Tricky Bits with Rob and PJ
Rob Wyatt and PJ McNerney discuss the latest and greatest news in the tech world and to figure out where things have been, where they are, and hopefully where they are going.
Tricky Bits with Rob and PJ
Interview with NeuroSync Labs
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Ever wondered why a virtual rollercoaster can leave your stomach in knots, despite never leaving your living room? Strap in and brace yourself as we unpack the enigma of VR-induced nausea with the expert insights of Nemanja Milosavljevic from Neurosync Labs. Our latest episode of Tricky Bits zooms in on the battle between our eyes and our inner ear when diving into the digital deep end, bringing to light the vestibular system's pivotal role in the physical disorientation we face in virtual landscapes.
Hold onto your headsets — this session isn't just about identifying problems; we're all about the solutions. Learn about how the groundbreaking C-Infinity device can sync your senses, offering an immersive experience with a solid grip on reality. By integrating force measurements with natural motion, this ergonomic innovation could be the key to unlocking a future of comfortable, nausea-free virtual exploration for a number of VR experiences.
Join us as we envision an electrifying era of VR, where the technology we discuss today might just redefine our gaming experiences tomorrow.
NeuroSync Labs: https://neurosyncvr.com/
All right, welcome back to Tricky Bits with Rob and PJ.
Speaker 1:We've done a lot of discussions in the past about VR, xr, ar and many times, like most folks, we have focused a lot on some of the problems, like the optics, like the ability to have pass-through, the ability to have high resolution.
Speaker 1:One thing that we have not gotten into very deeply is this disparity problem that exists between what my eyes see, what my visual cortex sees, and what the rest of my body actually feels, and what the rest of my body actually feels.
Speaker 1:It's all well and good to be able to have a first-person shooter in VR and be running at full speed, but what I'm experiencing in my eyes and what my inner ear, my vestibular system, might be experiencing is very different, and what happens is that this can lead to a sense of nausea, can lead to a sense of mismatch in our bodies. Today we're going to be having a discussion, a little bit of a preamble, with Rob and myself on what is some of the fundamental roots of this nausea problem, but then also having an interview with someone from a company named Neurosync to discuss a little bit more in detail both this as a problem, as nausea, as well as some solutions they've been coming up with. They've been coming up with, rob. This has been one of those areas that is often overlooked by the general press and it actually is a very fundamental problem in terms of longevity of usage for any of these VR XR headsets.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and I think a lot of it comes down to a lot of the reviewers and reporters who use these things don't use them for any significant amount of time. They put them on the head, they see the pre-prepared materials that the vendors want them to see and they take it off the head. When you start using these devices in ways that you want to whether it's playing games, watching movies or whatever it may be you start to see these problems a lot more and again. We always talk about the specs of how high resolution of the screen, of vision pro has 4k screens for each eye, etc. And what's the latency, what's the field of view, all graphics related things.
Speaker 2:We don't talk about the optics of those graphics. We don't talk about the, the focus distance, the accommodation, um, things like that which can induce eye strain and give headaches. We don't talk about the fact, like it says, I'm running around with a joystick I'm actually sitting still, but my visuals are seeing the scene fly past at high speed. Introduces movement, seasickness type, uh, nausea. No one talks about these things and, like you said, it's, it's the key to making these wearable for a long period of time. No one's going to wear these things for eight hours if it makes them feel sick.
Speaker 1:It's fascinating because, in many ways, where the press has been at has been really extending the narratives around what had been done for televisions or game consoles, which is focusing in on the resolution, focusing in on the frames per second. And now that we've entered a new paradigm, I think it's taking some time to catch up to the fact that this isn't just a game console. In your head it's a replication of some form of reality, but that form of reality very much is dissonant to the reality we actually experience it in.
Speaker 2:Yep, and we've only really solved the one problem. We've solved the visual problem. We've kind of done that badly, but we've done it enough to convince us we're in this 3D world, and then the rest of your body is going ah, I reject that reality.
Speaker 1:So we hope you enjoy the second interview episode and keep following up more with us in terms of where we're poking around at the VR AR side of things. All right, everyone, welcome back to Tricky Bits with Rob and PJ. We are really excited. Today we have our second interview episode and we have with us Nemanja Milosevic, and I'm so sorry if I mispronounce the name. I would encourage you to correct me so we get it right.
Speaker 3:Milosevic. Milosevic is a controversial one. Milosevic is a lot better for most people. Okay.
Speaker 1:Thank you very much.
Speaker 1:Thank you for the correction, and Nemanja is coming from a company called Neurosync.
Speaker 1:Especially with the release of the Apple Vision Pro XR, ar, vr has become even more in the zeitgeist of technology, and one of the interesting problems that exists is, you know, despite whatever bits of technology we can put into these headsets, we still end up with this problem of a mismatch, that it is virtual, it is not real, and so what I might be seeing and what I might be physiologically experiencing my body is different, and so there is going to be a cognitive dissidence, a mismatch that in some cases can be annoying, in other cases can lead to things like nausea.
Speaker 1:So one of the things that we are going to tease apart in this episode really is really trying to dive deep into this problem of VR, the VIMS problem, which I think, Nemanja, you're going to take us through, what that means, the physiological issues that occur, and we want to dive a bit deep into understanding what this really looks like, maybe some of the various approaches, and then how neurosync is actually trying to fix this issue. Rob, do you have any other other preamble stuff that you want to add into this one?
Speaker 2:no, it's it's really interesting because I come from the graphic side of AR and VR. We tend to think, oh, we do a stereo image, we render left and right eye, we project them into your face and it's all good, that's it. It looks like 3D, it works like 3D. But, myself included, a lot of people are very sensitive to the mismatch in the actual focus that you're seeing versus the fact that your eyes know that tvs are an inch in front of your eyes and that mismatch in your brain really interferes with some people, gives them headaches. Cause, not causes.
Speaker 2:Uh, nausea. I don't get nauseous. I do get a cracking headache after about five minutes of wearing any of these devices. The one that I didn't get as much of a headache with was magic leap, which, being true ar, additive light, obviously your most of what you're seeing is the real world and it's only a few objects that are rendered here and there which are virtual and they tend to have a better accommodation than pixels projected right in front of your face. So I think the back end of AR and VR, all this needs to be solved before it's a true consumer device. I mean, cell phones wouldn't be as popular as they were as they are if people got sick every time they looked at the screen. So this is a problem that needs to be solved. So I'm very interested to hear what you're doing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, before I start, let me ask you so, when you get, not nausea, but when you get the headache, is it all just from wearing the headset or is it connected to something you do with it? Is it connected to virtual locomotion, would you say, or is it just from wearing it? If you're just consuming normal media, would that be like a movie in VR? Would that still produce a headache?
Speaker 2:for you. Some of it is related to the movement and if I sat, I've not actually watched a movie on the Vision Pro. I've watched little bits of it and most of the time I was working on it it wasn't really working. So, on the finished product, I have not actually sat and watched one of the high-end, high-definition movies, so I don't know whether that would still do it, because that would just be sitting still wearing it. A lot of it as well is because I worked on all of this. On the technical side. Most of what I was working on wasn't actually working. So there's always bugs and things and that doesn't help with the headache problem. But I do definitely get it if I'm moving around, If I put an Oculus on and try to play a game where I'm definitely moving around.
Speaker 3:Even when using your body, so not just virtual even when moving around.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I've not done a huge amount of that, just because with the full headset on, you tend to hit things and crash into things and things like that, without having a studio where you can actually really experience it. I think a lot of people have probably not experienced it in its full form because of physical space restrictions yeah, yeah, a lot of people don't actually have enough space for normal VR.
Speaker 3:I mean, they might have space to play Walkabout Mini Golf, which is a just fine game I love Walkabout but they won't be playing anything that has them really jumping around or waving their arms around. A lot of people don't have that kind of space or a safe environment for doing so. So that's a big issue that VR still faces, in my opinion. Yeah, your situation is interesting, so I would like for you to try our device, obviously to see how it goes for you. But our device it solves nausea for people that have a specific reason why they get sick, which is the vestibular disconnect when they move. What they see does not match what they feel. And if you get a headache from just wearing a headset and not really connected to the virtual locomotion that you're performing, if you get sick from just wearing it and moving around with your own body, I'm not sure that it's going to have much of an effect on you, right, If that's the reason why you get the sickness the emotional sickness but in our case, the people who are going to benefit most from the nausea reduction side are going to be the people who struggle moving around using the joysticks as an input method.
Speaker 3:So the joysticks, they're not a precise way of moving around. You don't get that much precision with a controller on a stick and a lot of these games sometimes they'll have you influence the motion by moving your arm around, Sometimes it's by looking around. So there's still differences in various games or content in the way that you actually move around, Not to mention the speed is almost never the same in these games. You always move around at a different pace, which might not be the right pace for you, as well as rotation. For some people the segmented rotation helps where you do the segmented rotation, but for a lot of people that's not immersive. That's not the way they experience the real world. So they don't want to experience the segmented rotation of the game. They don't want to teleport.
Speaker 1:Could you go in and maybe let's double-click a little bit on the vestibular disconnect. Because, it seems like it would be useful to kind of say, hey, we've got this visual field that might be moving hyper fast, but obviously there's a disconnect that's happening because my ears aren't feeling that. So can you dive a little bit into that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so well. Your brain, you know it has. You have the motor cortex, you have the vestibular cortex, the vestibular organ in your body, and when you move around in real life, like when I'm walking around right now on the street here, I can see that I'm moving around. So my eyes definitely see and the refresh rate is perfect. So if the refresh rate was lower than 90, for most people 90 is good enough. I'm speaking about VR. So in real life it's infinite and I'm feeling great In VR it has to be at least 90 for most people. Some people will still need more, but for most people, as it has been 90. So I actually feel and perceive with my eyes what's going on when you move around in a virtual environment in a video game. So when you use a stick to move the joystick, you still you see the movement, but you don't feel it. Your body is not picking up on the small things it's been trained on over the years you've been alive to pick up on and it's not picking those up right. There's a disconnect there. There's a mismatch of what you see and what you feel. Your body has a lot of sensors. It's not a simple thing to explain. It's like this part of your brain is the one that's responsible for it. It's your whole body. It has receptors all over it and the neurons and everything in your brain, they all work together to tell you that you're actually moving around when you move. Otherwise, you feel sick, you think you've eaten something that's bad, gone bad probably and your body wants to expel you out. For some people it's different. Some people get a headache. It's the same thing people get on a ship when they're in the cabin, but it's just a different reason. But it's just a different reason. Over there you have a fixed point of reference. Your whole room feels static. You don't expect the room to move, but the ship might be doing this right. So you also get a vestibular disconnect where you're feeling it but you're not seeing it. So it can be the other way around and you get motion sickness, sea sickness or, in our case here, the simulation sickness, because of the mismatch in your brain and what your body is doing, when our device really comes in and how it works.
Speaker 3:I mean first, if anyone has listened to this and has not seen the C-Infinity before, I'll try to explain it slightly. On the physical side, it's a device that we call it sometimes between us like the chair. You know, did you set up the chair? That's what we say because it's kind of like a chair. You don't really sit in it. So it's not a chair in that sense.
Speaker 3:It's more of a device where you lean into right, so it has a seat, and that seat is designed in an ergonomic way, obviously, so that it feels good when you lean back into it. It has a platform on the bottom where your feet go, and it's a pretty large platform so you can put your feet wherever it feels comfortable for you. But you usually put them there, and the platform is at a slight angle so that when you lean back into the device, your body is actually standing straight. It feels like you're standing normally on the ground. It's a slight angle and you have these armrests that come out of the seat where your arms go, and on the end of the armrest you have two controllers that are fixed on the armrest where your hands go, and this is all ergonomically designed so that it fits your body properly. It could be adjusted for your body. You can extend the armrest, you can adjust the height, you can do all sorts of things on the device to make it more comfortable for you, and compared to some other devices devices you have a lot more freedom to really have your body any way you want. If there's no one right way to use it, you can have your body freely stand there the way you like. So it's it's also good. So you are basically resting there and your arms are on the on these armrests and you can stay in that position for a long time.
Speaker 3:So when you lean back into it, put on the headset, you load the game or the content router and then you want to move forward. What we have you do is your, your hands are at the end of these umbrellas like this. You pull on them so they don't actually move anywhere. I'm just doing this to show what I'm doing, but they don't actually move. They measure the force in the force and pulling. Okay, If I'm pulling very slightly, I'm going to start moving forward very slightly. So it's very precise. It's a lot more precise than you can ever get with a game pad or a controller or whatever. It measures literally from the smallest, like grams, up to kilos of force, so you can be very, very. It's a high resolution there, so you can be very precise. You can really sneak very slowly.
Speaker 3:And the thing is, when you pull the butter in your hands, your somatosensory cortex actually there are receptors in the tactile, there are tactile corpuscles in your fingertips and palms. They send signals to the somatosensory cortex in your brain. It processes there the feelings of touch, the pressure, anything but the moral cortex is posterior. It's right next to the somatosensory cortex and there's a slight overlap of the electrical signals being fired from firing up in that part of the brain next to the moral cortex. When you use the device, you'll feel a weird feeling the first time you use it.
Speaker 3:But after a while your brain learns to associate this as motion. And when you pull, when you issue the forward command, the back command does the same. You just push into it. So it's like you're pulling yourself closer to stuff or you're pushing yourself away from stuff. So your brain already has like a point of reference. When it pulls it feels like you're going to pull yourself out. But you start moving, your brain starts connecting that with emotion sensation. You feel this slight locomotion in your brain. That's enough for a lot of people to help them overcome the nausea, because there's a slightly there's slightly less of this mismatch, if that makes sense.
Speaker 1:This is interesting in terms of how you're trying to solve this problem. It seems like, rob, what you were saying is that with Magic Leap, you know it was additive light for the augmented items, so you actually were seeing the real world. The real world was just there. For most VR we don't have this huge expanse where it would match basically what's in the game where I could just literally just walk around. I'm typically confined into a smaller area for VR to actually interact with stuff and in the limit I'm just standing and so I'm just using the joysticks to move around.
Speaker 1:But that creates the highest level of contrast between what I see visually and what my body is feeling. See visually and what my body is feeling. Is it fair to say what NeuroSync is doing is? You know you're not able to replicate that kind of magic leap, like see everything, because obviously it's not a headset, but you're creating a substitutive motion that is within like the same vector space as the motion you want to do, like either move forward, move back, do a rotation to in some sense reduce the contrast between what the body is feeling and what the eyes are seeing. Is that a good way of putting it Exactly? That's?
Speaker 3:the best way to put it really. The simplest way to put it really is that ArtiWise does not help everyone. It will help people who experience motion sickness in VR due to the locomotion. That's where we come in and, like I say, it's a bell curve, so some people are going to be on the end, where they don't get sick from VR ever, which is going to be like me or they're going to be on the other end, for example, our CTO.
Speaker 3:He gets very sick from VR. Most people are somewhere in the middle who are going to be maybe a discomfort for a slight bit, or they might not get sick and then have a headache after a while, like Robert, that sort of thing. Most people are somewhere in the middle. For those middle guys, which is the most of the people, that's where Synfity helps the most. If you are very prone to motion sickness, this is a slight sensation that your brain trains. After playing for a bit more, you start to feel it more. I don't know how to explain better than that, but for people who are very prone to motion sickness, it might take them longer. I'm still pretty confident that everyone can grasp it because it's really not different from anything else you've tried in VR. I'd also like to mention one more thing to explain to anyone who might be listening.
Speaker 3:It might be hard to understand how you're going to be playing your games using this, because you are used to using motion track controllers in games. So you might be wondering if I want to play Pavlov or Beat Saber or whatever, how is that going to work out? So you're not going to be playing games that specifically only accept motion track controllers. So that's going to be games like Pavlov. That's going to be games like Walkabout Games, where you only use the motion check controllers. That's not going to be the games you're going to be playing. So you might be now thinking what are these games that don't use the motion check controllers? Are there any games like that?
Speaker 3:Until recently, there wasn't that many of them, but after the release of UEVR by PreyDog, there are now apparently 10,000 or whatever games. I'm not sure. I haven't tested them all. So that's a really cool thing. For people who don't get motion sickness, they like motion tech controllers it's gonna be awesome. But for a lot of the content most of the content it's not gonna work with the motion tech controllers. So you're stuck without the option of playing these games in a good enough way. In VR, you might use the Xbox 360 gamepad, for example, but it's not going to feel immersive or good in any way right. Or you could use the mouse and keyboard, which is going to be just even in reverse With our device. It's literally like a match made in heaven for these games.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that makes sense. Do you just expose your inputs as a USB device, or are you pretending to be some sort of simulated controller so you can directly? Plug in, or do you have just a private SDK that people can integrate? What is the software interface side?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so we don't have any software for it. Literally it's just one USB cable you plug into your PC. The computer will say C infinity, but it's an X input device. So any content that already works with the XInput, which is pretty much all the content, they all work just great out of the box. You don't have to set up anything outside of the content, outside of the options within the content. Say, you're playing a game, you might want to set up the input router, but that's usually within the options of the game. Our control C Infinity is literally just one USB cable that you plug into your PC.
Speaker 2:Just make it an X-input device. That's a great way of doing it, which opens up another question how does it work with PlayStation VR, because they don't support X-input?
Speaker 3:Yes, so with PlayStation VR 2, so the new PlayStation VR it won't work with that one. It does not work with it. I tried it. It doesn't work because the new PlayStation VR it uses the motion track controllers. They made them, they made the PlayStation make their own now, so they work pretty well. But they cut the support for the gamepad, so that's too bad. But if you're an owner of the PlayStation VR 1, it works with a lot of the games Skyrim, I don't know.
Speaker 2:I suspect there's something that can be done there, because I believe you can use USB-D level software user mode drivers on the PlayStation. Yeah, that's probably a way to make the next job work Very early on, and so you can probably write some sort of library just to pretend. The downside is because you expose it as a game controller prior to being an X-input device. It's probably going to install its own driver and then fail because it's not a PlayStation controller, but it is a controller class.
Speaker 3:Yeah, the way we got it to work with the first PlayStation is the way we got it to work was using a Titan adapter. So the thing people I don't know. I think people use those to attach third-party controllers. I use it to connect the Infinity. So I would connect the third-party adapter to the PlayStation on the USB port on the front.
Speaker 2:So yeah, I think your product does solve that whole locomotion side of VR, which is, like I said earlier, it's very misunderstood or not considered at all. Everyone always just dives in for the graphics and the latency and the hard specs, and I think that's what affects me. It's the latency and the optics that give me the headache.
Speaker 3:And probably the weight.
Speaker 2:But, like we said, this is an entirely barely discussed side of AR and VR that does need to get solved before these can be worn for any significant period of time. Like Apple's pushing the Vision Pro to like, oh, wear it all day, it's like you can't really wear it all day if you're going to get sick in the first five minutes.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and the weight thing as well. So at least Apple got the battery out of the headset, so it's on your side. Some people don't like that, I don't. I personally don't really mind it that much, so it's okay, but it's, it's a compromise. I mean there's not going to be ever, I think, a simple, single solution for all of the problems. It's a hard thing to imagine that there might be a headset one day that you put on, it's not heavy, it's perfect latency, perfect sharpness, picture, retinal level, whatever, and where it doesn't get you sick when you virtually locomote. I don't think that's going to be an easy thing to solve with one simple device. Right, it has to be a system, it has to be a setup of things. Your body is a system. It has to be a setup of things. Your body is a system. Right, it's not just the brain in a in a jar, it's your body, it's your, your spine, your hands, fingers. There's calculations going on in them before they enter the brain not all in the brain, right?
Speaker 2:yeah, I agree, I think we're a long way from solving all of these in one headset because on just on the optic side there's the the traditional focus accommodation problem, and I think there's a big difference here between AR and VR.
Speaker 2:Like I said, ar most of what you're looking at is the real world, I think the devices you would wear all day, like if you could just make a pair of glasses that you could walk around in. 99% of what you're seeing is real motion based on you moving about. There's very little in your field of view that's actually virtual. It's just key pieces when, for virtual reality, you have all of the problems with the screen in your face, you have all the problems with accommodation being completely wrong and you have the latency problems problems. You have the field of view problems. You have all of that on the technical side, which is what all we ever talk about, but the whole locomotion side of your head's covered. But I'm moving in a way that's different to what my optics are telling me is something that we I don't think are going to solve in any single headset in a reasonably close time frame. Yes, I, I, I agree, I don't think are going to solve in any single headset in a reasonably close timeframe.
Speaker 3:Yes, I agree, I don't think it's going to happen. Honestly, you'd have to work out something like a fantastical, magical solution that tricks your brain, like, let's say, I don't know, neuralink from Elon Musk's Neuralink. I don't think people are going to be installing that to play their games. But who am I to say that people, 100 years from now, might be doing? I personally would not do it just to play games in a better way. But honestly, other than that, other than an invasive method in your brain and your full body, I'm not sure how to do it in a device that was so, short of brain surgery, I think what you guys are saying is that there's very little that we know we can do on the headset right now.
Speaker 1:So, effectively, like the headsets, are the headsets without something you know again going invasive?
Speaker 3:Yes, yes, the virtual locomotive. You start moving, but your body does not feel it, unless you make it somehow feel it With the headset. That's not going to happen. It's only going to show you that you're moving, so what?
Speaker 1:I'm really curious there. Obviously, this, these problems, have been around for a while, for as long as VR has been around. I mean, I remember kind of the early days of shooting at the pterodactyl in that, the nineties VR standup unit. What are the other approaches that have been attempted to combat this nausea problem and maybe contrast that with hey? This is why Neurosync is actually a really good solution, because it overcomes the shortcomings of some of these other approaches.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned the 90s. That's basically where the story begins. I'll get to the other answers as well. So our CTO, the guy who invented the device, he started working on this project, who got us all in on the project, he experienced VR for the first time in the 90s and, like you said, the Peridot culture, everything he had, the virtual IO glasses, I think is what they were called.
Speaker 3:I was barely born there, I'm born in 1996, so I was barely around when those were around. So he immediately knew that the problem was going to be this motion sickness. Obviously, the headsets and the glasses had to become better. So the motion that he experienced in the game, but everyone got to try it back in those days. So that motion that he experienced in the game, but everyone got to try it back in those days. So that's when he started thinking about it. But not until 2014 did he start actually working on the product he knew. Let's say when.
Speaker 1:VR started.
Speaker 3:And to answer the other part, the other part on the solution to the thing is, in my opinion, everyone is trying to do it right. The people who make games, they try to do it, so it's not just a hardware thing. Everyone is trying to make people feel less sick in the game. So you'll have games where you're just standing around not doing much. You'll have games where you're in a cockpit, so it helps a little bit. People are trying out different stuff On the hardware side. You've probably seen all the treadmills, the ones where you don't actually move, where you're just sliding feet around. You've probably seen the little pad that you press down with your foot. I forgot what it's called, but there's a little product that you can kind of press with your foot to start over there. There's a bunch of things. We are not certain. A lot of those things help with VR, motion sickness, mainly these treadmills not to hate on them too much, but let's say I mean I've tried them all and you might have tried those. Have you guys tried any of the treadmills?
Speaker 2:I have tried the treadmill and I'm not a huge fan of it. I think aggressive movements with your head covered some people can pull it off real well and some people are going to really struggle. I thought you get used to it. But having the confidence to be able to just run and move your feet in the way you want to, not knowing where you're going technically going nowhere but you don't know that has its own set of problems. So there'll be a lot of people who just can't get used to those variable direction treadmills.
Speaker 3:A lot of people. I had tried a treadmill. They still got motion sickness. For a simple, simple reason it's the feeling of motion. It's not because I'm literally just moving my legs around People who don't have legs they still feel and experience motion.
Speaker 2:Not because of the legs right, it's because of other things that you and I think that's true I mean, if you just covered your head on a regular treadmill A, it would be physically hard to run without seeing how fast you're going where you're going. And if the visuals of what you covered your head with didn't exactly match the bounce and the movement and the motion of your physical body, I think you're just back to square one in a different sense.
Speaker 3:Yes, and it's a good thing you mentioned the normal gym treadmill, because if you guys ever use a treadmill in the gym, when you just run one direction for a while, when you get off the treadmill you have that weird feeling. It's like something is dragging you slightly behind because you weren't actually running outside Running on the treadmill. It's not the same, it does not equal running outside. You're just swooshing around, you're in a mirror, it's just going like this. And when you get off the device it does not feel like you ran, it feels like you. It's not the same, it just doesn't feel the same to people. And not only that, it's that your leg movements. They don't translate to like a leg move in the game unless you have like a specific thing on your foot and that tells that it's moving. You know the friction of your foot hitting the floor, initiating the motion of your body and et cetera. That does not work with these treadmills. You're basically pressing a button just by hitting your feet on the floor.
Speaker 3:You're basically doing this pop, pop, pop with your foot to initiate forward motion. That's what you're doing with your feet and that's, in my opinion, not really a great solution. We never really speak a lot of these treadmills because they are not going to be not really a competition for our product, even though they might look like on the first look they might seem. Because the games that you're going to be playing with your treadmill, even if you like it, it's not the game that you're going to be playing with the C-Infinity. So if you're using the treadmill to play Pavlov, for example, that's your favorite game, or any game similar to it, coriolis on a Sunshine or anything that supports the treadmill, that's going to be a machine for that. But if you're our device, you're going to be playing AAA games and thousands, hundreds,000. I don't know how many the mods now support, but that's the thing.
Speaker 3:The games that you're going to play in Infinity, they cannot physically be played in any of the treadmills. You cannot do it. It's not an X-input device that just plugs in. They might be able to play by. I don't know how you would aim or do any of the things. You need buttons. You need the treadmill. It only translates the motion in the game.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that is definitely true. The treadmill isn't the solution for 99% of things, just the physical size of them and the way they're set up and the environment they themselves need to be in. So that's not the locomotion solution at all.
Speaker 3:We call it movie logic. It's something that you see in a movie and it makes sense. When you see it, it's like oh for sure, there we go, that's the solution, make it and ship it. In reality, it's not really like that. It's not simple. It's actually simple in our case, because our device is very simple in the way it works.
Speaker 2:So for the hardcore VR people out there, how can they test one of your devices? How can they try one out? How can they test one?
Speaker 3:of your devices. How can they try one out? How can they get one? So right now they are available on the indiegogo. Indiegogo has it as an in-demand product, so it's available. You can just go to the indiegogo and, if you want, you can just get your device. Uh, if you want to try it out, there's a vr arcade in houston, so it's not an official product or there. But yeah, we have it there because we like to. We put it there to like test it out. It's called Exitus VR, e-x-i-t-u-s VR Exitus VR. They're in Houston area. We have some devices in Galveston, texas as well. They're mostly in Texas. We have one it's going to be very soon in California. There's going to be some. Some will be shipped to New York. So there's a. There's a movie theater actually placed in New York that's going to be getting the devices. We have one in Amsterdam.
Speaker 3:We are now reaching out to various arcades to try and tell them how good the devices are. First, it makes it easy for them to do their job. It's easy to keep these people safe. They're not going to be running around dropping the headset, dropping the controllers, changing the barriers. They will never be doing that. So, and in the controllers, changing the barriers. You'll never be doing that. And in the space in the arcade where you can fit one person, you can fit four people in the C infinities, right, and they can all safely play and it's very easy for one person to keep them safe because they're not really moving anywhere. So we are now talking to these people.
Speaker 3:The main problem we have right now with the arcades really is not what we thought was not the problem for the home user. That is the problem for the Arcade. We can't really put the devices in and like market it with the IP we do not own. So we don't have any rights to put Cyberpunk in our Arcade and play and run Cyberpunk on Steam there's it's not under the Steam Arcade program or whatever. We are actually developing our own content for the Arcade and it's going to be. Also, it's going to be made, but tailored to the arcade experience and to the uh uh, to the, to our device. So it's going to be like a sporty, like we're.
Speaker 3:We're making three games at the moment. So there's like two shooters and the horror game are in the works and those are going to be, and we're the first thing. We're going to be working on more titles. Well, we got some really talented guys working on it and they're looking really cool. So far, we haven't shared any of that yet out there, but we are working on it and it's a thing that's going to be this year in arcades.
Speaker 3:So we're going to be this year in arcades and that, in our opinion, is going to be the best way for people to try them out. So it's almost like a piece of furniture that you're going to be buying it. You obviously want to experience it, but you need to see it in person before you plan for it. So, in our opinion, the best like a saloon for the furniture. In our case, it's going to be like a VR arcade. So you're just going to launch the website and see, wherever in the world you are, where the closest arcade is, and we're going to try and get them all over the place so that you can be always very close by to people and people can just go out and try them. We're going to hit the largest population so that most people that are going to be likely to be interested in the device are going to have an easy time to get to them.
Speaker 1:And the name of the device, just to be sure, is the C Infinity and C as in the letter C, not a body of water. That's the flagship product that you guys have currently, which is the standing unit.
Speaker 3:yes, yes, the c infinity, the name the c infinity actually that's a funny story as well. So we were at the the world expo in dubai the 2021, 2022 and we were trying to think of a good name for it, because previously the working title was VR Chair, which is just kind of like, you know, generic name. It's not really a good name for a product. I mean it's okay, but we called it the VR Chair. It was just that it's literally VR Chair. The road to VR Chair came out sometime after we decided to call ourselves VR Chair. So then it was really obvious we have to differentiate. We cannot be called VRChair and none of us could think of a good name.
Speaker 3:We all have like stupid ideas out there and this might not be a good idea as well, but I don't know. I haven't. People usually they think it sounds cool, so I don't know how I thought of it. I was looking up various like terms in math and that sort of thing. I'm not really a big math, I don't. I'm not a mathematician or anything, but I am interested.
Speaker 3:You know, I'm always like looking around stuff on the internet, reading Wikipedia and everything. So I find this term C infinity. It actually describes like uh, like, uh, the smoothest, the smoothness of like a curve or like something like that I'm not sure it was, I can't really remember, but it's like a connected to a function of the smoothness or something like that. And I felt like this sounds really cool because the way you move with our device is smooth locomotion. It's not going to be segmented or teleported or anything. It's a smooth locomotion. You can infinitely move in any direction without having to teleport or stop or do anything, without having to have an infinite space around you to move around with your own feet, and our device kind of helps around with that. So I thought C-In thought Infinity sounds pretty cool and everyone else thought so as well, and we landed on that title. That's the name, that's what it is.
Speaker 1:Fun. That's a cool story, yeah, very, very cool. You know, without talking, you don't have to reveal any sort of secrets that are yet to come. I'm really curious, though where are some avenues that you're really excited about, and it could be in the general VR space or even kind of the directions. Again, we don't want to cause you to reveal any secret sauce basically, cause you to reveal any secret sauce basically, but are there sort of like avenues that you're excited about that where these things are going, whether in the VR space, you know any of the sort of research avenues you guys are doing? Anything you want to comment on that side of things?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so, if I understand correctly, you're wondering regarding our product where it's going to, where we think it's going to or just be no.
Speaker 1:no, I'm not looking for you to reveal any secrets or whatnot for your product, If you you know, or to whatever extent you feel comfortable. I'm just kind of curious in terms of, like, you have the C infinity. You've mentioned some avenues going into content. At this point in time, you know, talk through a little bit of kind of like where the most excitement is for you forward.
Speaker 3:So the biggest thing I can say regarding this, regarding the future, again, going forward is esports, so that's not something we really spoke a lot about. There's some media that we're going to be shooting. We're going to be shooting the studio. So we were checking out the studio space here where we're going to be shooting the studio. So we were checking out the studio space here where we're going to be shooting some more content for the YouTube channel and for the TikTok and Instagram. The idea is. So. I don't know if you guys saw the. Have you seen Tenet the movie?
Speaker 3:I have not, I'll admit, I meant to and I never got to it's okay Doesn't matter For the people who've seen it the yacht, they use the ship, the big ship thing that they use in the movie, where the ship has those hydrofoil sails that lift it above the water. So when you are using the yacht it flies. It literally flies above the water almost. It has like a little sail that goes under the water to kind of I'm not sure about the physics of it right, it's a really high-tech, like new thing that exists and the people who make those they literally like created a sport around them. So now that it became a sport, people are more interested in these yachts. Right, because they have this. It's recorded in a really nice way. You have drones, you have like like holograms on the water that when you're a viewer, you have like this epic sci-fi experience of watching these people raise the yachts right, and they fly up above the water moving very fast. It looks amazing. They have the UI and everything. It's amazing and that's a really. We thought that's a really clever and good way to make something more popular by making it a sport a sporting People like sports, people like esports, esports are huge by making it a sporting People like sports, people like esports, esports are huge and VR esports are not huge, for whatever reason. Mostly because in my opinion, it's a bit tricky to produce VR esports Esports first the content, the people who can actually do it and the way the PVR is played.
Speaker 3:Normally it's a hard thing to have as an esports event. You can imagine having people on the stage right and what are they doing? They're like laying on the floor and falling over, shooting each other. It would be madness. You can't have the lights, you can't have the camera. People have it.
Speaker 3:There's a lot there that's missing from having VR esports in a good way and we are trying. We will try to produce content and to make an exciting thing. We'll try to make teams around the world that can practice and then compete against each other. That's what the guys, the yachts they put, the captains all over the world who created the teams, and then they train with these teams and they represent the country and they now all compete in this huge tournament. That's what we want to do. We want to make this tournament happen. We want to find these people, train them up in the games and they'll compete against each other. It can be shot in a beautiful way because the people are going to be in the devices and you can have a light above them and when they die the light goes red, or something Like in Ready Player One, the IO guys are in the huge plate for the play VR. You can do something like that.
Speaker 1:Very cool. I find it fascinating that, uh, you're, you're taking, you know, vr, which we've been talking about, which has a significant nausea problem, like we've been saying, and this yacht, e-sport, which is where we get seasickness from, and so I'm immensely curious if you're able to solve both of these things at the same time. So it's almost like nausea on top of nausea and you're going to, like you know, kill them all in one fell swoop. So it's, it's almost like it's either going to be constructive interference, and everyone's going to get sick after 50 seconds, or destructive interference, and everyone's going to be blowing their minds out, and it it's going to be perfectly fine. So that's very exciting. I like that. You know that kind of combination that you guys are going for right now.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you know what I dream of sometimes. I imagine a huge arena and a hundred of the devices in there, literally stacked like this, and a hundred people in them competing in a what's it called Like PUBG. What's it called? Um uh like pubg.
Speaker 1:What's it?
Speaker 3:called the battle arena, the, the, where they all shoot each other one, then one person is the winner, the. I literally it escapes me the, the type of the game, like pubg, basically. So just imagine them playing pubg or whatever. Your preferred game is Apex or whatever, so something like that but it's literally a hundred of them and they're all fighting each other and we have lights under them so you can see who's live, who's dead or whatever. It can look really good, it can look sick. That's one of the dreams I have a vision.
Speaker 1:I'd like to see it happen. Virtual reality, hunger Games, I think, is what you're going for at this point in time, kind of like that yeah, this is cool stuff, very, very cool stuff. Anything else in terms of what you want to talk about, either about Neurosync or any particulars of the problem or the solution that we didn't get a chance to cover?
Speaker 3:Yes. So let me just think. So basically, the to put to kind of summarize everything the device. It's not going to be for everyone, so I'm just putting out there. We would hate for someone to be going out there on the indiegogo or the r e store shop or whatever, later buying it and then realizing it's not for them.
Speaker 3:Think about the games that you're playing. Think about the games that you want to see. If there are some of those games that you love on flat, flat skin but you'd love to be played in VR, look it up. It might be possible to play it in VR. There's mods for a lot of the popular games. Just try, try to find and see where it works with our device. It's going to be the best way to play these wallet games period, because of the nausea reduction, because of the content, that you're actually the games that you're playing. They're the games you might actually really want to play. They're not like a indie level tech tech demo. They're triple a titles, uh and uh. Of course, if you get very sick from vr, I would suggest strongly to try.
Speaker 1:Try our device in a, in a place where you can try before action and to be fair based on what you have on the website, because I fully appreciate you saying it's not for everyone, but some of the games that I think you have on there are pretty interesting, where it seems like you have a battle mech type game. For people who don't know, battle mechs are giant robots that fight each other. There's a flying game that you showcase there where you're, you know, like in the seat of a cockpit going through, so you know, just to talk your guys's book for a second, you know, in terms of there there are certainly popular avenues of games for which it seems like your unit would be immensely popular and very useful for for providing a tremendous experience.
Speaker 1:So, and again, maybe I maybe I'm under representing the full set of games that you should be considering, but I just wanted to make sure we put that kind of out there in terms of like the the positive avenues to go down yeah, we, we know that vr is a niche.
Speaker 3:Vr is a niche, right, and uh, we're not idiots. We know that this is going to be a micro-niche. It's a niche of a niche. It's a niche of input devices for VR locomotion. That it's not going to be like a huge thing I'd love for it to be but I realize that it's going to be for people who are really enthusiastic about trying out new things in VR. It's going to be about people who really like tech. It's going to be for people who are really enthusiastic about trying out new things in VR. It's going to be about people who really like tech. It's going to be for people who want to experience the games they always wanted to try in VR in a much better way than anything other that's available, like a keyboard or mouse or whatever the normal gamepad. It's going to be for those people. And, yeah, that's basically the device.
Speaker 1:Well, I think what's nice is that the problem you're tackling enables, basically, an expansion of the market of VR, where there's a set of people who won't do VR because it just makes them sick, and what's nice is that you're able to kind of increase that audience by virtue of this augmentation at a physiological level.
Speaker 3:Not going to be for everyone, but for the people that it's going to be for, they're going to love it. Just imagine, uh, normal people who are not gamers but their workplace now has them training in vr, whether it's a thing where it's hard for them to train by having them go out to the like. Let's say it's a hazardous area. Let's say it's like an oil rig model or something you're not going to be. There might be I don't know how they train them up, but there might be sending people there. It's going to be a lot easier for these people to map out the area, to learn it, to learn what their job is, how the place looks like through VR. And imagine if you're not a gamer, you never use teleporting around. It's going to be uncomfortable With our device. With all the tests we've done. We've tested thousands, we've had thousands of people in the device. More than 10,000 people have tried the device.
Speaker 3:All people who struggle using gamepads or whatever. They do really good with C-Infinity A lot better than you'd imagine, because they are like a blank slate. They don't compare it to anything else. They don't compare it to a game peddler. If for them, the the way you tell them it works. They just kind of click with it.
Speaker 3:So my mom, she's not a gamer, she doesn't play phone games, she's completely not a gamer. I had her, uh, while while gta was available, the mod for gta. It's not available anymore for gta 5 because of the take two. They stood look, unfortunately, so he had to take it down the mod. That's a rare occurrence of that happening, really, but it did. That did happen with GTA, uh, actually with Rockstar games. So you can't play Red Dead Redemption either by using the look crosses mod.
Speaker 3:There are other methods. I'm just saying take two, don't, don't, don't sue me, but there are other ways of doing it. Uh, but, but I had my mom play GTA for like almost an hour. She loved it and she wasn't like shooting people out of her, she was just walking around exploring Los Santos. She felt like she was there and that's to me enough. I know she doesn't use a gamepad, she can't use a gamepad, she tries. It's not software, but with our device it's that simple to move around that it's very easy for people who are not gamers as well, and there's going to be more and more of these people in VR due to their work, having them train or do their job in VR. That's all I'm trying to say.
Speaker 1:Rob, do you have any last questions that you want to throw in there?
Speaker 2:No, I think that pretty much covers everything I wanted to know about the device. I look forward to trying one Indeed.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so we will stay in touch. I'll stay in touch. I'll try to get a device close to you so you can try it, or I'll send it to you, or something like that, so you can hear the sound.
Speaker 1:And Emanuele, if you need some folks basically to try and solve some of your controller issues, let us know. You can hire us on we can figure these things out. Regardless, though, I just want to say thank you so much. This was fantastic in terms of taking us through the problem. What are some of the approaches and what you guys are doing that's unique to really expand this out, make it more accessible, make it more engaging, make it a lot more fun? So, nemanja, thank you so much for this.
Speaker 3:If you don't like it, that's totally fine. You have all the other stuff in VR and you don't have to mess around with this. But if you like it, it's just more stuff, more content, more things to do in VR that are innovated, not possible otherwise. Awesome.
Speaker 1:All right. Well, thank you so much and we look forward to maybe talking to you again in the future to find out, you know, all the other new incredible things that you guys are doing.
Speaker 3:Thank you. Thank you. I'd love to come back again and tell you all about it, for sure.
Speaker 1:Awesome, all right.