if this event is worth attending. And as usual, I would say that it depends on what you want to achieve. If you want to connect with people from Somnium and its partner companies, it is definitely worth going. The same holds if you want to absolutely try one of the devices (e.g. Somnium VR1, Lynx, etc…) in the small expo area. If you just want to enjoy the talks and hear the news, probably you can just watch the live stream, instead. I would also suggest going especially if you are in Europe, because given Prague’s central position, usually you can get there with 1-2 hours of plane. If you are from another continent, probably I would wait for the event to grow in size before traveling explicitly for it.
For me, it was interesting for a few reasons: I have been able to meet with some cool VR influencers, like Tyriell Woods, David Heaney, and Scott Hayden, whom I rarely met in real life. I have finally met Artur Sychov after so much chatting on Discord with him, and I had a nice chat with Stan Larroque, the CEO of Lynx, who is not only a nice guy, but he’s also very knowledgeable. I’ve met and connected on Linkedin with a few new interesting people. And then, of course, I’ve been able to try cool stuff like the VR1 and the Teslasuit. And then the food was also quite good, and you know, free food is for me the main reason to go to events! On the con side, I think the afternoon sessions were a bit too many, and probably the event should have been a bit shorter.
Teslasuit hands-on
One of the most interesting demos I had at Somnium Connect was with the Teslasuit haptic suit. Teslasuit is the most advanced haptic suit out there, and it is able to perform body tracking, haptic rumbles, temperature changes, and also pain induction via small electric shocks. It is defined by some people as the “haptic suit of Ready Player One” and for sure it can show what is the future of haptics in XR: many years from now, XR systems will be able to give your body all forms of physical sensations.
Teslasuit has been in business for many years, but I’ve never been able to try it, so I was quite happy to finally have a hands-on session with it. The demo was about playing Half-Life: Alyx with the Somnium VR1 headset and the upper part of the Teslasuit, to have the most immersive setup possible for playing this game.
When I arrived at the booth (I literally ran to be the first in line), I was asked what is the size of the shirts I usually wear, and then I was given the vest of my size. The Teslasuit employee at the booth told me to go behind a black curtain, remove my clothes, and put the Teslasuit shirt on. Since the shirt must stimulate your muscles, it must be in direct contact with the skin, so you can not wear clothes below it. Wearing the shirt is actually easy and it is like wearing a normal sweater, that you close with a zip in front of your torso. There are also a few buttons to close on the forearms, but that’s it. It felt a bit tight and I guess this was the purpose: if the shirt were loose, it could be distant from my skin in some parts so the sensation it provided may have been less convincing. It also felt a bit “synthetic”: it is not something I would wear outside during the summer.
After I had my suit on, the people at the booth ran a calibration procedure: for various regions of my body (right arm front, right arm back, back, stomach, left arm front, etc…), they started giving me growing electrical impulses and I had to tell when I started feeling something, like a little tingling (min threshold) and when I started feeling pain (max threshold). It’s interesting how in every region, the max threshold was never above 30% of the max power that the suit could give me. I spoke with a few other people and they all reported the same. I can not imagine the pain levels that this suit can give at 100% of its power!
After the system was set up, I was given a VR1 headset, VR controllers, and instructed to play a specific part of Half-Life: Alyx. I have to admit I was a bit rusty with Alyx, and things got even worse because they asked me to play it with the Index Controllers that I don’t own, but I have managed to play a few shooting sessions nonetheless. Every time I was shot by a soldier or hurt by a headcrab I could feel pain in my body. Since the pain levels had been calibrated before, the pain was not insurmountable, but still, it hurt. And it didn’t feel like the pain you normally feel when you are hit by something or are cut by something… it was more like being hit by a few dozen needles on your skin. After a while that I was playing, my brain started associating being hit with the discomfort of the pain, so I didn’t want to be shot anymore. It was interesting that Teslasuit engineers also associated shooting with my own gun to some vibrations to the gun arm (the right one in the demo). This was cool because it made shooting more realistic. Of course in this case, the purpose was not to make me feel pain (the electricity level was lower), but just to make my arm vibrate because of the force applied by the gun. The vibration also didn’t feel like the classical rumble (like with bHaptics suit) but was more like being touched (but not stung) by many needles on my arm.
The demo was very cool to try, but at the same time, I wondered if I would have kept playing that way for hours. I mean, a demo of a couple minutes where you feel pain when you are shot is fun, but would I ever play for hours, getting continuous electrical shocks every time I’m shot? Probably not, because my brain would start associating playing Alyx with feeling pain and would stop me from playing it. I’ve enough experience to also tell you that too many intense haptic sensations for too much time can feel “tiresome” on the body, so probably this is not how I would play video games the whole day.
But we have to remember that Teslasuit is a device for enterprise usage and not for gaming. And in the enterprise, during safety training, the fact that your brain associates “pain I do not want to feel” with a wrong operation that makes a machine explode is actually good because it means that you will never make that error again to not feel pain again, so your learn in a more efficient way.
Unluckily I’ve not been able to try the other features of the suit, but only the vibration and the pain simulation. Some people who tried it in other demos in the past told me it has many cool features, like the ability to make your forearm rotate upwards after you shoot to simulate the recoil. Maybe I’ll try them in the future. For now, I can say I had a positive impression of it, even if I would have liked the pain to feel a bit more like real pain (I know, this sentence sounds a bit BDSM) and not like needles on my skin.
If you’re curious about the price: the device costs $13,000 but interested universities can get it for research projects with a 30% discount.
After my demo, I went back behind the black curtain, removed the haptic suit, and while I had my torso naked, a guy from Somnium entered the space. After all those invitations to nightclubs, I was in the end the involuntary stripper for someone, I guess. But I was disappointed he didn’t leave any money in my underpants. Young people don’t know good manners anymore…
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