The Oculus Rift does a neat job of putting your head inside a game, but what about the rest of your body? YEI Technology's first stab at Kickstarting their PrioVR mo-cap suit fell short, gathering 49% of its $225K goal, but with the first consumer-ready prototypes being shown off at a packed CES preview event YEI are gearing up to start a new funding drive on Valentine's Day.
The prototype suit I saw at the show is a half-body affair, with sensors in the hands and head, tracking upper body movements with a pretty impressive degree of accuracy. I got all excited on first glance because I thought they were demoing with DayZ, but it turned out to be an in-house game YEI had developed themselves to show the suit off.
The suit has around eight to ten hours of wireless gaming time, and each attached sensor houses a three-axis accelerometer, magnetometer and gyroscope.
It was a little odd seeing the demo-man gyrating on a spinning stool in front of the PC monitor, but even more so seeing him rolling around on the floor in the company videos. The system is designed to support multiple suits on the same PC, but you may not want others seeing you during a vigorous session.
Right now their in-house titles are the only ones they can show off, but they have developed an SDK and are looking to make it as easy as possible to translate the motion-tracking sensor data into existing games. I spoke to Ashley Hetman of YEI Technology about it and she said they are in talks with a number of developers at the moment, but couldn't divulge which ones. At the moment though they are looking at drop-in support for Unity3D, the Unreal Development Kit (UDK) and CryEngine.
