I felt TOUCH in VR with a Full-body Haptic Suit!

so there's a scene in Ready Player one where the two main characters are in VR but every time their avatars touch they can feel it on their body because in the real world they're wearing these crazy haptic Suits now admittedly this scenes a little awkward to say the least what kind of haptics you rocking but I haven't been able to stop thinking about the idea since I first saw it imagine this sort of interaction but not science fiction and today we're taking a step towards that this is a full body haptic suit for use in VR but that's not all it also doubles as a full motion capture rig for use with full body tracking all while being cheaper than any solution we've ever had before but of course as with all things it's a little complicated so let's full dive into this thing because I think by the time we're through this you're gonna see exactly why this is truly [Music] [Applause] hello and welcome to virtually odd we are finally back with season two it's been a long time coming and jeez doesn't feel good and in case you're new this is a series where we take a look at the weird past odd presence and unknown future of all sorts of virtual reality technology and it's all Hands-On from treadmills to ten thousand dollar headsets to bring computer interfaces today we're going to be talking all about this this is the Shockwave suit as I said it's the very first consumer full body tracked full haptic suit it's sort of a modern day immersion rig or at least as close as we can get to it right now and this actually first peaked my attention about three years ago when I first mentioned the project but back then I did it with a lot of skepticism because Shockwave popped up on Kickstarter promising so many things that it was almost unbelievable this thing supposedly has 72 haptic Motors positioned all over the suit that allows you to feel VR everywhere from arms to chest to back to legs even your butt and if you're into that sort of thing well I guess you can have Kermit give you a little spank or something but not only that Shockwave is also a full motion capture suit offering almost the equivalent of 12 point tracking and to visualize all of that if you wanted this equivalent beforehand you'd need a full be haptic setup with feet legs arms vest and then for tracking you need 10 to 12 Vibe trackers and all of that would cost you over twenty five hundred dollars not to mention you'd then have to spend 20 minutes strapping it all up just for something not to be charged and you got to do it all over again the Shockwave on the other hand costs less than a fifth of all of that and does the same thing all while doing it easier so I'm sure you can imagine why I was skeptical this this whole thing sounds a little too good to be true which is why I'm a little surprised because here it is and it's very real oh please don't tell me you're not gonna talk about the fact that it's been two years and they still haven't shipped to all their kickstarters you're gonna talk about that right thrill hey hold on just a moment I'll get to that just let me talk about this thing first in the Box you get the full suit a battery pack that holds three rechargeable double a batteries that Shockwave says should last around nine hours or so of course with the option for a battery Bank instead and the setup is surprisingly easy you just throw the suit on right over your clothes although this sort of thing over pants just felt a little bulky I mean this thing in general just isn't gonna win you any beauty contests anyways so you might as well make yourself as comfortable as possible and I found that wearing compression pants underneath was by far the most comfortable setup and then on the PC side there's no need for a Bluetooth dongle or anything like that when you install the suit steam VR driver and launch their calibration application it just automatically connects not sure exactly how but it does and now we can talk about this application that they have you use for everything and admittedly it's just about as Jank as it looks but it does do its job for the most part here I'm able to calibrate all of the Imus which yes this does use Imus kind of just like slime VR just it has 12 Imus which is double the bass setup you actually and I gotta say at least in the app the tracking looks pretty darn good and after calibration the driver emulates 10 Vibe trackers within steamvr you got your legs shoulders hip arms all of it it's basically 10 point tracking and in the calibration app they also have a few extra demos like rain falling all over your body which is kind of crazy because you're able to feel it from your shoulders all the way down to your foot and if you lay down looking up then the rain will be hitting your chest and of course if you turn around then it'll start hitting your back it actually feels pretty precise and it's a pretty crazy feeling there's also a couple other demos like an explosions demo but it's kind of just more of the same because as cool as demos are if a suit like this only worked with a demo it'd be pretty useless and honestly whenever I first got it that's kind of all it did work with a few months later though and Shockwave now has beat saber Half-Life Alex bonework support as well as a few others even audio to haptic and full SDK and while that's not as much as B haptics for example it's a decent start I do gotta say though most importantly it does have full VR chat osc support but we'll get to that in just a moment boneworks was a surprisingly awesome experience any place you receive damage will light up and vibrate in the corresponding spot so say you get slapped in the back in game you'll feel it on your back in real life which certainly adds a whole new level of immersion to something like this also every time you pull the trigger a jolt a vibration is sent through your forearm and for this at least this suit certainly works pretty well and does add a ton to the experience that is after you go through the slog of actually adding the mods because all of these games at least for the haptic part don't have native support for anything for that you need the developers of each game to add this support in themselves with the SDK which means you're just gonna have to take an extra step and add a mod to every game you want to use this with which is kind of a pain especially when inevitably something always goes wrong but we haven't even gotten to the good part yet the one thing that doesn't require any modding is basically the reason why I was excited for Shockwave to begin with and that's VR chat why get slapped around in boneworks by null bodies when you can get slapped around by your homies in VR chat which uh kind of came out wrong but I think you get what I'm saying using VR chat Avatar SDK you can add Shockwave support to any Avatar and because of Avatar Dynamics you can interact with anybody or I guess I should say more properly anyone can interact with you oh whoa okay there we go there we go whether that be a hug a shoulder pad slap shoot you can even get calf massages from someone all the way across the world whatever and wherever people do things to your avatar you'll just feel it in real life of course it's just vibration it's not like it actually feels like the thing but still you're feeling interaction with people and it's all virtual it's kind of wild and of course we've seen this before with other setups but never before have we had something that works for the full body at least not this easily in total there are 72 haptic Motors around 16 on the chest ape or arm a couple on each foot 10 per leg eight on the back and interestingly enough around eight on the uh on the butt so yeah don't know why they focused on that location but you know take it for what it is I guess we got butt haptics in here however I think the really crazy part here that we're kind of forgetting about is that this suit isn't just a haptic suit what makes this an insane package is that it's also a full actual motion capture rig and the tracking Fidelity is pretty freaking good while still not as good as something like Vive trackers when I move my avatar moves and it's pretty one-to-one plus since this is IMU based I can wear this under a blanket or with any VR headset oh the tracking is good huh well how about that time when you're tracking completely failed and you looked like a pretzel in front of everyone or the dozens of times when the entire suit just froze leaving you looking like an idiot hey come on I was just about to get to this look this thing packed packed lot of bang for the buck but as I was about to say it's not perfect the haptics and full body tracking work well most the time I did run into a few pretty big issues that I gotta mention the tracking while better than most methods just isn't quite as good as something like slime VR or Vibe trackers most the time it's fine but occasionally something goes haywire and of course you still have that floaty IMU thing going on where you don't look quite concrete but I think the number one issue I had was the suit freezing and disconnecting randomly Shockwave did say that this problem has been fixed in the newest version of the suits but I'm having the issues so I gotta talk about it the other problem is that there's no easy way to recalibrate the Imus when you're in an application if you've ever dealt with IMU tracking before you'll know that this is pretty darn necessary Imus are just susceptible to drift which means you're gonna have to recalibrate occasionally and with most things this is fine it's just a bit of a hassle with shockwave though at least right now you have F2 for example close VR chat open the calibrator calibrate it close it and then open vrchat again and then hope you get a solid amount of time before your next calibration it's a little Annoying that being said all the issues aside this is still pretty freaking cool it's also kind of hard to directly compare this to anything because it does more than what most things do and especially for something like VR chat right now this is still looking to be one of the most affordable and versatile pieces of immersive Hardware I've ever seen it's a cheap jack of all trades but as all things are there's an even bigger issue here the kickstarter sheesh finally so my initial skepticism for the Shockwave suit seems to have been somewhat well placed so let's uh put on the sleuth hat because this is part of why this is so odd Shockwave got its start on Kickstarter all the way back in 2020 with 563 backers they raised 161 thousand dollars only around 400 of the backers actually paying now fast forward to 2023 and Shockwave says they still haven't shipped about a quarter of their suits to backers and two years has passed so just what the hell happened this is a dope piece of tech with a lot of potential and I don't smell scam here because unlike most Kickstarter scams it is a real product they have shipped quite a bit and when you actually look into it turns out things weren't quite what they seem because even though the price has shot up all the way to around 400 or so for one of these back in 2020 during the kickstarter they were trying to sell these for just a hundred and ninety dollars for the base kit which is barely even breaking even turns out that decision was kinda stupid because just a few months later component costs skyrocketed and Chip shortages plagued the entire industry within just a few months of their Kickstarter closing they were losing money every time they shipped unit and you know the funny part is I probably would have actually believed this was real back then and not a Kickstarter scam if it had cost more and then they ironically wouldn't even be in the situation because they'd have more cash flow but everybody has 20 20 Vision in hindsight and that brings us to the current state of Shockwave and you know what if any company is ever gonna put me in this position that you're about to hear I think you all deserve to know about it too here's the call that I had with shockwave to talk about what's going on now just after the kickstarter campaign and we started manufacturing the suits the price of IMU short 5x like literally 5x and above so whatever stock we had uh we just manufactured and uh and we delivered to our backer so about 100 odd backers do not have their suit and they are I think waiting for it and we are working on that but the problem is when you have to buy things cheap you have to buy them in bulk we don't have the resources right now to buy them that is the reason no profits nothing we want to deliver all the soups to the leftover Kickstarter backers so that is the reason uh we are going for pre-orders uh I'll be very Frank here I really shouldn't say it as a businessman like as an entrepreneur I shouldn't be saying it but things depend on you I shouldn't say but the fate of this company is kind of dependent on you and not putting too much pressure on you but this is the fact man and please please please get this video out I think you got it cool alrighty well okay I'm gonna go get to work then so the entire fate of Shockwave apparently rests in my hands or maybe this video's hands but the funny part about all of this is that I can't actually do anything and if what I heard was right Shockwave wants to essentially subsidize their unsent Kickstarter Hardware with a new batch of pre-orders charge a little more than they would so they have enough money for all the units and they're relying on a video like this to do that which I feel is almost disingenuous if I wouldn't include that and so I think this is pretty darn interesting if this is the kind of thing that gets you excited is it worth the gamble on a haptic full body tracksuit that maybe won't happen for a while and bail them out or is it better to just look at Shockwave as yet another failed Kickstarter that bit off a bit more than it can chew at the wrong time and I think this situation right here is exactly why in the future we're all gonna look back at Shockwave no matter which way it goes whether it turns into vaporware or whether these turn into the best suits ever made we're gonna be thinking wow wow that was odd virtually odd so uh yeah I I honestly don't know where this one's gonna go I think Shockwave has something really freaking cool here and it's something I've wanted for a long time but well you guys know the entire situation now and just wanted to say this in case it needs saying I'm not getting anything for this video I was offered an affiliate code for the pre-orders but I turned it down I did get the suit sent to me so I could test out and make a video but that's it otherwise I am so glad that virtually odd is back I've got a whole pile of videos that I'm working through so let me know what you guys thought anyways thank you to all of my patreon supporters for making videos like this possible I could not do any of this without you so thank you and of course thank you all for watching and as always don't forget to like this video if you loved it subscribe if you want more of this and hit that freaking Bell if you just can't live without it much love real loud [Music] thank you

Channel: ThrillSeeker

Views: 1,120,619

Keywords: vr, virtual reality, virtually odd, thrillseeker, tuesday newsday, haptic suit, full body tracking, shockwave, vr suit, haptic, haptic feedback, quest 2, index, beyond, valve index, oculus, oculus quest 2, meta quest 2, quest 3

Id: rHl969qJS5c

Length: 15min 7sec (907 seconds)

Published: Sun May 07 2023