Interview with Sensics CEO Yuval Boger

Ben Lang

11 years ago

Categories: FeatureNewsVirtual Reality

Sensics CEO Yuval Boger (left). Photo credit – Baltimore Sun

Yuval Boger is the CEO of Sensics, a company focused on the professional HMD market — used for research, military training, and high-end simulation. Recently I spoke with Boger about the state of virtual reality and the interplay between the consumer and professional fields of head mounted displays.

Yes, this is the same Yuval Boger that took the zSight 810 HMD into the shower! He also maintains a blog on virtual reality and head mounted displays.

Boger brings a great perspective from the professional HMD world. Many of the folks now becoming interested in virtual reality via the Oculus Rift may not realize that the professional market has existed behind the scenes even after the VR crash of the 90’s. They’re not to be blamed for not knowing though — the majority of products in the professional HMD world are cost-prohibitive for most mainstream applications, especially for your everyday gamer. However, there’s insight to be gleaned and lessons to be learned by the consumer market from the professional HMD world — and vice versa, methinks.

Interview with Sensics CEO Yuval Boger

Road to VR: Tell us about yourself and your involvement with Sensics.

Boger: My name is Yuval Boger and I’m the CEO of Sensics. Based in Maryland, Sensics has been in business for about ten years of developing and selling professional-grade products including head-mounted displays (HMDs) and simulated weapon sights. Our customers typically come from the defense industry where our products are used for training, universities that use our products for research and then a companies that use our products for a wide range of applications including automotive design, market research, data visualization and more.

The original Sensics technology was developed at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. A Japanese car company funded a JHU project to develop an HMD with both wide field of view and very high resolution – 8 million pixels per eye. Once that project successfully completed, two key researchers from JHU – Dr. Larry Brown and Marc Shapiro –started Sensics and licensed the technology from JHU. A few of years later, they asked me to join to help them take this technology to market.

I’ve been with Sensics for almost 7 years. How time flies! Before Sensics, I helped start and grow several startup companies spanning medical equipment, communications and software. Some were successful and some were excellent learning experiences.

Road to VR: Do you think that virtual reality is ready for the mainstream — and the mainstream ready for VR?

Previous incarnations of consumer VR were a bit like cicadas – rising from the ashes every few years, making a lot of noise, and then die down.

Boger: I certainly hope so. Previous incarnations of consumer VR were a bit like cicadas – rising from the ashes every few years, making a lot of noise, and then die down. What has prevented consumer VR from taking off in the past was that the visual experience on the lower end of the price range, the combination of field of view and resolution, was just not compelling enough. Good displays were expensive and drove prices to ‘professional market’ levels whereas low-cost displays were just not attractive enough. What has changed this time and gives everyone hope is that cell phone displays are both inexpensive and offer good resolutions. Within reason, larger displays make it easier to design wearable systems with wide field of view, so the optics do not need to be as complex or expensive as they had to be in the past. All of this adds up to being able to create fairly compelling goggles at price ranges that individuals can sometimes afford.

One reason that high-resolution microdisplays that are used in professional goggles are expensive is that there are not many markets outside VR and military eyepieces that need them. As such, quantities were low and price was high. Today, when VR goggles can ride the wave of cell phone displays, the economics change. Kudos to my friend Mark Bolas from USC for building proof of concept prototypes that illustrated the promise and, of course, for the Oculus team for taking this concept and running with it.

Road to VR: What are the challenges of bringing virtual reality to the mainstream? Do some approaches work in the professional market that don’t work in the mainstream or vice versa?

Fortunately, there was never a question of whether people want to experience virtual reality goggles.

Boger: Fortunately, there was never a question of whether people want to experience virtual reality goggles. They saw Hollywood versions of them in enough movies to get excited about the concept. However, there are several challenges to tackle:

Matching the resolution and field of view to the application. Wide field of view generates immersion — which is great — but high resolution especially in the central vision area is important if you want to see detail. For fast-moving games, immersion might be more important than resolution. For other applications, resolution is a must.
Adapting experiences, or better yet creating them, to take advantage of this new medium. We saw that when people started adapting game to consumer goggles they realized that they need to change the camera position, to understand head tracking well, to move some of the user interface elements to areas that are easier to see, to overcome optical distortions, to enable stereo viewing and more. But, the best games will be those that are built from the ground up for VR and VR goggle. I think the Microsoft Kinect is a good analogy: a new platform at the time and allowed marker-less motion sensing. You could take an existing XBOX game like Madden NFL and make it enhanced a bit with the Kinect, but only Kinect-centric games like many of those created by Microsoft or some of the fitness games truly unleash the power of the platform. Creating VR-centric applications will take time and experimentation.
Sensors. A consumer VR goggle these days is essentially a “head-mounted monitor with a head tracker”. The interaction with the game is still done with a game controller, mouse, keyboard, etc. There will need to be more comprehensive sensors to help the application understand what the user is doing, what is in the vicinity of the user and allow for more natural interaction. You might be interested in my blog post on the subject called “The barriers for consumer virtual reality may not be what you think”. In professional-market deployments you often see rich sensors: full body tracking, weapon tracking, positional (and not just rotational) head tracking and more.
Feedback. A driving simulator, for instance, is much more compelling when you feel the tilt of the car as you hit a sharp curve. Beyond the visual experience, the brain is expecting to sense the curve in other ways. The vibrating game controller is an example of non-visual feedback and there will need to be more of that

Road to VR: What kind of features/functions/devices are enjoyed in the professional VR space that are still far away from hitting the mainstream (for cost, complexity, or other reasons)?

Boger: Professional VR deployments often have higher resolutions and better displays. For instance, Sensics offers a head-mounted display where each eye has 1920×1200 resolution driven by an OLED display. These OLED displays are very fast – no motion blur – have deep colors and very high contrasts. Over time, such experiences will come to the consumer market. Aside from sensors and feedback that we spoke about earlier, professional deployments often have accessories: you can be virtually driving in an armored vehicle and physically grab a machine gun that feels like the real thing, recoils like the real thing and has a ballistics model that closely resembles live bullets. In professional-market training applications, it is important not to introduce what is called ‘negative training’, meaning not to train you to do something that can’t really be done in actual conditions, or needs to be done differently. This is higher level of realism that requires investments.