WalkOVR Lite

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  WalkOVR Lite, the most lightweight, affordable and immersive way of physical VR experience.

Inspiration

VR users, today, experience body movement in VR technology with gamepads, keyboards or, at best, with the new generation room scale controllers. But you need to satisfy three things to feel you are really moving: 1- your eyes, 2- your ears and 3- Your muscular integrity. All these controllers fail to emulate this real body movement in VR applications. You move in the game, you see the action by your eyes but you don't really physically move during this experience. Unless you don't feel you are really moving in VR apps, VR experience is never satisfying and worse than that, users feel motion sickness.

Therefore we developed WalkOVR Lite, a wearable motion capture system that lets you physically walk/run in place in Virtual reality applications. It is plug and play with your favourite locomotion enabled VR games. You wear it and then you don't need controllers to move in the game.

We are all gamers in the team, we all wanted a solution like this and hence we develop WalkOVR for ourselves. WalkOVR mainly solves below problems in VR: • nausea and motion sickness, • the incomplete immersive experience caused by the lack of body movement, • lack of infinite movement space.

What it does

WalkOVR is a wearable hardware, a sensor network you put on your body. It captures your body position in 3D space and converts it into digital movements in a very quick way, so you get the real-time VR movement. We use sensor fusion technologies to track user movement in real life and by the help of our algorithm, we transform them into digital movements in a gaming level Bluetooth transmission.

How we built it

We first built a more complex business version of WalkOVR (aka WalkOVR Biz). It is the electronics plus mechanics (an omnidirectional treadmill) version of WalkOVR. We already sold many and receiving hundreds of inquiries all around the world.

The electronics and the firmware in it are all developed in-house by our team and nowadays we are converting the complex version into a compact / small and affordable consumer version.

Challenges we ran into

Main challenges we ran into was building a cost-efficient hardware and the level of sensor technology. Building a hardware is "hard", establishing a cost-efficient solution is highly related to the quality of sensor/micro controllers etc. We tested/are still testing many sensors to make our motion capture system more affordable and better.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We literally receive more than 100 inquiries from all around the world, from Brasil to Australia, from Germany to the USA for the Business version (expensive version) of WalkOVR. We built so much with the very low amount of resources. We tested our products with more than 100s of gamers and almost %100 of them stated that motion sickness is either removed or considerably decreased.

What we learned

We should have started the easier way (only electronics), but we did the hard way first (the full omnidirectional treadmill solution). Now we have 4 products (from the most lightweight version to most complex one) to sell but need more resources to market and sell it globally.

What's next for WalkOVR Lite

We will do a Kickstarter campaign this year and let all gamers know about our product. We are testing it with many gamers and hopefully, if we succeed and win at AT&T Challenge, we may start our Kickstarter just after the winners are announced on 4th of June.

Built With

• c
• firmware
• hardware
• motion-capture
• sensors