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CES 2014: Ohio Company is Bringing Military-Grade Motion Sensors to Gaming
In a town called Portsmouth, Ohio, a company called Yost Engineering (YEI) Technology has quietly been making motion sensing devices for military, aerospace, industrial, robotics, and other commercial motion capture uses, including rotoscoping for the film/video industry. Now they want to bring this same technology to gaming. They tried a Kickstarter campaign in 2013, but only got a little less than 1/2 of their target amount pledged. They're going to do Kickstarter again, starting Feb. 14, 2014 -- and this time, they've been working on PR before asking for money. You can see what they're up to in gaming sensor development at www.priovr.com/. Or go to the main YEI Technology corporate site, which has a whole bunch of free downloads in addition to the usual product blurbs.
I thought military grade meant reliable, rugged, and manufactured by the lowest bidder. High performance doesn't really seem like its part of the package.
I would rather have something commercial or enterprise grade if I'm after performance, or consumer grade if I am after price. Maybe military grade if its for a toddler and I don't want it to be destroyed instantly...
and this time, they've been working on PR before asking for money
Obviously, if this story's on Slashdot.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
is why they just didn't use YETI as their company acronym and be done with it?
Military-grade encryption?
The number one draw for me is that, unlike other similar offerings, this one does not have a spy camera aimed at you all the time!
In fact; this system is far faster and more accurate than even the newest version of the Kinect. From the Video: Old Kinect had a 90ms latency, the new Kinect has a 60ms latency and this YEI strap-on system has a smaller than 10ms latency.
Also; This YEI system is essentially ready to go now. They say they just want to tweak the design of the wearables then raise enough money from kickstarter to mass-produce it. The turn around from kickstarter to shipping is supposed to be very quick.
I will be checking this out, especially since I already have the Oculus Rift dev system.
Complete living room destruction!
And probably a trip to the ER.
Stupider like a fox! - H.S.
Why does TFS link to a wikipedia article about rotoscoping, which (correctly) identifies it as a manual, 2D process?
But I guess we should be thankful that, if editors aren't actually going to catch such mistakes, they are at least doing us the favor of linking to documentation highlighting their errors.
I was at CES and got to put on their sensor suit with an Oculus Rift. It's the best immersion I've experienced so far. The ability to independently rotate your hands, biceps, and forearms is hugely beneficial.
Because the system isn't based on optical tracking, there are no occlusion issues. The biggest drawback is that it takes a couple minutes to "suit up". They need to devise a way to attach the sensors to you without all the straps. Also, I've heard people report that there can be sensor drift problems. I didn't experience that, though.
Overall, I was super impressed with the experience.
-Matt Sonic / virtualreality.io
simply put, this is a very expensive way to do things. the Kinect has done a good job at motion capture so why not just improve on that idea? using multiple (cheap-o) cameras at different angles, you could not only capture one person but multiple people without putting on any annoying suits or even extend the area of capture. what's better is that it scales as you can add more and more cameras and create a more accurate model which means it would solve occlusion issues. just to sweeten the deal, you could use optical flow to predict future motion and thus remove any possible lag you may encounter. this would be a great use case for Epiphany III manycore processor as it could process every camera at the same time.
the bottom line is that while this military-grade motion sensing stuff may be a great but it's going to be expensive ($350 per unit from what i see on KS) and there are going to be a LOT of hardware support issues.
Further reading:
3D Reconstruction from Multiple Images
Optical Flow
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I saw this demo'ed first hand, and it is awesome. I don't know that I'd call it "military grade" (not sure what that means) but they originally developed the technology for controlling industrial robots better, according to the guy in the booth who I talked to. So I'd say it's at least "industrial grade" tech. I really want to see the kickstarter succeed. This VR suit pairs brilliantly with oculus rift, and makes the wiimote seem rather primitive.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I had him as a professor for some computer engineering courses in the 90's. A little bit of a nut in the fun way; good professor, and coincidentally I ran into his MIDI servo controllers about a decade ago. Those were very solid, well designed, and responded to the appropriate range of MIDI commands instead of being just barely functional. It looks like his product line has matured quite a bit, and this seems completely plausible from him and his group.
Will the general public buy into something that sells for over $300, and then requires one to "suit up" and strap multiple thingies to your arms, legs, head, and torso? Unfortunately, I think not. If the sensors are built into a garment like thing (i.e. something like a sleeved shirt) so the user just pulls it over his/her head without multiple strapping points, it may be more acceptable. The public is extremely lazy.
The VR community had heavily invested in the STEM kickstarter a month or so before PrioVR's kickstarter was up. I think this was a big reason that the first one failed. The marketing of the technology also failed because they didn't show any integration into any existing games like the STEM system was doing at the time. The fact that the Razer Hydra was already in the hands of folks meant they could see other people using what is in sense a prototype for the STEM system. Also PrioVR is only relational to your own body and doesn't track where you physically are in a room which was one of the major concerns people wanted addressed.