Samsung is taking three new experimental projects along to the SXSW 2016 festival, including a brand new way to look really silly while wearing a VR headset. It’s called Entrim 4D, and it fools the brain into thinking you’re really moving around in the VR world, despite being seating in the real one. As is shown in the demo video, this means you wobble around a lot, usually waving your hands about in the air at the same time.
The Entrim 4D experience is provided by a set of special headphones that send an electric signal to the brain, where it stimulates the nerves which control balance and identify body movement. When matched to a Gear VR experience, it gives the impression of actual movement. The team’s demonstrating Entrim 4D using a drone-shot video that apparently fools you into feeling like you’re flying.
Samsung says the Entrim 4D headset will replace the need for those crazy full-motion chairs, and a future version is being worked on with rotational motion detection. If it all sounds vomit-inducing, it’s supposed to do the opposite, by combining a physical sensation with the visual VR experience that bypasses the sensations which bring on motion sickness.
Entrim 4D isn’t about to go on sale though, it’s one of the cool side projects found inside Samsung’s C-Labs, and one of three that Samsung will exhibit at SXSW this year. The other two are apps. The first is called Hum On!, where you hum a tune that’s then converted over to musical notes, and played back in a variety of musical styles.
The other app is Waffle, a social storytelling app where multiple people can share messages, images, and doodled pictures to a single channel. The wall — which looks like the surface of a waffle, hence the name — is gradually filled with content related to a single event, a shared experience, or just a fun time together. It’s the only one of Samsung’s C-Lab projects seen here you can try now, because a beta version is available through Google Play here.
Samsung has revealed some of its C-Lab projects before, which are worked on by employees of the company, with the possibility of becoming fully-fledged startups that operate independently should the idea prove successful.
