My hands-on sessions at MatchXR: Obers’s cheap VR treadmill, NOKIA audio innovations, and more!

Yesterday, here in Helsinki, there was MatchXR, the event dedicated to immersive realities in Nordic Europe. It is my third year here, and as usual, I want to highlight for you a few things that I tried in the expo area.

[Disclaimer: I’ve been supported by some people in the Finnish XR ecosystem on this trip to Finland. I know it sounds vague, but I’m not sure how to explain this any better. Anyway, no one gave me money; this is the most important thing to clarify.]

Obers

Probably the most innovative startup on the Match XR show floor was Obers. This company was showing both a treadmill to walk in VR and a scent emitter.

Michau

The treadmill, called Michau, was not like the Virtuix Omni or other similar 360° treadmills. It was a standard treadmill, like the ones you can buy at the supermarket, to which was attached a system to make you use it in VR.

First of all, some white squares were attached to the black walking strip at regular intervals. Then, a camera was put in front of the treadmill, so that it could detect the speed at which the various white elements were moving. Using the information detected by the camera, some software magic was able to infer the walking speed of the user. This speed was then applied to the VR game. You can see the video below to very easily understand what I’m talking about.

The company was showcasing a special box that allowed players to play the games with this treadmill in 3 modes: with tethered headsets, with standalone headsets, and with three headsets+treadmills connected for multiplayer.

The experience they made me try was just about walking forward, and then at a certain point, some droids were shooting at me, and I had to look at them to shoot them down. It lasted 5 minutes, but I’ve been told that the full version is around 25.

I tried the system, and I can say that it worked, but not without issues. The walking detection was very irregular: sometimes the system was going too fast, other times too slow. In general, I wasn’t able to keep a stable speed, and this could cause discomfort to some people. Plus, the fact that you have a standard treadmill means that you can only walk forward, and it is hard to adapt this to content that requires you to move around in all directions.

The good side of this is that it can be a cheap solution to adapt existing treadmills to play games. Instead of buying an expensive omnidirectional treadmill, you can just buy an add-on for the treadmill you already own and use it to play in VR. It reminds me of the solution of that Redditor who just used a mouse to use his treadmill in VR.

Aromatron

You know how I’m fascinated by scent and taste emulation in VR, so I was very happy to try Aromatron, the scent emitter by Obers.

Aromatron works like many scent emitters: you put it in various cartridges with some smells you want to have in your experience, and then when the user comes to the point where he has to feel a smell, the device releases some perfume particles in the air, which reach the nose of the user, who then perceives the aroma. It was demoed with a simple Unity application about a ship anchored on a seashore. There were 6 key points where I could feel the scent of flowers, sea, coffee, and other stuff.

Honestly speaking, I did come out of this experience thinking that while Aromatron is an interesting project, there is still some work to do. The device is still bulky, and you have to wear it to keep it attached to your chest.

This is a more complicated setup than other scent emitter devices like VAQSO, which was simply attached below your headset. The fact that the device is positioned far from your nose means that it has to spray a large number of perfume particles with considerable force to allow you to perceive the scent. Every time I went to a checkpoint, I could literally feel the perfumed air blowing into my nose from this device. But the problem with scents is that if you emit too many of them, the nose gets easily saturated by perfumes. Plus, the air around you remains perfumed even after you exit the virtual location where you should feel the scent.

So I sensed that the scents were too strong, too chemical (the aroma of the flower didn’t feel very natural, for instance), and there was too much leakage from one scent to the next (the air remained perfumed also after the use of the device). I kept feeling the scents in my nose for many minutes after having tried the device. I think this can be at least improved by putting the device much closer to the user’s nose.

Nokia

Being a big Finnish company, NOKIA had a few things to showcase at Match XR. The two demos about spatial audio were pretty interesting to me.

The first one was about mobile videocalls: thanks to a dedicated protocol for spatial audio and a microphone array installed in the phone, it was possible to have spatial audio in a phone call. This meant that I was not only able to hear the sound coming from the other side, but the sound was clearly positional. And since I was given 3DOF tracked headphones, I could feel the sound changing when I was moving my head. I don’t know how much this can be useful in practice, since many times when you have a phone call, you just want to hear the voice of the other person, but it was for sure cool.

The other demo was in VR, provided through a Pico headset with attached some very expensive headphones (probably the ones by Apple). In this demo, I could see myself inside a garage, and there were a few cars that were playing music: some of the cars had the doors fully closed, but one was completely open and without any roof. The audio was fully positional, and I could perceive that the more I got closer to a car, the louder it became louder. Plus, the closed cars had muffled sound coming from them, while the open car let me hear the music with its full power.

I can say the system worked very well, and I felt the sound not only had good spatialization, but also felt more… complete, as if I were listening to all the frequencies with good quality. It was more realistic. I don’t know how much the merit is of NOKIA’s software and how much was of the amazing headphones, though. The NOKIA employee told me that they believe their spatialization solution provides a better sound and is also able to better model the bouncing of the soundwaves across the environment. These are also things done by the Oculus Spatializer, or by Resonance, though, and I have no idea how much this is better than these widely known solutions without trying both of them side-by-side.

Donkey Hotel

Donkey Hotel is a company that records events like concerts with stereoscopic immersive videos (180 or 360 degrees). They showed me a showreel, and I can say that the recording quality was very good, but there were also some drawbacks, like the fact that in a few videos, the people looked a bit smaller than they should have been, or that the FOV was a bit limited. The company is aware of these issues and is working on them.

Yvon Bespoke

Erson and Narmeen from the Helsinki XR Center have created this little startup that creates customized perfumes for people. I never found a perfume company at an XR showcase, so I found this to be pretty original. I filled out a questionnaire with a few questions, and then using my answers, they will create by hand a perfume that is customized for my personality. Sounds like a nice project… maybe they should partner with the Aromatron guy at a certain point…

Distance Technology

I went to the Distance Technology afterparty in the evening. Distance was showcasing the latest iteration of its prototype, some secret stuff, and also a demo of a windshield application inside a car. It seems that the military and automotive industries are two of the most promising markets for this company.

The demo in the car was pretty nice: I could see on the windshield of a standard Kia car a lot of indications about the simulated road in front of me: I could see some dangers, the lane I should switch to, plus the usual indicators like the speed of the car.

The cool side of Distance for the car windshield is that compared to the present windshield graphics, this one had a pretty larger FOV, so it occupied a larger area of my vision. Plus, it was stereoscopic: the system was tracking my head position, and from that, it could infer the pose of my eyes, and so show content that appeared in 3D to me. This is in stark contrast with the classical 2D smart windshields: with Distance it will be possible to show the visual information about the road and the other cars directly in 3D on the road in front of the driver, which is super cool and useful.

The demo was not perfect, though, and there is still some work to do: for instance, whenever I was moving my head, the system lagged in adapting itself to my new point of view. And stereoscopy was not perfect from all points of view. But still, it felt very cool and promising.

And that’s it for the main things I tried at MatchXR! Now you don’t have the FOMO for not having come to Finland! Or maybe you should have, since it is a very cool place…