Freeaim has raised $316,700 (£250,000) in funding to launch its VR Shoes, or shoes that you can wear in virtual reality games and applications.
The start-up is focused on designing wearable tech for virtual reality.
The round was led by Nikolaus Oldendorff, through the Oldendorff family office, part of a global shipping and maritime firm based in Germany. Freeaim’s new pre-seed round will support the immediate launch of a developer version of the company’s flagship VR Shoes and enable the startup to scale production for a full, consumer-level release in 2025.
Freeaim CEO Ashley Foxcroft said in an interview with GamesBeat that he believes we’re at a key moment for virtual reality. Its market value related to gaming is projected to grow from $16.86 billion in 2024 to $105.22 billion by 2032.
Despite this, attempts to improve the physical motion aspect of virtual reality have stalled. VR companies working in locomotion tend to develop versions of sliding treadmills, which allow the user to walk in place while held on a platform that is synced up to a VR program.
These treadmills and similar devices are cumbersome and often prohibitively expensive. In the enterprise market, motorized omni-directional treadmills (ODT) tend to be more effective but can cost upwards of $50,000.
Freeaim said it is subverting the status quo by developing wearable tech instead. Rather than requiring a large and expensive machine to move a person, Freeaim’s omnidirectional motorised technology is built directly into the sole of its shoes.
These shoes require less hardware and material than treadmills, and can go to market with a price point far more accessible in the rapidly growing VR industry. Easily stored in a box or carried in a backpack, the shoes can sync with any VR headset supported by SteamVR and will work with most PC VR games that have walkable environments. The VR Shoes feel more natural and stable, similar to walking on a gym treadmill, but in any direction while being immersed in VR, Freeaim said.
Freeaim is today releasing its VR Shoes developer kit to businesses for $5,000. The developer version of Freeaim VR Shoes will offer benefits to businesses – in addition to more advanced hardware, Freeaim will offer an SDK to enable the use of terrain- and event-triggered haptic feedback, kinetic feedback, and foot visualization. The shoes send a signal via Bluetooth to a PC. In the future, it could send signals to stand-alone headsets, Foxcroft said.
The pro-level VR shoes will also offer data capture and analysis tools aimed at medical applications and training evaluation.
“We’ve created a more portable, sleeker, and lighter alternative to current walking-related VR tech, and we’ve done it by thinking in the opposite direction,” Foxcroft said, in a statement. “We focused on people’s feet and natural motion as opposed to trying to manufacture a special platform for them to walk on. This funding round is going to accelerate the launch, and with a consumer version set to follow the developer version, it’s going to be an enormous year for Freeaim. This kind of wearable tech is going to start getting a lot more attention.”
Freeaim’s VR Shoes are pioneering use cases beyond the obvious gaming applications. Hinted at by its maritime investor, Freeaim’s VR Shoes demonstrate serious potential for safety and job training in companies and government entities that require personnel to be in remote environments, such as oil rigs, submarines, and even training to work on other planets.
The developer version supported by this pre-seed round is of particular interest here, and Freeaim is offering certain customization options expressly for organizations of this nature.
Lead investor Nikolaus Oldendorff said in a statement, “In recent years, individual pieces of VR hardware have started to look more alike. Freeaim and these VR Shoes are an intelligent antidote to this problem, and that’s why we’re supporting it. The potential that Freeaim has identified and, in some ways, helped create outside of the gaming sphere is enormous. We’re eager to see Freeaim take bigger strides into this new space. An XR or VR experience that includes full mobility, which can also be shipped in relatively tiny packages, has tremendous potential in many industries.”
The pre-seed round will additionally support various hardware improvements, further scaling, and preparations for the consumer version. The consumer version of VR Shoes is expected to be released within a year, coming in at a price point comparable to, if not more affordable than, existing VR treadmills.
The Freeaim team will offer a playground experience and demo slots at the upcoming edition of Augmented World Expo 2024 in Long Beach, California. A team of seven is helping right now, with a mix of part-time and full-time people. The company has been working on getting the product right, and it has thousands of followers on social media like YouTube.
“We want to get this product right,” Foxcroft said.
Foxcroft, who was a successful YouTuber, started the London-based company in 2021. He and his cofounder wanted to build on the idea of building something with motorized shoes for a VR headset.
The VR Shoes take about 15 minutes to learn how to use the shoes properly in a tutorial. But Foxcroft said it helps with motion sickness. You can get nausea in VR if the movement in VR doesn’t match up with the movement in reality. In this case, the shoes are pretty much replicated accurately in VR. The VR shoes have haptic feedback that can tell you if the battery is low.
Within a half hour, you can be playing a game like Half-Life: Alyx.
“It’s super fun and super immersive, as it changes the experience of virtual reality, making it so much more realistic,” Foxcroft said. “You are really there. You are in the game.”
There could be applications in other industries like defense or other consumer products. One of the goals for an official 2025 launch is to bring down the price for VR enthusiasts and consumers. It will also take time to be able to manufacture the device in higher quantities.
“The key for the developer version is to get more key users,” Foxcroft said. “We can work closely with them and get to the consumer version.”
In 2025, the company may do another round of funding, perhaps through crowdfunding, Foxcroft said. Eventually, the dream would be to make VR Shoes a standard part of any VR headset platform. Eventually, VR platforms are expected to add haptic vests or haptic gloves, adding to the immersion. Maybe better sensors on the shoes will also be more interesting in the future as well.
“You want to have full-body experiences, almost like a Holodeck,” Foxcroft said. “Our challenge as a startup is to prove that we are right and we can solve these problems.”
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