Nimble VR: What It Is, And What It Does For Virtual Reality
As a tech startup founded at San Francisco, California, Nimble VR sought people’s attention and support for their nifty tech project called the Nimble Sense. With the widespread adoption of crowdfunding site Kickstarter, Nimble VR took advantage of the power of the interwebs to gain mass support. They weren’t wrong.
Founded by a small group of tech experts, Nimble VR was formerly called 3Gear Systems. Its team comprises of highly educated people, hailing from top academe institutions like MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Berkeley, and USC. Their passion is to build and create the most immersive VR experiences the world has ever seen.
Nimble VR started work with exoskeletal devices, some two years ago. This attempt to bridge real human interactions with the virtual world led the startup to charter new territory in VR, with their depth-sensing camera specifically designed for the Oculus Rift.
People behind Nimble VR envisioned the future of virtual reality to be as close to real world interactions as possible. Thanks to their depth-sensing camera technology, Nimble VR was able to demonstrate that hand gestures can be used to enhance on-screen interactions with the user’s virtual content. The prototype for this technology, the Nimble Sense, is based on the time-of-flight technology. Nimble Sense works by creating a three-dimensional point cloud in open space based on the movement of the user’s hands and fingers. This point cloud is then interpreted by a proprietary software to track various aspects of the hands and fingers. Simply put, anyone can manipulate and interact with on-screen objects in real time, without the need to wear or hold controllers on hands and fingers.
But to further grow public interest with their technology, Nimble VR took one step further to make this possible – that is, to outsource their research and development funding to anyone. Crowdfunding website Kickstarter served a great purpose for Nimble VR to take their motion-sensing technology to mass adoption. The wide adoption of Oculus Rift among tech enthusiasts helped Nimble VR to propel their goal of making the Oculus Rift as interactive as possible. They made the Nimble Sense public with Kickstarter, and set a funding goal of US$ 62,500.
The public funding project was successful – to the extent that their fund was double the amount of their initial goal. But to complement this feat, Nimble VR was recently acquired by Oculus VR. Due to this, the Kickstarter project was canceled – some backers were disappointed by this move, citing disrespect to the whole funding process. But this acquisition serves both companies to tightly integrate their VR technologies to create even more immersive and realistic VR experiences. Since the Nimble Sense is optimized to work with the Rift, Oculus took the chance of making the Sense a deeply integrated technology on the Rift headset. With this, we can expect Oculus to show everyone a model of the Rift with built-in motion-tracking capabilities – taking the VR experience with the Rift a notch higher.
Exciting times are in for both companies, as well as for the VR community. As of now, Nimble and Oculus are both hard at work developing ways to make their technologies come together, and make the VR experience as seamless as it can be – bridging the gap of real human interactions with computers – in this case, the virtual and the real worlds.
For more information on Nimble VR, please visit the following websites:
http://nimblevr.com/
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nimblevr/nimble-sense-bring-your-hands-into-virtual-reality
https://www.oculus.com/blog/nimble-vr-13th-lab-and-chris-bregler-join-oculus/
