LAS VEGAS -- The future of gaming, at least to those banking on the rise of virtual reality, lies not just with better graphics or voice control, but with sensor suits and headsets that bring our real-world movements to life onscreen. At CES 2014, the PrioVR full-body tracking suit is on display and the company behind it, YEI Technology, is partnering with VR headset maker Oculus Rift to showoff a fully immersive gaming experience later this week.
Sailing toward the far-off sci-fi future of those powered exoskeletons in "The Matrix" or the video game series Crysis, the PrioVR hardware is a string of strap-on sensors extensive enough to make anyone look like an actor in a motion capture studio. Its half-body system includes sensors for a users head, elbows, and wrists that can be expanded into a full-body suit that tracks ones shoulder, waist and leg movements.
"That allows you to drop on the ground, roll around, shoot under your leg, curl up into a fetal position," said Paul Yost, YEIs chief of R&D.
"We have this collection of inertial sensors that combines with a software that ties all that together into this skeletal model. All that happens on the system itself, so theres no computational load on the PC other than the communication." (Credit: Nick Statt/CNET)
Combined with that software are API plug-ins, Yost pointed out, that are compatible with all major gaming engines, allowing developers to drop the suit support into into any application with relative ease. PCs are the starting point, but YEI hopes to expand to consoles as well.
As far as movement goes, players wield a nunchuk-like controller similar to that of the original
Wii to navigate the game environment and utilize both hands and his or her upper body to make more nuanced movements. On the floor at
CES, a user strapped into the half-body PrioVR prototype played a first-person shooter demo, shifting in his chair to peek out of corners and furiously angling a virtual weapon with his hands.
While this iteration of the PrioVR is new, YEIs attempts to jump into the VR market trace back to last fall. PrioVR originally
launched on Kickstarter last September, where it racked up an impressive $111,000 but failed to meet its $225,000 goal.
According to Bloomberg, well be seeing some devices introduced at Nokia World that will run on 