Super excited about this finally being revealed - my small startup Voysys makes the OdenVR Render Engine that powers this product :)
I think there are so many telepresence and remote-operation use cases for VR. It's not yet widely known how powerful it is to experience real time VR when you also can control something remotely.
I just spent a half hour looking through your sites and vidoes... absolutely amazing.
Can you tell us more about how the networking works? Whats the lowest viable bitrate you can remotely operate something like this at? Not like a work-site heavy machine, but say even just your telepresense robot?
On the robot we're using RTP and usually stream the individual cameras separately at about 4Mb each (1440x1080). That is a bitrate where we see little improvement in image quality from going higher. We can go lower, 1-2Mb/stream, but probably if you want to save bandwidth you'll want to process the video into equirect or cubemap or something locally and then stream that at 4K at whatever bandwith your network can handle.
Operating the robot over 4G should work, but I haven't tested it yet :)
The article mentions safety regulations and having worked around [not in] cranes in a previous life that was also my first thought. So I am curious about how the system handles safety for people other than the operator.
The VR system actually gives a wider field of view than what a person in a cabin can see, so the situational awareness is improved. But it's also an ideal first application - forestry cranes usually operate where there are no people around to begin with.
To everyone saying you won't need the crane operator on site and they can work from their home, latency and bandwidth are going to make that much harder. Really you have to be able send multiple HD stream of video from different remote locations. You can't just send the view the operator is looking at because the round trip time is probably going into be at least 1/2 a second. On that matter how effective is an operator with 1/2 a second of latency going to be vs the someone one the ground?
I think there are so many telepresence and remote-operation use cases for VR. It's not yet widely known how powerful it is to experience real time VR when you also can control something remotely.
http://odenvr.com/hiab-reveals-hivision-remote-crane-operati... http://voysys.se