Hello FOVEANS! March is almost over and we’re excited to share with you what we’ve been working on this month. First and foremost…

Arigato!

We want to thank everyone who has stayed with us throughout our journey regardless of the ups and downs we’ve faced. Earlier were planning to support Lighthouse with the FOVE headset. However, we had to make the decision to drop it after all, and we wanted to be fair and offered refunds to all of our backers at Kickstarter who weren’t happy with the decision. Since the announcement, we got refund request from only a few of them, which means that the most of our backers believed in the power of our eye-tracking VRHMD and decided to stay with us! For this, we are very grateful.

This month has been exciting once again, and we are working really hard in order to meet the shipping date, Fall 2016.

Series A funding

In addition to the folks at Kickstarter, even more people decided to support us moving forward! FOVE has raised $11M from Colopl VR Fund, with participation from Hon Hai Venture Fund (Foxconn), 2020 and Samsung Venture Investment, in series A funding combined. The story was published in TechCrunch.

This gives us an amazing boost forward towards our ambitious goals, but we want you to know that getting to this point would never have been possible without early support from our Kickstarter backers.

With this newly acquired funding we concentrate on a couple of main areas. First, we will move towards and speed up mass production. Second, we will develop more and more immersive eye-tracking VR content. Third, we will take steps to strengthen our long-term research & development.

Tokyo office moved (again)

When we moved to our previous office, FOVE consisted only of six employees. The number has been steadily increasing, and now half a year later the team has grown to 14 full-time employees and over 10 interns! Not only Tokyo, but our team in LA has been growing too!

In the old Tokyo office we were consistently lacking chairs and desks, it was difficult to concentrate because of overlapping Skype calls all over the cramped office space, and even the wifi let us down frequently.

The new office is in a beautiful location and we finally have enough room (and desks!) in order to work properly.

Before:



After:



Working on Positional Tracking

The hardware team has been visiting Taiwan and China frequently discussing the product delivery in-depth. We have a good feeling about the preparations and we are definitely getting closer to shipping a FOVE unit to everyone. We’ve also been selecting external materials for the hardware and want to share some insights about industrial design with you.

In order to make positional tracking possible, we need to place infrared LEDs around our HMD. At the same time we are very passionate about our streamlined design, and that is is why we want to hide the LEDs behind an external shell. To do this, we need materials which are strong enough, cost-effective and light enough, let the IR LED light pass through, and look good with both black and white colors.

The design has proved to be a long challenge because we want to make the device white, contrasting with most other HMDs with positional tracking that are black. After loads of testing, we have finally found a good material that we are happy with.

Different materials we’ve been experimenting with:





Software update

The software team has been working on various projects. First of all, we have been preparing for the release of v0.5 of our SDK, and it is to be published next month! We are really excited about getting constructive feedback from our community so that we can be sure to have a stable API that the majority of our users are happy with well in advance of hardware shipping. We’re also investigating and implementing “DirectMode” on Nvidia and AMD hardware.

Our warmest thanks for your support once more. With these updates we are steadily moving towards shipping FOVEs to all of you, and we have confidence that this is going to be an amazing year in many ways.