iMovify
Motion, The Final Frontier. Over the years, gaming computers have brought us higher framerates, higher resolution, 3D vision, seven point sound, and even force feedback controllers. All of these are designed to engage the senses and make gaming more immersive and entertaining. Sight and sound have been the primary ways for computers to interact with us. Until now!
Introducing iMovify. A personal motion platform for around $1000 (see discussion below). With iMovify, your computer can finally rock your world, roll it, and generally toss you around. It is the ultimate feedback system. iMovify engages your inner ear and invites your vestibular system to the party. It uses your sense of balance to give you information about your position in your virtual environment that no other sense can give. And when motion is introduced, all other senses are forced to take a back seat. Just try and focus on the trees on the side of the road when your car hits a bump and you experience even a millisecond of "air."
So how does this fit into your life? If you are a gamer, you’re going to want one. Imagine a tank game. As your tank rolls over the terrain, you’ll feel the terrain. Fire the gun, feel the recoil. Take a hit and feel the shock.
Do you like flight simulators? With iMovify, you’ll feel the climbs, dives, and banks. Hit some turbulence and you’ll feel it in the seat of your pants. Professional flight simulators have always had motion, now you can have motion in your home system.
What about your favorite Online game? Does it have a dragon? Feel the flight! Only have ground troops? That boring hike now becomes exciting as the movements of your character across the landscape are translated to motions on your chair.
What? You say games aren’t everything?
How about
Movies? One set, called “ridefilms” have had successful runs as
amusement park attractions. Putting
motion to regular Hollywood films has had a far more checked past, mainly
since the people doing the motions figured that the chairs had to be moving
all the time. After all, that’s what people were paying for. When you have an iMovify
platform, if the movie needs motion, you get motion.
If it doesn’t, you don’t have to be thrown around just for the sake of
motion. And we’ll build the software tools to allow you and your friends to
program up your own sets of motions, so you can experience the same movie in
different ways.
iMovify can enhance other types of entertainment as well. Imagine your favorite GoPro Stupid Human Trick video, but now with motion! Ride along with your favorite daredevils as they try not to get themselves killed.
Why motion and why now?
You’ve probably seen motion platform systems before at amusement parks and arcades. Ford Motor Company has a wonderful motion platform to fully abuse cars that are under development, but it's the size of a small house, and probably cost as much as one. * While it could probably do some seriously cool games, basically, you will never get to try it.
There have been some home systems, but they were either too expensive or woefully underpowered. Throwing humans around properly requires a certain amount of oomph. (Sorry about the technical term.) Since these older machines didn’t match the marketplace very well, they were never adopted in serious enough numbers to get anybody coding games for them. So then nobody wanted them. And they stayed expensive. That cycle has remained unbroken for decades.
We should know, we’ve been at this for a long time
and tried this beforel. If you
were around in exactly the right place at exactly the right time, about 18
years ago, you might have seen the earlier incarnations of what is now
iMovify. It looked like it belonged in an arcade, basically because it was
designed to be in an arcade. And it was in some arcades. Ever play a game of
Lunar Defense™ in an arcade? That was us.
Let’s just say that my phone can run rings around
what we used as a computer in those days. And I no longer have to use
Windows 98. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that…) The thing is, with
big hardware devices like a motion platform, advances in computers don’t
impact the price as much as you might think. Or Hope. The old system ran at
9600 baud, happily, and iMovify only needs a few times as much data today.
For iMovify, the breakthrough was from the Brad’s Big
Brain™. He not only found a way to dramatically drop the price of the
cylinders used to create the motion, but he also invented a new type of
sensor that allows us to accurately know the sensor’s position without
having to attach a fragile and bulky potentiometer. The sensor, known as
QVLA, costs about a tenth as much per cylinder as the older system and is
far more robust. It’s really cool too, in that it uses light inside the
cylinder’s volume to calculate position. This
work has led to 14 issued patents directly related to cylinders and QVLA
technology.
With this new, lower cost technology, iMovify can be built at an affordable price. Now this isn’t just a rocking chair with a couple of motors, it is a high precision pneumatic system. Using air for the actuators allows for great reaction times to changes in position, giving realism to the motions. The system is powered by the latest generation “whisper quiet” compressors that are at or below 60 dB. This allows you to carry on a normal conversation while the thing is running, another breakthrough necessary for the stars to align for us.
What all this means to you is that instead of having
to pay $20,000 to have an arcade class motion platform hooked up to your
computer, we expect to be able sell iMovify for just under $1,000 once we
get into volume production. Before then, it might be $1,200 to $1,500. Still
quite affordable and well within reach of most small gaming studios as well
as anyone looking for an amazingly immersive experience.
And that’s the other breakthrough that makes the timing right. We will write the SDKs and plug-ins for game engines such as Unity3D to allow developers to easily incorporate motion into their games (and we do mean EASY). Unity3D alone has over ten million registered developers! If we give them an easy route to motion, think about how many motion games will be produced!
Our MotionMixer™ technology will let everyone develop their own
motion datasets for movies and videos. We are just
beginning to imagine how iMovify users will socialize this technology.
*The monster thing at Ford looks like a 6 degree of
freedom platform on each wheel with the vehicle 20 feet in the air.