The company winning the “Best In Show” award at United XR Europe has been Iralta with Skyjet VR, a product promising to let you live the experience of flying on a jetpack in virtual reality. Of course, it has been one of the first things that I’ve tried when I arrived at the expo, and now I’ll tell you how it was.
The SkyjetVR station
Skyjet VR is a solution for location-based entertainment. The machine is made by a standing station with a cushion for your back and a safety belt that keeps your torso attached to the cushion even when the station is moving. On your two sides, there are two metal handles that you should hold during the whole experience. This has two advantages: one is, of course, safety, and the other is related to realism, because if you had a real jetpack, most probably your hands would be holding something similar, too.
Below your shoes, there is a metallic floor with some hydraulic mechanisms that let it rotate: when the floor rotates a bit, for instance, to simulate you going on a curved path with your jetpack, you rotate with it, for an added realism of the experience.
In front of you, two fans simulate airflow towards you while you are flying.
Setup
I was expecting a long and complicated setup, while instead it was incredibly easy. I stepped on the machine, which just required me to go onto its floor, which was in a stable horizontal position. I leaned on the back custion, and I buckled the safety belt. Then the Iralta employee put me on a Vive headset and some immersive headphones. After that, I was already ready to go.
This ease and speed of setup impressed us all and made my friend Christian think that this machine could also be operated independently. I’ll talk more about this later.
The flight experience
My first flight was inside a CGI world made with Unreal Engine 5. In the beginning, I was inside a plane, then the cargo door of the plane opened, I went outside, and the real experience started.
I felt myself inside some mountains, flying following a path that made me go through colored rings. It reminded me of the game I had to play while trying Vitruvian VR, with the difference that Vitruvian was a fully active experience, while this one was fully passive. The system guided me through all the rings without my having to perform any input action. Going through the various rings involved a few steering movements to the left, right, up, and down, and this was entertaining, because of course the more you move, the more you find the experience interesting.
The mountain environment around me was nice, thanks to the amazing rendering features of UE5, but nothing super-remarkable. This was still a demo application, after all.
The last ring, instead of being transparent like the previous ones, had an image of another place inside it: when I went through it, it teleported me to another location.
The other location was not made in CGI, but was 12K drone footage instead. The quality of the images was definitely good; there were just a couple of distortion issues here and there.
While I was flying, a voice was explaining to me where I was, what I was looking at, and why it was important. It showed me some nice places (e.g., a Church) in the mountains between France and Spain and described them to me. The voice was informative and calm at the same time; it was almost relaxing. What was shown to me was clearly an experience dedicated to virtual tourism, which is one of the proposed use cases of Skyjet VR. Without moving from your city, you could fly through some mountains virtually and discover everything about them.
Looking below me, I could see some virtual legs of my avatar and a little “platform” I was on.
The flight sensations
If you want to know how cool the flight was… then you are in the right place.
Let me start with the moving platform: the platform can only make your body lean 20° in every direction. This is not a technical constraint (the platform can do more), but it is a value the company set because it is what seems to be comfortable for everyone. 20° is not much, so the body never bends in an uncomfortable way, and to this we have to add that usually the platform also moves pretty slowly. What happens is that your body slightly moves left, right, or forward… enough to feel that the flight is more immersive, but not so much to make you feel the fear of the flight. You can have an example of this from the video below:
The flight is so safe that most of the time it is not even necessary to hold the handles, and the safety belt is enough. While my friend Christian Steiner was trying the experience, in some moments, he left the handles, and literally nothing happened.
I could make a similar comment related to the wind emulation: it was perceivable, and sometimes was stronger, other times weaker, depending on the flight direction and speed, but it was never very strong. It was more like feeling the wind in the face close to the sea than doing indoor skydiving.
The good thing is that thanks to all these physical sensations, my body was not feeling any motion sickness, notwithstanding the fact that I was doing a long flight in virtual reality with many changes of direction. This confirms my opinion that this experience is optimized for comfort.
Everything felt very “mild”, which is amazing if you want to build an experience that is pleasant for everyone and that puts safety in the first place. It is ideal for families that want to try the virtual travel experience together.
BUT I’m not a family, but a crazy guy that has been 11 years in the VR field and for me, that was a tiny bit underwhelming. I would have liked to have more extreme sensations: my body should have bent more, so that I would feel the gravity, or anyway the full power of the jetpack. The platform should have vibrated more, and the wind should have been strong on my face. I like when VR can make me feel adrenaline, and in fact, the first thing I did when I tried Vitruvian VR was put myself upside down. Skyjet looked to me like playing a lot on the safe side, which is good for the majority of the users, but can leave a bit disappointed the people looking for more action like me.
I’m not saying I didn’t like the experience (it was good), it is just that I expected a bit more adrenaline: my nerd dream is to try a jetpack, which is something that makes you fly in an adventurous way; this looked to me more like a trip on a fast hot-air balloon. But this is just my subjective opinion: I guess that for the majority of other people (that maybe didn’t even try VR), this is already adventurous enough.
Some possible improvements
I suggested to the people of Iralta to improve the experience by:
- Making the CGI part interactive, so that I can move the jetpack to go through the rings at the speed that I want
- Calibrating the experience according to the user: people could choose if they want the relaxing trip or the crazy flight, so that everyone comes out of it happy.
- Adding some multiplayer so that I can fly against my friend and have a lot of fun
The good thing is that the answer I got was: “We are already working on all of this”. This makes me very positive about the future of this company and this solution.
One other idea we gave to Iralta is to consider creating some automatic stations out of it. The system is very safe, the machine is sturdy, and the setup per person is fast and minimal. This is the ideal candidate to become one of those machines that you put inside airports, and people just pay and do it without the need for any stewards. I think SkyjetVR would be ideal in this sense, if it can find a distributor.
Final considerations
I think that SkyjetVR totally deserved the award it got. Iralta has been able to create a solution that is easy to set up and use, and that can offer a very comfortable experience to its users. SkyjetVR allows you to fly around places for tourism, or training, or other use cases, in environments that are very well-made: the drone footage in particular was very good. The flight experience is definitely pleasant, gives no motion sickness, and is much more realistic than anything you can obtain at home. If they manage to add more interactivity, a bit more adrenaline, and some social interactions, this product has good chances of becoming very successful.
Or, given the context, maybe I should say that it has the potential to fly high…