Hardlight Suit – Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation

January 17, 2019

The Entire Hardlight VR project is now Open Source

It’s always a sad day when a successful Kickstarter project has to close due to a lack of continued interest. That’s what befell the Hardlight VR team back in September, with the founders issuing a statement notifying backers that the company was closing due to lack of funds. Recently the team updated their Kickstarter page to reveal that the entire Hardlight VR project would be made open source.

Nullspace VR - Hardlight Suit

What does that mean for customers, not a lot really, the company is still shuttered. But for those inventive souls out there who like to tinker with technology in their garages or tool sheds, it means you’ve got all the details to make a Hardlight Suit of your own.

On the update the team notes:

“We have made the entire Hardlight project available under the permissive MIT license. This includes:

Our SDK and Windows service
Our plugins for Unity, Unreal, and C/C++
The Hardlight Engine, used for translating game engine data to haptic events
Standalone applications like the Haptic Explorer (used for haptic sequence design) and the Hardlight Diagnostics tool (used for debugging haptic peripherals)
Several demo Unity projects, including our motion tracking prototype.
All plastics, cables, electronics and firmware used in the Hardlight suit.
Accessories like the Wireless Module and Backpack PC Attachment”

Nullspace VR - Hardlight Suit_1

All you need to do is head on over to the HardlightVR GitHub page and download all the required files.

Hardlight VR began its funding campaign in early 2017 which saw the company raise $147,574 USD, easily achieving its $80,000 goal. During the campaign, the Hardlight Suit was available for $499 USD as an early bird offer then $549 USD after that. Once the Kickstarter had ended the regular price for the Hardlight Suit became $630 for consumers and $1,100 for commercial users. That price then dropped in January 2018, with the Hardlight Suit retailing for $299.00. After that everything looked to be going well, entering into partnerships with the likes of Vertigo Games and Source Team to support both Arizona Sunshine and Half-Life 2 VR respectively.

As we now know that wasn’t meant to be, so if you’re looking for full body VR haptics at home you’re going to need to make it yourself, our there’s always HoloSuit. For further full-body haptic news, keep reading VRFocus.

September 21, 2018

Hardlight VR to Close as Funds Run Out

The virtual reality (VR) industry has seen both economic success for some companies while others have failed due to lack of uptake. Hardlight VR has announced this week that it has fallen into the latter category, confirming it’ll be closing its doors this month because it has run out of cash.

Nullspace VR - Hardlight Suit

Having completed a successful Kickstarter funding campaign in early 2017 which saw the company raise $147,574 USD, easily achieving its $80,000 goal, everything looked to be going well entering into partnerships with the likes of Vertigo Games and Source Team to support both Arizona Sunshine and Half-Life 2 VR respectively.

And this isn’t one of those tales where Kickstarter backers have been entirely left out of pocket and empty-handed either, with Hardlight VR’s Hardlight Suit shipping to most customers only last month – the Kickstarter page states 95 percent of suits had been shipped.

Yet the issue does just seem to be lack of adoption and the inability to raise further funding to keep things going. A statement on its Kickstarter page reads: “I have some sad news to share with the Hardlight community today: Hardlight VR will be closing down this month. We have been unable to raise additional operating funds, and so, after two years of operation, we have no options left to us but straightforward closure – we are simply out of money.”

Nullspace VR - Hardlight Suit_1

Hardlight VR then goes into further detail on how the final costs of manufacturing stacked up, showcasing that Hardlight took over 138% of the actual funding total.

$8,697 mandatory first-article manufacturing prototype
$43,250 plastic injection molds
$50,643 electronic parts and assembly
$87,945 textiles, plastics and final assembly
$22,183 shipping (still counting)
Total cost: $212,718

So with official support now gone Hardlight Suit owners will no longer see additional videogame support. That doesn’t mean developers can’t still work with the device as the Hardlight software development kit (SDK) has been made publicly available via GitHub.

The consumer VR industry is still growing yet it seems not enough to support expensive haptic add-ons just yet. As further advances are made in the field of haptics VRFocus will keep you updated.

March 22, 2018

Hardlight VR Annouces Partnership With Vertigo Games and Source Team

Hardlight VR have announced a new partnership that will see their virtual reality (VR) Hardlight Suit bringing the sensation of touch and impact to even more titles. Vertigo Games’ Arizona Sunshine and Source Team’s VR port of Valve’s Half-Life 2 are among immersive VR titles that will support the solution.

Nullspace VR - Hardlight Suit_1

Announced back at the start of 2017, the Hardlight Suit offers a new way to experience VR titles with a complete set of haptic feedback senors at work within the suit creating the sensation of touch and impact. After a successful Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign the Hardlight Suit has become closer to release with a permanent price reduction to $299.99 (USD) at the start of this year. Now, with the news of the company partnering with Source Team and Vertigo Games on support for Arizona Sunshine and Half-Life 2 VR the Hardlight Suit has new opportunists to create excitement.

Hardlight VR co-founder Morgan Sinko commented on the announcement by saying: “We’ve always aimed to partner with the best games in the industry, the titles we’re announcing now represent some of the most fun, high-quality work being done in VR and we couldn’t be more excited to be working with them. These are titles our community has been clamoring for since our inception and we’re thrilled to finally be able to say we’re bringing cutting edge haptics to these excellent games.”

Arizona Sunshine LBVR (horizontal)

In addition to partnering with the above titles, Hardlight have also been the exclusive haptics provider for an innovative Game Developer Conference experience in collaboration with VR tracking pioneers Optitrack and Vertigo Games. This is a brand new, fully tracked, four-player co-operative version of the popular Arizona Sunshine that will see players blasting away at hordes of zombies all while the Hardlight Suits provide immersive, location-based haptics to maximize the impact and experience. You can always read VRFocus’ Editor Kevin Joyce’s review of the PlayStation 4 version of Arizona Sunshine here.

VRFocus will be sure to bring you all the latest on Hardlight VR in the future so make sure to stay tuned for more.

January 5, 2018

Hardlight Suit Gets Permanent Base Price Reduction to $299.99

In early 2017 virtual reality (VR) startup Nullspace VR launched a Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign for an upper body haptic device called the Hardlight Suit. The campaign proved to be successful and with the first suits beginning to rollout to backers the company has announced a major price reduction.

Nullspace VR - Hardlight Suit

During the campaign the Hardlight Suit was available for $499 USD as an early bird offer then $549 USD after that. Once the Kickstarter had ended the regular price for the Hardlight Suit became $630 for consumers and and $1,100 for commercial users. Not exactly cheap when you consider the expense of VR in the first place, so now the company has reduced that cost of both versions.

So the standard Hardlight Suit will be retail for $299.00 while the Hardlight Suit: Enterprise Edition will cost exactly the same just with an additional license fee for commercial entities of $9.99 per month (or $99.99 for one year).

Explaining the reason for the price change, CEO Lucian Copeland said in a statement: “Making the suit more approachable from a price standpoint has always been a long-term goal of ours. We were able to reach the production milestones that made this possible earlier than expected, and we’re enthusiastic about the opportunity to introduce haptics to a much wider audience with this new pricing.”

Nullspace VR - Hardlight Suit_1

“One of our paramount goals is to keep the Hardlight Suit strong well into the future,” adds Hardlight’s Founder Morgan Sinko. “As eager as we are to get the suits out to people, we know all this effort would be wasted if we couldn’t deliver what we intended: a robust, superior quality haptic suit with a long lifespan. That’s why we’re putting so much effort into making the Hardlight Suit as accessible and robust a platform as possible, and a lower price point will help those efforts immensely.”

Initially conceived by students and members of the University of Rochester’s Robotics Club, the Hardlight Suit features 16 haptic feedback zones aimed at targeting every muscle group across a players chest, abdomen, shoulders, or arms, whilst using inertial trackers to track the limbs relative to the users headset.

As more products come to market that make VR even more immersive, VRFocus will keep you updated.

April 12, 2017

Hardlight VR Haptic Suit Shows off Integration into Sairento VR

The team behind the successfully Kickstarted virtual reality (VR) haptic suit, the Hardlight VR, have been showing what the equipment can do when properly integrated into a VR experience.

Steam Early Access videogame Sairento VR has integrated Hardlight VR capability into the fast-paced ninja combat and has managed to impress the Nullspace team who created the Hardlight suit so much that they have put together a special video to display how well the integration works.

Sairento VR was developed by indie studio Mixed Realms. In Sairento, the player steps into the role of one of the Silent Ones, a futuristic group of cyborg ninjas. Some sort of mysterious nano-virus causes the protagonists fellow Silent Ones to go berserk, forcing the player to have to cut them all down in a suitably impressive way, utilising swords, guns and Matrix-style Bullet Time to cut down enemies, discover the secret behind the nano virus and save the world.

“Nullspace VR provides an easy to use, out of the box API that allowed us to get started in no time,” said Mixed Realms’ Founder and CEO Aldric Chang. “We were thrilled to be able to add another layer of tactile immersion quickly and painlessly with the Hardlight Suit. Our fans are now able to enjoy Sairento VR even more with the haptic effects powered by the Hardlight Suit.”

The Hardlight suit enables interesting haptic effects such as a rapid heartbeat effect that happens when the game enters the Bullet Time-esque ‘Focus Mode’ as well as allowing the player to feel the blows struck upon the player character and the recoil from firing a gun.

Sairento VR is available on Steam Early Access for £18.99 (GBP) and supports HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. More information on the Hardlight VR haptic suit, and the chance to pre-order one, is available on the Hardlight VR official website.

You can watch the Sairento with Hardlight video below.

VRFocus will bring you further information on Hardlight VR when it becomes available.

April 3, 2017

Center Stage Kickstarter Creating AR Arcade Lounge

An ambitious project to create an augmented reality (AR) sports bar is looking for funding on Kickstarter. The project plans to create a hybrid lounge/arcade where visitors can interact with AR holograms to be truly inside the game.

The facility is to be called ‘Center Stage’. The project is looking for $50,000 USD in funding to perfect the technology that will be used in the facilities. The creators of Center Stage are working with Nullspace VR, who had their own successful Kickstarter for the Hardlight VR haptic suit, as well as Vuzix, creators of the M300 AR Smart Glasses, who have been covered extensively on VRFocus.

The creators behind the project hope to eventually be able to generate an AR environment where up to six players can play together. Each person to visit the Center Stage will be able to set up their own profile which can be customised to their own personal preferences. Center Stage will also have a sports bar area, where players can take a break, have a drink and watch sports, of the traditional or eSports variety. There are also plans for tournaments to be held.

Funding tiers range from $5 which gets the backer a personal thank you email and access to exclusive Kickstarter updates, right through to $8,500 which allows an entire organisation to have a private party at the Center Stage facility with free food and drinks.

The location of the first Center Stage facility has not yet been confirmed. The organisers say that the more backers they get from a particular area, the more likely it is that the facility will be opened in that area. The organisers hope to eventually have Center Stage bars in every major city in the world.

Further information is available on the official Kickstarter page.

VRFocus will keep you updated on Center Stage and other VR/AR Kickstarter projects.

March 8, 2017

Hardlight Haptic VR Suit Meets It’s Kickstarter Goal

The Hardlight VR haptic suit launched its Kickstarter campaign in February, and has already exceeded its funding goal by a significant amount. 294 backers have already pledged over $126,000 USD to the project.

Developer Nullspace VR were aiming for a goal of $80,000. Within 24 hours the campaign already had over half that amount, so it comes as no surprise that the project met its goal with 15 days still to go.

Nullspace VR - Hardlight Suit_1

The suit itself it designed to be comfortable and adjustable to most body types. It features 16 haptic feedback nodes and sensors to enable the user to feel every experience when playing a virtual reality (VR) game. Nullspace VR has said there are 10 videogame titles already designed to be compatible with the Hardlight, with more in development.

With 15 days still to go on the campaign, Nullspace VR are turning their attention to stretch goals. Two of the stretch goals have already been unlocked; a free VR game called The Art of Fight, and another that adds the option to get a wireless version of the suit.

The Early Bird rewards tiers are all gone, but several other reward tiers are still available, ranging from $20 for a Hardlight VR game bundle (without the suit) through to $5,999, that will net the backer not only 2 Hardlight suits, but also an all-expenses-paid trip to Seattle for two to hang out with the Nullspace VR team.

Nullspace VR are planning on bringing the Hardlight suit to PAX East on March 10th-12th 2017 for attendees to try out for themselves. They also plan on livestreaming their demonstrations for those who cannot make it in person.

They have also announced that another game is being added to the list of videogames with Hardlight support, zombie survival shooter VRZ Torment.

VRFocus will keep you updated on Hardlight and the latest Nullspace VR projects.

February 23, 2017

Hardlight VR Suit Kickstarter Launched, Already Over 50% Funded

For those that love virtual reality (VR) true immersion isn’t just about what you can see and hear, it’s about feedback, feeling the world the world around you. And for that you’ll need haptics, or more importantly a haptic suit. Last month Nullspace VR announced it would be launching a Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign for its Hardlight VR Suit, featuring haptics sensors and vibration nodes. The campaign has now gone live and already proving to be popular.

Looking to raise $80,000 USD over the next month, the first 24 hours saw the campaign raise just over $56,000. Featuring 16 haptic feedback zones aimed at targeting every muscle group across a players chest, abdomen, shoulders, or arms, the suit uses inertial trackers to track the limbs relative to the users headset.

Nullspace VR - Hardlight Suit_1

Backing tiers start from $5 to help the campaign but if you want to secure a suit you’ll need to pledge $499 for the early bird offer. Once that’s run out the price jumps to $549, still saving money on the regular price of $620. For an additional $20 backers can also add a videogame bundle that includes Steam downloads of The Art of Fight and The Nest.

Initially conceived by students and members of the University of Rochester’s Robotics Club, Morgan Sinko (CEO), Lucian Copeland (COO) and Jordan Brooks (CTO), the Hardlight VR Suit has gone through several years of researching, testing and prototyping before getting to this stage.

VRFocus will continue its coverage of Nullspace VR, reporting back with the latest updates.

February 18, 2017

NullSpace VR’s New ‘Hardlight’ Haptic Suit is Heading to Kickstarter

NullSpace VR are poised to launch a new haptic vest focused toward immersive, virtual reality gaming, via Kickstarter soon. The Hardlight suit integrates 16 haptic pads that allow you to feel directional impact linked to actions inside the VR experience.

We’re all for amping up immersion on Road to VR, via whatever means necessary frankly. But our experiences in the world of wearable haptics as a mean to do so has not been exactly stellar so far. Nevertheless, the appeal of having directional, accurate force feedback which allows your chosen VR experience to punish you for your failures, or indeed merely give you a prod into action, is clear.

NullSpace VR, are poised to unleash their solution to this gap in the VR haptics market and they’re calling it the Hardlight Suit. This upper-body vest contains 16 haptic pads for delivering feedback to your chest, back, arms and shoulders. These pads can be triggered by any software integrated with NullSpace VR’s APIs and indeed, the company (who’ve made substantial progress since we first covered them) have persuaded a number of VR developers, including recent Indie favourite Sairento VR, to add Hardlight Suit support.

The team recently took their latest prototype to the World’s Fair ‘Nano’ event to show off their progress, filming attendee reaction for posterity.

The key concern for us is still the accuracy at which the suit can detect your orientation in relation to the virtual world. The Hardlight Suit contains inertial sensors, which detect rotational movement, but these sorts of sensors are not absolute and therefore can suffer from drift and positional inaccuracies. That said, since we first covered the suit, we now have room-scale capable positional tracking for both headsets and motion controllers, which adds more data to guess the user’s body orientation, but there are still gaps in that data which will need to be filled in order to be truly immersive.

The vest has been cannily designed, with a simple, open design and adjustable straps which should allow the system to be worn by people of varying shapes and sizes.

The team are adding the finishing touched to their Kickstarter campaign as I write this and we’ll pass on more details on that once they go live. In the mean time, if you’ve gone hands on with the Hardlight Suit in the past, why not share your experiences in the comments section below.

The post NullSpace VR’s New ‘Hardlight’ Haptic Suit is Heading to Kickstarter appeared first on Road to VR.

January 25, 2017

Nullspace VR Launching Kickstarter Campaign for Haptic Feedback Suit Hardlight

Really good virtual reality (VR) can be a highly engaging experience, with users getting sucked into the virtual world they can see and hear. But there are still obstacles to overcome before VR becomes truly immersive, one of which is feeling the digital world around that users are in. To achieve this companies are working on haptic feed-back devices, one of which is Nullspace VR, a company that’s recently announced an upcoming Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign for its Hardlight Suit.

The Hardlight Suit was initially conceived by students and members of the University of Rochester’s Robotics Club, Morgan Sinko (CEO), Lucian Copeland (COO) and Jordan Brooks (CTO), who then went on to form Nullspace VR, securing a Y Combinator Fellowship whilst moving to Seattle.

Nullspace VR - Hardlight Suit

The team has spent several years researching, testing and prototyping the Hardlight Suit. The design features 16 individually controlled haptic feedback zones, allowing users to feel a wide range of interaction with virtual environments. Whether its the sharp impact of a sword, an earthquake, a punch, or the light patter of rainfall, the suit aims to make the virtual seem a lot more real.

“Presence in VR is a huge concern, obviously, so we not only wanted to introduce haptics—the sense of touch feedback—to add to the immersion, but we’ve also added tracking to the suit, so a player can actually see an avatar in-game, rather than a set of floating hands,” said Sinko in a statement. “The whole point of VR in gaming is to make the experience more immersive and interactive, and Hardlight does exactly that.”

“Over the years and iterations, we’ve been working really closely with a lot of VR game developers. We wanted to make sure that the suit was up to industry standards and that it wouldn’t be a headache for developers to incorporate into their games,” said Brooks. “Plus, those relationships and feedback have allowed us to promise full Hardlight compatibility with ten to fifteen VR titles at launch, with more constantly being added. After all, what good is a peripheral if you can’t do anything with it? To that end, we’re collaborating with as many of the most exciting and innovative VR developers as we can and have a huge slate of really great Hardlight-ready games to announce during the launch.”

Nullspace VR will be launching a Kickstarter campaign starting on 23rd February 2017, with the aim to fund the first production run of Hardlight Suits for consumers.

“We considered a lot of options, but ultimately Kickstarter was what we kept coming back to,” said Copeland. “The design, manufacturing, and logistics are all in place, so we really wanted to prioritize a medium that would allow us to interact directly with the community. Being able to hear directly from fans and users is so crucial to what we do that we couldn’t think of a better way to introduce Hardlight to the world.”

For further details on Nullspace VR and its Hardlight Suit, keep reading VRFocus.