S&S #5: Feeling the Future of Gaming

Good Morning Everybody,

Welcome back! Happy Hump Day.

I want to take a moment to thank the five new subscribers since last edition, and to give a shout-out to one of Suena’s angel investors, Matthias Grychta, who was generous enough to repost S&S #4.

If you, like Matthias, know people you think would enjoy this one, please consider sharing!

And also, if you’re reading this and have yet to subscribe, please consider doing so.

In this edition, we’ll be looking back at the batch of companies that raised during the first week of January.

Let’s get to it.

Our Companies of the Week 

57 companies raised a seed round between January 1st and January 7th in NA and EU. Of those, 41 disclosed round size. From those who disclosed, our cash cows are: 

• Credo: Developers of a platform intended to give healthcare providers a complete clinical picture of patients from the get-go. The platform provides caregivers with access to comprehensive medical records, gathering and identifying all digitally native documents and records on patients in less than 48 hours. They raised $5.25M from FCA Venture Partners and Hanna Grey VC on January 5th. 

• Heart and Paw: Operators of an integrated pet care company offering veterinary care, grooming, daycare, boarding, retail, and other services at 29 locations across the eastern United States and Midwest. They raised $5M in seed funding from Whistler Capital Partners on January 4th. 

• Fimple: Developer of a cloud-based core banking system, allowing banks to handle all core processes on a digitally native platform. The platform allows banks to create a consumer-focused banking front end, allowing for financial product integrations and customization that caters to client’s needs and financial journeys. They raised $3.5M from APY Ventures and Kuveyt Turk Portfolio on January 3d. 

• Intrinsic: Developer of a program designed to help users create personalized AI models for trust and safety workflows. They raised $3.1M from Urban Innovation Fund and YC on January 2nd. 

• Fan Hub: A loyalty platform for soccer fans that allows users to be recognized for their loyalty, earning points that can be redeemed for real rewards from the clubs they follow. They raised $3M on January 5 from undisclosed investors. 

As always, in addition to our biggest raisers, I want to highlight a few other companies I think are worth noting. 

Vasa Therapeutics is a San Diego-based biotech startup working to develop therapeutics that target the pathophysiology of cardiovascular aging. Heart diseases, including heart failure, peripheral artery disease, sarcopenia, and other age-related heart diseases are expected to kill 23 million people per year by 2030. Vasa is creating therapeutics intended to slow the aging of the heart, effectively preventing or treating any diseases that manifest as the heart gets older. 

Velo has created an AI-powered bike light to keep riders safe. The bike “copilot” uses a camera and computer vision to sense what’s going on around the rider, looping for approaching vehicles and discerning whether said vehicle is approaching safely or aggressively. In the latter case, the copilot alerts the cyclist through audible warnings and the driver through bright flashes of light to avoid an accident. 

Ceretype is building a platform centered on bringing biological visibility to the activity of patients’ brains. In every area of medicine, clear biological evidence is imperative for both diagnosis and treatment of medical conditions. Despite years of research, therapies for psychiatric and many neurologic disorders have not benefited from biological brain-based evidence. One of the primary reasons for this is that although fMRI activity has been successful in showing neural activity, translating this activity into insights has been challenging. Ceretype has created a functional brain map built to measure the mechanisms and markers of treatment on the brain, allowing for the quantification of fMRI images using proprietary algorithms to measure activity. The platform is cloud-based, and learns from each case to make measurements more accurate and democratized across patients. 

Manina Medtech is creating solutions geared towards solving issues prevalent with in-vitro fertilization. Infertility affects one in every six couples. The main solution, IVF, has low success rates, takes an average of two years to complete, and can cost couples well over $10,000. Manina is creating a solution to detect uterine receptivity and embryo-uterine synchrony to improve implantation rates and IVF success. 

Cybertruck Shmybertruck. Munro, a Scottish EV company, has created an all-electric 4x4 challenger. Their M170 and M280 models claim to be among the top in terms of reliability, battery capacity, and performance. This space is saturated, and it won’t be an easy task for an early-stage company such as Munro to cement themselves as significant players, but the cars look great, and show good promise.

Our Featured Company of the Week 

This week, we’ll be looking at the future of sensing in gaming and entertainment, diving into Mayo Clinic funded Vmocion. 

Let’s set the scene. 

The Future of Gaming 

It’s not a stretch of the imagination to say that the future of gaming lies within VR. 

As motion tracking, controllers, and headsets evolve to enable more intuitive and accurate interaction between gamers and the virtual world, and graphics continue to improve at a rapid clip, VR will likely surpass console or PC gaming as the leader in the market.

Beyond improvements to motion tracking and graphics, industry experts concur that the next technological step for all gaming, not just VR, is increased sensory experiences. 

Much of the work in this space has rested in haptic feedback technology — wearables that translate information and data provided by the game into physical touch-based feelings, further immersing gamers into what they see on the screen. 

An example of a major advancement in this space is Teslasuit, a full-body haptic feedback suite that allows gamers to feel virtual sensations on their entire body that correlate to what’s happening in-game. 

This integration of sensory feedback into video games and virtual experiences will radically change the way humans interact with digital worlds, and with the addition of haptic technology to the mix, games now can encompass four of the seven senses: Touch, Sight, Proprioception, and Hearing. 

For now, thank God, smell and taste have yet to be integrated into sensory experiences included in gaming (though this may change soon). 

Dear Scientists, let’s focus on other issues first, please. 

Vmocion is working on technology to address the seventh, less discussed sense. 

Reactive vs Active Senses: The Vestibular System 

The Vestibular system, located within the inner ear, is responsible for our sense of motion and spatial orientation. 

All of our other senses are reactive, meaning if they receive no inputs, they send no signals to the brain. The vestibular system, on the other hand, is active, constantly sending pulses to the brain based on what the body is doing. 

It includes the semicircular ear canals and the otolith organs, which detect rotational and linear movements, respectively. 

Semicircular Canals, which react to rotational motion:

Otolith organs, which react to linear motion:

When the head moves, fluid inside these structures shifts, stimulating hair cells inside the ear that convert this motion into nerve signals. These signals are sent to the brain, informing it about the body's movement and position.

The information sent by the vestibular system is integrated with that received by the visual and proprioceptive systems to give the brain the ability to maintain balance, coordinate movements, and help us understand our general position and movement within our environment. Disruptions within this system lead to dizziness, balance problems, and difficulty in spatial orientation, and are the central cause of motion sickness (and VR sickness… we’ll revisit this in a second). 

For those who are interested in a deeper explanation, check out this video by Neuroscientifically Challenged on Youtube

Artificial Motion: Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation 

So, what does all of this have to do with gaming?

Well, imagine for a second that you could feel, according to all of the biological inputs your body is giving you, like you’re actually moving with your character.

This is exactly what Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation does — the tech that’s making that dystopian, Ready Player One idea into a reality

Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation, or GVS, artificially replicates the sensation of movement through electric stimulation of the vestibular system.

GVS relies on electrodes placed on the skin near the ears that fire off small electrical pulses to the vestibular nerves, which creates the illusion of movement or changes in spatial orientation.

By altering the signals received by the brain, GVS can mimic all sensations of motion, tilt, or acceleration.

GVS, VR Sickness, and Enhanced Cognitive Response

Funny enough, GVS was first introduced as a way to reduce motion sickness in fighter pilots training in simulations.

Virtual reality sickness (VR motion sickness) is the physical discomfort that occurs when an end user's brain receives conflicting signals about self-movement in a digital environment.

If a person is stationary, having their visual senses immersed in a virtual world can lead to a mismatch between the signals produced by the vision system and vestibular system, leading to discomfort and motion sickness.

To combat this, researchers used galvanic vestibular stimulation synchronized and paired with the visual field to lessen the mismatch of sensory inputs that leads to VR sickness in flight sims. 

Further research with the same technology was performed on eSports gamers and results suggested that incorporating the feeling of physical movement enhances cognitive functions and reaction time for people in digital environments.

It’s suggested, then, that by simulating motion in gaming setups, players using equipped systems will experience an improved sense of spatial orientation and a more instinctive grasp of in-game scenarios, making them perform better than those who do not use GVS. 

So now, we have a pretty clear opportunity that has emerged. GSV not only eliminates VR Sickness, it also enhances gameplay performance. 

Not to mention, it’s freaking cool, and pretty clearly can be turned into something consumers end up demanding out of their future gaming systems.

That’s what VMocion is betting on, at least.

VMocion

In collaboration with the Mayo Clinic, Vmocion has created a consumer GSV device built specifically for gaming and virtual environments.

By using this technology, participants will be able to match what they see in-game to what they feel in real life.

Imagine running through a Call of Duty map and feeling like you’re sprinting.

Imagine playing Gran Turismo and feeling the g-force on every turn.

Their 3V product is an exclusive licensed version of the technology developed from Mayo Clinic’s GSV patents, which was developed from extensive medical research by Mayo Clinic's Aerospace Medicine and Vestibular Research Laboratory team.

In other words, as of now, VMocion is the only company capable of producing, marketing, and selling this technology. If the demand is there, they can fundamentally change the gaming market alone.

Vmocion’s GSV device can be integrated and paired with any existing operating system at both the software and hardware level, making it compatible with all current systems regardless of make or model, and they’re currently offering the tech through licensing to console and VR manufacturers.

Closing Thoughts

It might be a little bit dystopian, but for a second imagine that, likely within the next decade, you can be playing games with a fully immersive headset, haptic feedback suite, and GSV-based motion simulator.

It will feel, in every way, like you’re actually in the virtual game.

It goes without saying how insane that is. Very excited (nervous) to see what other things develop from tech similar to this.

See you next week, folks.