“Most people sit down to work, to chat, to watch a movie, to browse and shop online, and if VR is going to be the medium that we hope it can be, then people need to be able to comfortably engage with 360-degree content”
people need to be able to sit down comfortably and engage with 360-degree content.
A chair seems an obvious starting point to address that. Was it? We didn’t set out to make a chair. We set out to solve the problem of how you sit down in VR and not feel discomfort. The solution, as you can see, is a motorised base and a head tracker that clips to your headset so that wherever you look the chair will automatically turn. The faster you move, the faster the chair will respond. If you just move a little bit, you won’t even notice anything. We make it super smooth. It’s comfortable. You don’t get motion sick.
What we found was that an external motor moving
your body, rather than sitting statically, reminds your brain that you’ve got body mass because you physically feel it, and when you’re in the VR experience, that translates into feeling more present. That’s a sort of byproduct of what we’ve done, which we’re super excited about. We call it gravitational presence. On top of that we’ve got rumble in the chair, so rather than just feeling the haptics through your hands, you feel it through your whole body, which, again, adds more immersive presence. And we can do all of this and rotate you consistently, continuously, without the cables getting tangled.
Is a separate head tracking device strictly necessary given the onboard capabilities of most headsets? In our SDK developers can connect directly to the headset and use its head tracking, but we built our own proprietary head tracker, which reports to the base via Bluetooth, because the probability of us getting every developer to support Roto VR will be difficult. With Roto VR you just clip it on and it works with anything - even without a headset if you clip it to your glasses. The head tracker makes Roto VR compatible with past, present and future content. Out of the box it works with and enhances everything.
Many… let’s call them VR movement accessories, are so cumbersome, expensive and impractical, but the Roto VR looks like it wouldn’t take up much space at all. Can it be used as a regular gaming chair? If you don’t engage the motor, you can just take off the base covers and it becomes a regular swivel chair. And actually, if you want to watch Netflix or play PlayStation or Xbox games, you can have haptics going through your body even without VR. Netflix on your phone, even.
You say you’ve been absorbed by this since Facebook acquired Oculus in 2014. Has the Roto VR been in development since then? It’s been nine years. We’ve got patents granted in the UK, US, China and we’ve been refining our solution for a long period of time. We’ve had quite a chunk of investment over the years, and now we’re showing the world our refined solution that ships in one box and the reaction so far has been great. And we’re partnering with Meta. This is now a licensed, endorsed, ‘Made for Meta product, and so we’re thrilled that we share a vision going forward.
Nine years is a long time. What have been the difficulties? This has been one of my biggest challenges, not least
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