Out-of-the-box measurement As a bridge to connect mobile VR and PC VR, is NOLO "solid"?

Can you also enjoy interactive Steam VR games with the most common carton helmets? In the past, this may have been a daydream that people dared not think about, but from now on, this is no longer a seemingly unattainable event. That's right, NOLOis coming, impossible is nothing!

As a company established in 2015, Ling Yuzhi chose a unique development path from the beginning - "bridge repair." In 2015, there were already a large number of “players” in terms of hardware, whether it was PC VR or mobile VR. After comprehensively weighing the advantages and disadvantages of these two product types, Ling Yu’s intelligent control aimed at a special focus point that had previously hardly anyone dared to Think of the direction - let the mobile VR really "move" together, but also let the mobile VR can enjoy the PC VR experience.

Before entering the VR market, Ling Yu intelligent space positioning technology is mainly used in the field of drones. It is also thanks to the accumulation of their team's genes and technologies that have enabled them to make breakthrough progress in a short period of time.

At the new product experience conference at the end of August last year, Ling Yu intellectually announced the Cobb, a prototype and engineering machine for space positioning and interactive solutions created specifically for mobile VR. From the actual experience at that time, through a Cardboard (the most common paper shell version) equipped with the Cobb scheme, it is possible to walk freely within a space of about 4m*4m, and it can be interactively operated through interactive handles.

After more than half a year's optimization and improvement, Ling Yuzhi's space positioning and interactive solutions have also been transformed from the original prototype engineering machine Cobb to the current NOLO.

On January 31 this year, NOLO landed on the Kickstarter crowdfunding program in the United States. While gaining praise from overseas users, it also delivered a perfect answer sheet: reaching the target amount in less than half a day, as of March 11th. The end of the program was supported by more than $230,000 in support from 1,683 supporters.

After the successful completion of crowdfunding, NOLO also ushered in its first domestic public appearance at the GMGC 2017 (Beijing) Conference. NOLO is becoming more and more perfect under the meticulous polishing of Ling Yuzhi, and it is getting closer and closer to the consumer market. Until now, NOLO has come, and the New Territories has also been fortunate to be one of the first media to get the consumer version of NOLO CV1.

There is not much to say, so let's take a look at the consumer version of NOLO.

NOLO out of the box

Like most leading technology products, the consumer version of NOLO has a large rectangular box with the word “NOLO” printed on it. The main black color gives a simple and generous feeling. Of course, from the perspective of psychology, choosing a black packaging box can reduce the influence of color on people's emotions, and give birth to a kind of "science and technology is the sense of sight", which easily demonstrates the image of the product.

After opening the box, you will find that the overall package is divided into two layers. The upper layer is the accessory layer, which contains a power adapter, various types of cables and two different NOLO helmet locator cartridges, all housed in a black box; the lower layer is a neat NOLO kit, including Two handles, NOLO positioning base station and NOLO helmet locator.

Finally, come take a look at the handsome photo of the NOLO kit family:

NOLO Design & Hardware

According to the official introduction, NOLO adopts an independent research and development innovative program: "acoustic optoelectronic + IMU module", based on this to create a "PolarTraq" space positioning technology, the entire system includes a positioning base station, a helmet locator and a pair of interactive handles. Provides millimeter-level head and hands 6-DoF spatial positioning and interaction capabilities. The so-called "acoustic optoelectronics," namely ultrasound, lasers, and radios, combine the three to achieve spatial positioning.

It is precisely because of this that NOLO's positioning range can reach the Room-Scale level, meet the needs of the vast majority of users in the virtual world of real movement, and millimeter accuracy and less than 20 milliseconds delay, but also allows users in a longer time There will not be too much vertigo in the experience. Here we come to understand the hardware design and functions of the three main components.

NOLO allows you to experience the VR game on Steam using the regular glasses box. From the above figure, the NOLO handle includes system keys, menu keys, and trigger keys. Considering that most VR games on Steam are compatible with HTC Vive, the overall handle structure and function provided by NOLO is similar to the Vive handle controller. Therefore, we do not elaborate much on the function of the NOLO handle.

It is worth mentioning that because NOLO only contains a positioning base station, in theory, it can only achieve the positioning of the side of the base station, so in order to meet some games that need to turn, Ling Yu added control in the handle, 180 ° turn and other shortcuts.

In addition, the entire handle is made of black matte material, not only looks full of sense of technology, but also more practical in the actual operation process - basically will not appear because of playing too much and cause the handle to fall off.

It is relatively simple to locate the keys contained on the base station, only the key, calibration keys and charging interface. However, such a small object contains far more technical content than it does.

According to the understanding of the boundary bacteria, the positioning base station will transmit coded sound, light, and radio signals into the space when it is working. After each positioning mark receives the signal, it will undergo certain processing to solve its own relative to the positioning base station. Spatial location. In addition, the positioning base station has an effective positioning range of 100° FOV and a radius of 6 meters. Theoretically, it can simultaneously position an infinite number of positioning marks within the positioning range, and achieve a 60 Hz refresh rate and millimeter-level positioning accuracy.

It should be noted that, in order to ensure the accuracy of positioning during actual use, please place the positioning base station horizontally on the edge of the table top and facing the use direction (the optimal position is the height flush with the shoulder), and be careful not to Place any obstructions before positioning the base station.

The helmet locator includes a charging interface and a calibration key, which is easily discernible due to the relatively simple overall structure.

In the process of use, you need to choose the NOLO helmet locator deck that is suitable for your head (taking into account the variety of moving heads on the market, the official intimate provides two kinds of decks), tear the double-sided adhesive, paste to The middle position above the VR helmet. Remove the NOLO helmet locator and insert it into the NOLO helmet locator deck. Hmm... The double-sided tape on the card seat is a bit strong and tearing requires a little effort.

Some people may feel that adding an item to the moving head may affect the experience because of the increase in weight. However, from the perspective of actual experience, the added weight is basically negligible, and it can even be said that there is basically no impact on the entire experience.

NOLO's other accessories include USB connectors and various cables. The greatest role of one-and-three USB is to be able to charge two interactive handles and positioning base stations simultaneously, which is very convenient. The 4-meter-long Steam VR line is used to experience VR games on Steam through NOLO. It uses a plug with a NOLO Logo to connect to the PC, and the other end is used to connect the phone and helmet locator.

Before Enjoy NOLO, you need to prepare these things

NOLO not only provides a solution for spatial positioning and interaction for mobile VR, but also makes a bold breakthrough so that mobile VR can also experience content on Steam. Presumably a lot of people have seen this place and are already quite excited and want to experience something. But before that, you also need to do some necessary preparations:

An Android phone (unfortunately, NOLO does not support Apple phones at the moment); A Cardboard (up to a mobile VR benchmark Gear VR, Cardboard down to a few dollars can be); A performance enough to run VR games on Steam PC; SteamVR (software, nothing to say); Riftcat (streaming software, projecting the PC's screen onto the phone); Vridge (for use with Riftcat, Gear VR users need to install VR forge for Gear VR); NOLO driver For windows (software officially produced by Ling Yuzhi, which will be available for download on the official website); A software that allows you to "scientifically access the Internet" (this is very important).

As a complete full immersive mobile VR interactive system, NOLO can adapt to all mainstream mobile VR head phones and Android phones currently on the market, which means that any glasses box + mobile phone, together with NOLO, can Experience PC-level spatial positioning on mobile VR. To some extent, equivalent to passing NOLO can reduce the cost of the average consumer experience SteamVR game, in addition to saving an HTC Vive, NOLO also significantly reduced the requirements for the PC configuration, specifically look:

In the end, the point that needs to be explained is that due to the initial evaluation that was completed in the "Dragon Boat Holiday", it really suffered a lot during the entire installation and debugging process. This process will not go into details. One degree is "absolutely unreliable". However, under the guidance of the official staff, these problems have been solved. We have finally mastered the entire operation process.

In general, when NOLO is used for the first time, it may take some effort to install and debug various software. However, if you run through the entire process, everything becomes So easy.

* If you have some unpredictable problems in the process of experience, you can leave a message on the public number to discuss with us.

NOLO practical application experience

It can be said that product experience is the highlight of a device evaluation, but limited by space, we do not specifically introduce the experience of the game. The whole application experience is divided into PC and mobile. In order to get the most realistic results, we chose Lenovo ZUK2, Xiaomi 4, and Huawei Mate9 to match the IMS Vega (glasses boxes) with NOLO. And contrast.

The specific hardware and software configurations used for the test are as follows:

The following is the experience result:

When testing PC VR applications, we selected three different styles of applications/games to experience. Basically, they all belong to the hot content on SteamVR. They are Google Earth VR, Waltz of the Wizard and The Lab. 》

Google Earth VR

Waltz of the Wizard

The Lab

From the actual experience of the situation, NOLO did what it said - so that mobile VR can also experience the VR game on Steam. The entire experience process can be said to be basically the same as experiencing through HTC Vive. The overall interaction is smooth. Because the NOLO handle is similar in structure to the HTC Vive's handle controller, even during the experience process, we once thought that we were using the HTC Vive. In terms of positioning, NOLO can really allow you to move around. The setting of one-click steering has also eased the ambiguity of having only one base station.

Of course, experiencing Steam VR games through NOLO is not perfect, depending on the hardware conditions. Limited by the performance of the mobile phone, the picture may occasionally appear to be stuck during the entire experience, especially after the mobile phone has been running for a period of time. This kind of caching will become apparent. However, it is clear that this problem belongs to the “common problem” in the industry, and it is not Ling Yu’s intelligence that can be solved with his own efforts.

On the mobile side, we experienced two games officially offered by Black Edge and Tetris. Among them, "Black Hole Edge" is a test game docked between Beijing Yuye Technology and the NOLO VR team, and "Tetris" is a game we have experienced at previous experience sessions. One of them is that there are not many mobile VR games that can be adapted to NOLO at present. However, Ling Yuzhi stated that he is currently actively interfacing with the CP and that more and more mobile VR games will be added later.

Black hole edge

Tetris

From the experience results, the screen effect is consistent with the ordinary glasses box. From the experience of different mobile phones, the effect is slightly different, but it is not obvious. However, after NOLO provided a positioning solution for mobile VR, during the entire experience, it became apparent that the interaction was smoother and immersive.

It is worth mentioning that NOLO is accompanied by a mobile VR benchmark, the Samsung Gear VR will have a better experience, but we don't have a Samsung mobile phone at hand, so we cannot show it to everyone in this initial evaluation.

NOLO experience summary

At this point, the NOLO experience has come to an end. Throughout the evaluation process, there was the initial pain of indefinite software, the surprises that came with us when experiencing NOLO, and the frustration of facing “worry” in the entire industry. In any case, it would be worthwhile to spend the entire “Dragon Boat Holiday” to bring everyone such a product’s initial evaluation. Perhaps this is the charm of cutting-edge technology.

The sensation ended and we went back to the theme. Leaving aside the console VR that is basically SONY's singing monologue, broadly speaking, the VR headset can be divided into two parts: PC VR and mobile VR. The former is superior to good quality, while the latter is better in mobility. All along, the two forms of products are similar to the Chuhe Han community. The emergence of NOLO broke this barrier and became a bridge between communicating PC VR and mobile VR. From our actual experience, NOLO's current performance has been "strong enough."

As for the content of NOLO, Steam VR is obviously not a problem. However, currently there are not many mobile VRs that have joined the full interaction and positioning. However, as we mentioned in the previous article, Ling Yu is in active contact with the CP, and more and more mobile VR games will follow. In this regard, we also reported ardent expectations.

Perhaps NOLO is not the optimal solution for mobile VR spatial positioning, nor can it bring us the best quality VR experience in the industry. But compared with the meaning of NOLO in the industry, these seem to be insignificant - smart phones all the way to the present, and who would have a joke when the iPhone is not easy to use it?

What's more important is that it is precisely with "unrestful" companies such as Ling Yuzhi that they continue to break through and subvert everyone's imagination, so that the future of the entire industry has become more likely. “No interaction, no VR”, so this small step by NOLO is a big step for the entire VR industry.