When Spatial Computing Meets Pro Skating

We grew up skateboarding, and playing Tony Hawk Pro Skater. One of these pushed our bodies to do more, and the other one pushed our imaginations for what could even be possible.

Given the power of this combo, we thought it would be fun to combine our physical spatial intelligence with new digital spatial intelligence, and see where it might take us.

Skate Moves

When you skate, every day is leg-day. Every day is a core workout. The only difference from then till now is when we used to fall down our bodies would bounce right back. Now we carry the injuries for a lot longer.

We still want to keep experiencing a version of that movement that we enjoyed so much, so we made the Skate Moves demo to give ourselves a fun new way to make crazy things possible again, minus the wipe outs.

Vision-powered Play

Computer Vision-powered gaming is at its best when it feels like second nature for your body, and when it’s pushing your imagination beyond what you think is possible.

In our Skate Moves expereince you can crouch to go faster, lean backwards or forwards to turn, balance and lean on one leg to manual, jump to ollie or pivot to railslide. You can even pull off a perfect 360 without a thousand hours of practice.

It starts to blur physical and digital experience in a really new and rewarding way.

GPU Tracking with Aura Touchless Interaction

In our first prototype we were running a basic vision system with CPU-powered body-tracking, so there was noticeable motion-to-photon delay. In this latest iteration we built out fresh GPU body-tracking, which dropped latency from 30ms per frame down to 10ms per frame, which creates a fluid connection between yourself and your avatar. It really feels like it represents you, which allows you stop thinking about controlling a character, and to just move as if it is you in the game.

We are also using our Aura touchless spatial interface, which makes every movement incredibly instinctual and natural. Together they close the gap between our physical movements and our digital movements. Skate Moves feels instantly great to play.

Verdict

Spatial skating is endless fun, and really works up a sweat. Interactions with spatial computing outside of wearable devices are such a gigantic uncharted territory.

The potential to make leg day your favorite day is now on the table, and it feels like spatial world models like Genie 3, World Labs and Odyssey are going to explode the potential even further as they move towards physics-aware real-time generative environments that we can combine with our own technology and gameplay.