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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.
High performance doesn't really seem like its part of the package.
It is if you're shopping for components to build an INS-guided cruise or ballistic missile. ;-) That reminds me, where can I buy these sensors again? :D
Ezekiel 23:20
Simulators are an area where military requirements are at least as strict as commercial specs. Flight simulators are a good example. Link was the first serious simulator manufacturer, and their first large customer was the Army Air Force.
is why they just didn't use YETI as their company acronym and be done with it?
Even a commercial product could be classified as "military grade" if it meets a specification put out by the military.
Yep. You can have the military grade steaks, I'll still with USDA grade Prime ;)
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
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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.
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