Last week haptic vest company Woojer launched a Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign for its first product, the Woojer ryg. The campaign has already proved to be a massive success, flying past its goal within three hours of launch.
Woojer demoed the haptic vest during the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) 2018 in June, where VRFocus demoed the device and spoke with Woojer CTO Mor Efrati about what the product could do.
The ryg vest has eight haptic zones to help users really feel part of the experience that they are playing or watching, compatible with PC, console and virtual reality (VR) headsets like PlayStation VR, Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. It can provide up to 8 hours of playtime, plus the ability to triple that with additional battery packs, for its patented Osci – Oscillating Frame Actuators which deliver polyphonic vibrations that reproduce and play frequencies up to 500Hz, including subsonic frequencies that are below the threshold of the human ear (1-20Hz).
The Kickstarter aimed to raise $50,000 USD, and at the time of writing has achieved just over $161,000. The Super Early Bird tier at $499 has already sold out – there were only 100 available – but for those still interested there’s the Early Bird tier at $549 still available. Once that tier has sold out then there’s the $599 tier available – which is still a saving as the regular price will be $799.
“We’re really stoked about the launch of ryg on Kickstarter,” said Woojer CEO, Kfir Bar-Levav, in a statement: “We’re getting phenomenal feedback from the top creators that already have our Dev-Kits and we hope that together with the Kickstarter community, ryg will become the go-to haptics for the entertainment industry”.
To encourage more developers to the platform Woojer has a couple of developer focused tiers available. While these are more expensive, starting at $699, they do include the PC Mounting Rig and full access to ryg’s SDK (available for Unreal Engine & Unity), Documentation, Developer Forum, and Support.
Haptics can be a great way to immerse yourself in a virtual world but the industry is still fairly small at them moment. This was proved last month with the closure of Hardlight VR, another haptic vest company which had a successful Kickstarter campaign back in 2017.
As the haptic industry grows, VRFocus will keep you updated on the latest announcements.
via Mint VR