Alternatives, to Razer Hydra

[Toni Da Luz]

Hi!

Since the production stopped, it's veryhard to find a Razer Hydra at reasonable price (about 350$ here in Canada).

I hope Sixsense has a new product on its way, but since then do you know other product that can (kind of) replace the Hydra?

I want to try the last VR Geeks prototypes! :D

Toni

[Jan Ciger]

On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 1:54 AM, Toni Da Luz <t.d...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi!

Since the production stopped, it's veryhard to find a Razer Hydra at reasonable price (about 350$ here in Canada).

They have stopped the production of the Hydra? Now that is news ... I see it still listed at the RazerStore under Products, but there doesn't seem to be any "buy" button nor price anywhere, indeed.
 

I hope Sixsense has a new product on its way, but since then do you know other product that can (kind of) replace the Hydra?
 

I want to try the last VR Geeks prototypes! :D

Well, there is always the Gametrak, but that one may be even harder to find that the Hydra. However, you shouldn't pay more than about 20 bucks for one. The problem with it is that it is less accurate than the Hydra and doesn't give you orientation nor buttons, so you must use something like a Wiimote in your hand and track its position using the Gametrak cables.

Other common solution was to combine e.g. Kinect for hand/head position tracking and Wiimote for hand orientation. The Wiimotes combined with the Motion+ gyros (either external or the newer ones have it built-in) are surprisingly good, but you have to do your own sensor fusion using e.g. a Kalman filter (not hard) and correct the yaw drift using the sensor bar when it is visible to the Wiimote, as it doesn't have a magnetic sensor.

Alternatively there are some hacks for the PS Move controllers around. I have made this: http://thp.io/2010/psmove/ work in Linux, but be prepared for some minor hacking in Linux and major headaches in Windows (mainly due to the non-standard connection/Bluetooth pairing). However, I suspect that the orientation tracking code (sensor fusion) in this library is not completely OK, I have found some bugs in there (especially if compiling in 64bit mode) and the IMU kind-of tracks, but it drifts a lot. The code uses the GPL-ed Madgwick's sensor fusion code and there are likely some "impedance mismatches" between the data from the Move and that code.

Regards,

J.

[Laurent BOIREAU]

The hydra successor by Sixense is the STEM system http://sixense.com/hardware/wireless. It is kind of a wireless hydra, with the ability to deal with more trackers at a time (up to 5 if I remember well). They launched it ion Kickstarter last summer, and should deliver next summer ...

   Laurent

2014/1/14 Jan Ciger <jan....@gmail.com>

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[Jan Ciger]

On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 11:43 AM, Laurent BOIREAU <laurent...@gmail.com> wrote:

The hydra successor by Sixense is the STEM system http://sixense.com/hardware/wireless. It is kind of a wireless hydra, with the ability to deal with more trackers at a time (up to 5 if I remember well). They launched it ion Kickstarter last summer, and should deliver next summer ...

Well, the point Toni made is that STEM isn't available yet and Hydra doesn't seem to be available any more. So what can we use in the meantime?

J.

[Toni Da Luz]

Thanks Jan,

As I understand it's hard to find a good alternative solution for the moment. And as a UX Designer with just enough skill to prototype I don't think I'll be able to do better than you for the PS Move or the Wiimote ;)

Also, it seems that the product is still available on Sixsense store: http://www.sixensestore.com/razerhydra.aspx

J.

--

[Laurent BOIREAU]

How about Ebay and similar sources ?

      Laurent

2014/1/14 Toni Da Luz <t.d...@gmail.com>

[Jan Ciger]

On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 4:55 PM, Toni Da Luz <t.d...@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks Jan,

As I understand it's hard to find a good alternative solution for the moment. And as a UX Designer with just enough skill to prototype I don't think I'll be able to do better than you for the PS Move or the Wiimote ;)

<rant>
Well, that's the way it is with VR :( Lot of the stuff (like tracking) is really hard technically. Even very expensive "pro" solutions often don't work out of the box and a lot of hacking/"bricolage" needs to be done. Then VR is a domain of engineers and we get crappy demos and applications that are barely usable because people like you have little chance to actually use the tools. Heck, frequently even engineers cannot make them work ...

I don't have a good solution for this, unfortunately - most of the "point and click", "no programming required" stuff that is frequently advertised as a solution for the non-engineering people are just crappy (and often expensive) toys. Moreover, they do little to make people actually understand what is going on and why things don't work as expected when stuff breaks.

Your best bet is likely to join forces with a technical guy (or girl!) who can handle the engineering stuff for you. I am sure they will be happy to have someone make their stuff look and work decent too.
</rant>
 

Also, it seems that the product is still available on Sixsense store: http://www.sixensestore.com/razerhydra.aspx

Ah, good. The "Limit one per customer." line is not encouraging, though!

J.

[Arya]

Quite true Jan,

The first thing that I learned the hard way in VR is the following:

1. Things break, especially when you are demo'ing.

2. The 'work to make it work' is enormous.

Best,

Arya. 

Sincerely,

Aryabrata Basu
PhD Student,
Virtual Experiences Lab
Department of Computer Science,
University of Georgia
Athens, GA 30602, USA.

Email: abasu[AT]cs[dot]uga[dot]edu
Web:   www.cs.uga.edu/~abasu

[Jan Ciger]

On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 5:00 PM, Laurent BOIREAU <laurent...@gmail.com> wrote:

How about Ebay and similar sources ?

Likely going to be for ridiculous prices - e.g. Amazon.com lists one for $500+ already.

J.

[Jan Ciger]

On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 6:45 PM, Arya <basu.ar...@gmail.com> wrote:

Quite true Jan,

The first thing that I learned the hard way in VR is the following:

1. Things break, especially when you are demo'ing.

2. The 'work to make it work' is enormous.

That is something to have printed and framed on a wall at the office.

On another note - I think there are quite a few engineers on the list who would love to participate in small projects/demos/art installations etc. and could contribute their tech expertise during their free time, just are put off by the lack of designers to help with the content or design of the demo, etc. And in reverse, I think we have quite a few "soft skill" people on the list too - designers, UX people, artists interested in VR, but without skills to "make it work".

Why not advertise the projects/ideas on the list, perhaps someone would bite? It could be a really nice way of bringing people to work together and perhaps build something nice.

Of course, it needs to be reasonable - I doubt anyone would want to do months of free work for something that is going to be a commercial product in the end, also many of us have various non-compete/intellectual property protection clauses in our work contracts, so that would be the responsibility of everyone to make it work.

E.g. I have plenty of technical, engineering expertise building software (not just VR), even smaller hardware gadgets, if needed. However, I do suck at 3D design and I am not extremely good at inventing new crazy ideas for VR experiences. I would be happy to help out with something like an art project or some sort of installation, for example.

Regards,

Jan

[Ryan Pavlik]

This is really disappointing news - I was really getting into enjoying the Razer Hydra in its modified and unmodified states. (An undergrad EE in our lab even figured out an easier mod that literally just moves the ground wire and adds one surface-mount resistor...)  And despite Sebastian's plea on Twitter, I haven't heard from Sixense about a STEM :(

Ryan

[Jan Ciger]

On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 7:06 PM, Ryan Pavlik <ryan....@gmail.com> wrote:

This is really disappointing news - I was really getting into enjoying the Razer Hydra in its modified and unmodified states. (An undergrad EE in our lab even figured out an easier mod that literally just moves the ground wire and adds one surface-mount resistor...)

Care to share this one? :)
 

 And despite Sebastian's plea on Twitter, I haven't heard from Sixense about a STEM :(

I guess they are going to be very tight lipped about it until the release day to avoid boxing themselves into a corner with a fixed release date should some late engineering or production issue arise. Oculus (and basically everyone else) is doing the same.

J.

[Toni Da Luz]

<rant>
Well, that's the way it is with VR :( Lot of the stuff (like tracking) is really hard technically. Even very expensive "pro" solutions often don't work out of the box and a lot of hacking/"bricolage" needs to be done. Then VR is a domain of engineers and we get crappy demos and applications that are barely usable because people like you have little chance to actually use the tools. Heck, frequently even engineers cannot make them work ...

Yes, I know that, before moving for Video Games & App design, I was working for a "VR Company" in France. Even "high-end" products are such a pain and never that easy to use. I remember spending so much time on Optitrack Calibration tool :)

 

I don't have a good solution for this, unfortunately - most of the "point and click", "no programming required" stuff that is frequently advertised as a solution for the non-engineering people are just crappy (and often expensive) toys. Moreover, they do little to make people actually understand what is going on and why things don't work as expected when stuff breaks.

Your best bet is likely to join forces with a technical guy (or girl!) who can handle the engineering stuff for you. I am sure they will be happy to have someone make their stuff look and work decent too.
</rant>

For the moment I don't have any VR project on its way, but I surely don't work alone and try to work with "technical guys" when I will want to start one.   

[Jan Ciger]

On Wed, Jan 15, 2014 at 4:47 AM, Toni Da Luz <t.d...@gmail.com> wrote:

Yes, I know that, before moving for Video Games & App design, I was working for a "VR Company" in France. Even "high-end" products are such a pain and never that easy to use. I remember spending so much time on Optitrack Calibration tool :)

A colleague of mine was trying to get a pair of datagloves working with the wireless backpack of a magnetic tracker from one well known company few years ago. According to the doc, it was meant to work together, the connectors were the right ones and everything - you plug the gloves in the backpack and it would send the data along with the magnetic sensor data. Except it didn't work. Like not at all. No data being received by the SDK from the gloves.

After a long and frustrating time trying to figure out what is going on with the thing, he called the reseller and following a lot of stonewalling he was finally told that he was the first one to ever try that out and that they haven't actually implemented the functionality in the software because they thought nobody would ever need it! However, the company was happy to sell him both the tracking system and gloves as for sure working together ...  Finally an undergraduate student spent some with him reverse engineering the thing and they have implemented a custom driver for the system, completely bypassing the crappy vendor SDK. So much for "pro" products ...

Jan