Hardlight

Hardlight VR makes an upper body haptic jacket. We ran a successful kickstarter early in 2017.

I joined the team during my first year of grad school. Over the next 3 years, I would build, iterate, and refine the tools to hit a high level of usability, power and robustness.

SDK Goal: Allow for easy creation & adding of in-depth haptics to existing VR games.

Unity SDK

The Unity engine developer tool set was built with continuous deployment and with the feedback of external developer partners. It was a fairly novel endeavor with adapting goals (the best kind).

Early on in our development, we focused purely on the technical execution of haptics. Getting them to play quickly and reliably. This gradually led towards sophistication. The first sophistication was assets to recall previously defined complex behavior. Next came tools to automatically generate complex behavior based upon parameters. As the number of tools grew, so did the demand for a test bench environment to showcase all the different functionalities. Assets underwent several revisions and redesigns to better serve developer ease of use and flexibility.

Finally, the tools left the strictly haptic feedback spaces and entered into Virtual Reality work-space – requiring tools for making body simulation easily accessible.

Haptics Explorer

Haptics Explorer is the developer test bench. It features a slew of different haptic functionalities.

• Haptic Visualizer
• Asset Explorer & Player
• Draw Mode (simple Input-to-Haptics)
• Impulses (Emanation, Traversal, Gathering)
• Collision Haptics (Spherecast, Trigger Volume)
• Tracking Toolset (Virtual Reality Tools)

Unreal SDK

Developing the Unreal Engine plugin was a secondary objective with an interesting journey.

Unreal Strengths

• Established plugin pipeline and various sample plugins
• Open Source Engine allows for full-stack hunting of problems
• Blueprints are flexible and debuggable
• Powerful native assets (once we wrote importer tools)

Unreal Challenges

• Must upgrade & support features across multiple engine versions.
• Patchwork documentation can make finding up-to-date solutions difficult.
• Unreal does not politely support various file IO tasks
• Lengthy build process
• Lengthy QA process (building plugin, packaging it, testing in rocket builds, testing all features)

I’d also like to direct an earnest thanks towards Michael Allar. He is an Unreal engine wizard who assisted with tricky technical questions in our early days. If you need some assistance, reach out to him.

blueprint Nodes

This is an example of a simple collider

 Partners

Hardlight’s SDK is currently used by ~20 partners

• Sairento VR
• Mech League Boxing
• Art of the Fight – (VR FPS)
• Thrill of the Fight – (VR Boxing)
• Holopoint
• The Nest
• Battledome
• Cyberthreat
• And more