Well there’s no reason you couldn’t just wear a fancy neon suit to feel cool and stuff while you’re doing it. No need to bang your head against a brick wall to make form merge with function. You can have both separately
Ok but the main idea is this. Look around and notice everyone is approximately the same (at least as far as “functionality” goes). No one can fly, most people have 2 arms and 2 legs, etc. Poor visibility in the dark. So to add functionality, you put on gadgets like a smartwatch by strapping it to yourself or putting on glasses by hooking them over your ears. This would let you do more than that. Imagine being able to connect a sensor to a port on, say, your belt and see infrared? It’d be more useful than distinct gadgets, as many people trying to put on a cheap phone VR headset when they wear glasses due to horrible vision can tell you (like me, I had to take them off and everything was blurry). It basically makes a sort of standard interface to use everything with.
It’s like a having a smartphone versus carrying a pda, a cell phone, a mp3 player, a camera, etc.
So you want augmented reality glasses?
The problem with those is they don’t usually replace anything, they just add stuff
If you add stuff over top of existing stuff, you’re replacing it
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No, I mean it can’t eliminate anything in your vision or add solid object usually
Well why don’t we make one that can? That could be a good goal. You basically already described that as one of the things that you want. A VR headset but with cameras to view the world through
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The VR rig with cameras would also allow you to do things like zooming in
Plus more vr-style stuff like replacing the world around u with another one
That is the core point…
The same point still applies here.
You can use a $20 motion tracking camera to achieve body motion tracking.
Said suit as you describe would cost hundreds of thousands to manufacture.
Those would allow you a degree of control inferior to a joystick…
I got some friends in Spain working with AR and they tried to integrate LucidVR as a controller for their project.
It’s good for some home projects, but still miles away from being comercialy reliable.
i.e. Let’s assume you achieve making your suit with those gloves, and then control your car.
If you are really driving a car through those gloves, there is a 1 in 10 chance every minute that the car will randomly turn 90 degrees to the right. or left.
Would you really want to drive a car with that degree of chance for catasthrofe?
I feel like you want “a sci fi suit” that integrates with some other stuff “because it’s fun”.
Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing bad about it!
In fact, would be a very cool project to make, for fun!!
But if you want to design something to become a big project, you got to start small and focused.
First figure out what exactly you want to do, then ask yourself “why?”, and finally, “how?”
So…
If you want to make a controller, then there is one path in front of you (but I assure you that a suit is one of the worst options to achieve any form of a good controller)
If you want to make an immersion interface, then it’s possible to do something like the Void… but real immersion like Fusers from Shadowrun, or “Jacking in”, will require a BCI.
But if what you want is to make a cool suit… then it’s perfectly viable! just don’t expect to achieve the same degree of control over a drone than a joystick would. (assuming we are not getting into BCI territory)
and just an observation:
That is more often untrue than true.
A Swiss army knife is less useful to me than a screwdriver.
My screwdriver cuts things better than that shitty knife.
Works as a better makeshift fishing rod than the shitty one on the swiss army knife… is better to start fire… doesn’t break when trying to screw or pry open something… etc, etc, etc…
The idea is that this is supposed to be portable though.
But tbh the most basic model would be a simple with hand tracking and AR/vr
Ok, I got confused… are you aiming at a full on body suit… or at something portable?
and by portable, do you mean “I can use on the street”, or “I can take with me to the hotel”?
because those are two very distinct things.
So… you mean a regular Meta Quest with LeapMotion?
Leap is a small addon to the headset which allows you to have integrated hand, finger and gesture tracking.
it’s the size of a finger and you can strap to the headset, or put on the table, or even wear on your chest.
It’s also a considerably chap option, highly portable and keep your hands free to be used beyond the motion tracking (whilst solutions like Lucid are bulky, unwieldy, less precise, hard to carry around and prevent you from using your hands while wearing them)
While the Meta quest is also a cheap option which already has all the cameras integrated and you already have some apps to let you use the cameras.
Unity integrates both Meta and Leap, so…
Are we talking about building a software then?
Because this hardware already exists, and for cheaper than the parts you would need to buy separately to build something similar with even remotely teh same level of acurracy.
That’s my favorite but theres others. Obviously not readable text but the point is it kinda make the technology blend in with yourself but also be practical and kinda awesome. Would you rather have a basic AR rig with haptic gloves or something like that? I know what I’d prefer. Plus having a suit allows you to add better functionality bc the tech doesn’t need to fit in a headset and gloves. Plus it can be added to without introducing more hardware you’d have to put on, as it could be plugged into and mounted on the existing hardware of the suit.
Ok… so what you want is to “make a really cool suit full of gadgets”, right?
If you stick to that, you can go far, make it, have fun, maybe stumble into something really usefull outside of that!
Just don’t try to mix things up, or you’ll lose traction of your own goals, and when that happens, nothing gets done!
What I mean with this is: If you want to build a suit, trying to find out justifications for it, such as “it will feel more natural”, “will be more intuitive”, “will allow you to control more things”… won’t help. Especially when a suit form-factor is probably conterproducent to these other factors.
i.e. steer clear from statements such as this:
Because…
Not being on a suit, also doesn’t mean it needs to fit into a headset and googles. Which turns your point moot.
More than that…
Being in a suit makes it harder to add more functionality, because now you are restricted to “things you can add to a suit”…
There’s also some tech you might want which is sensitive to motion, which makes it unlikely to work while “on a suit”, etc…
I mean… I feel like you’re trying too hard to find “reasons why it should be in a suit”, when all you need is “it’s going to be in a suit because it’s my project and I want a suit”.
There’s nothing wrong with it.
Just don’t try to convince yourself that a suit is more practical than a device you can put on your backpack… or even on your pocket. etc, etc…
That said, if the suit is the focus and you want it to be modular, start looking into what materials do you need, how are you gonna hook up modules to it, etc…
And Bob’s your uncle!
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It’s basically supposed to be general purpose. Like a computer. If you buy, say, a raspi, it can do a lot of stuff depending on what you add. This is no different. Capable of being used for anything you need. Plus I don’t think there’s any reason that the tech in the gloves couldn’t be added to the suit somehow and add full body tracking. And tbh it doesn’t necessarily have to be more practical this is more like what’d be the more future-y thing to do. Like having a smartphone and echo dots and stuff like that. And having 3 phones, one of which is a rooted flip phone without a touch screen that runs android 11 aosp and has been modded to support apk installation. I don’t have an echo dot but I do have the phones and this would be better than that. You can fit a pretty big battery in a suit.
Cool.
I can see it now that you want to make a suit. That’s a good first step in making it!
You want to start with the gloves and VR. Cool.
So, going back to the first post…
Do you know now exactly what is it that you meant by “with your help”?
And on a side note, watch out for blanket statements, because not only they don’t mean anything, but they actually detract people from understanding what something can do.
for example:
Technically, you don’t “add stuff that does something” to a RasPi. it’s not a modular system that can do anything.
A RasPi is a computer, and you need to build it towards what you want it to do.
And as soon as you have it doing that thing, it can no longer do “anything”.
I am guilty of using RasPis for way too many things where an Arduino or a simple control board would be enough. That leads to me wasting shittons of energy, having slower systems, etc…
But I used to get RasPis for free, so… there was a tradeoff there! 
And if I got a RasPi into being a router, when I needed it to be a remote switch for a lightbulb array, I had to undo one project and make another. it wasn’t “plug-n-play”.
Raspi has HATs. That’s what I mean. They add stuff. But anyway, I don’t have much cash tbh
I still live at home (I’m 18 rn) and my parents are not excellent so they control my pay card and I can’t actually use it 90% of the time. So I’m planning on moving out soon but I don’t make a ton of money so there’s that too.