The end goal is of course to combine this system with a headset like the Rift and a treadmill like the Omni to offer fully immersive VR with boundless movement.
That being said, I still think PrioVR on its own has a lot to offer to games that hasn't been offered before. Imagine a fighting game where you dodge punches by actually ducking down, or a dancing game that can actually capture the full extent of your motion and respond accurately. Both of these concepts could be implemented without any fear of running into a wall, and should present a whole new way to interact with games.
The Kinect and other optical systems have a number of drawbacks we considered when deciding on inertial sensors.
Like you say, range and latency are issues, as well as occlusion, resolution of limb rotations, difficulties with multiple actors in one space, and general inaccuracies due to the system having to make a guess as to the actor's pose and position.
While the Kinect can work fine for simple games, we wanted the user's motions in game to feel natural and fluid, and to be able to extract the whole body pose even if part of the user's body is occluding another part(e.g. hands behind the back, crouched down).
Hello, my name is Steve and I am a developer at YEI.
We've worked a lot with the inertial sensing technology behind the suit, and have found it to be stable and well-suited to the task of motion capture. The biggest thing that can go wrong with this kind of technology is the presence of large magnets or ferrous objects nearby, but even in the roughest environments we've taken the current version of the suit to(mostly conference halls with giant steel beams running through them), we've always been able to calibrate it to work in the environment. There are also ways to automatically account for temporary magnetic distortions by relying on the gyroscope.
Outside of these sorts of distortions, inertial sensing has always seemed like a solid option for mocap to us, and one with a lot less potential for error than an optical or IK based system. I'd be glad to hear about any bugs anyone has experienced with inertial sensors in the past, and I can let you know what our system does to alleviate or sidestep those issues.
That being said, I still think PrioVR on its own has a lot to offer to games that hasn't been offered before. Imagine a fighting game where you dodge punches by actually ducking down, or a dancing game that can actually capture the full extent of your motion and respond accurately. Both of these concepts could be implemented without any fear of running into a wall, and should present a whole new way to interact with games.