Hello FOVEans!

August is almost over and we hope you’ve had a great summer. For us it has truly been the ”Summer of VR” (pun intended – we’ll get to that in a bit). We’ve taken big steps on the hardware side, attended and planned some more events, and conducted another user test in Tokyo to improve our eye tracking. Things are looking bright and we are having a nice flow. Here are the highlights of this month. Enjoy!

Our Team USA attended the Summer of VR at the Computer History Museum in San Jose. We showed some of our demos to the visitors for a couple of hours and once again enjoyed the great reactions and feedback we got. Three of our most used demos have taught us a lot about what people like about FOVE’s technology. First, the reality-aspects seem to delight and amaze. Experiencing depth of field in a game or seeing (or rather not seeing because it feels quite natural) foveated rendering at work always gets the “wow”s. And second, well, shooting laser out of your eyes at exactly where you are looking is pretty darn cool.

So we’ve toured around the USA, but we must not forget Japan! FOVE is attending this year’s Tokyo Game Show with an enthusiastic crew, and the timing couldn’t be better. We’ve been developing new content on the side in order to show people what you can do and experience with FOVE, and we are finally locked and loaded with a couple of new demos. We are looking forward to seeing as many of you as possible by our booth at TGS! We will be happy to answer any questions you might have and show you new awesome content. Here is a little teaser what people in Tokyo have a chance to experience:

We love it that we finally have something new to show you guys. However, since our main focus is building and developing the headset itself, we have taken some new initiatives too. We have started talking to some of the most innovative indie developers in VR. We’re putting together some very interesting demos with them, many of which focus on the narrative implications of eye-tracking. We’ll have more to talk about in the coming weeks as we head towards a big event later this Fall.

Hardware update

Two weeks ago there was a fireworks display in Tokyo, and we got to enjoy it from the roof of our office. The timing of the event was spot on – we had just received our first batch of ES2s (Engineering Sample 2) from our factory and it felt like the whole city was celebrating with us! Is this how parents feel like when their baby is born?

This month our hardware engineers spent most of their time at our factory in China. Otsukaresama! That means something along the lines “thanks for your hard work”. We have established the assembly line for the headsets, opened molding, made many FOVE-samples with varying configurations and solved a bunch of challenges along the way. It has taken a lot of time to set this all up. To be honest, earlier this year we were sweating with many hardware-related issues and wondering whether we can get everything done on schedule. However, our hardware-heroes returned with confidence, lots of good news, and of course pictures. Here are a couple of the best ones:

Software update

We have not been slacking off on the software side either! We designed, organized, and almost completed another user test to improve our eye tracking. Until now, most of our testing has been conducted with Japanese users, and this time we focused on recruiting a more international group of participants. They say that “the eyes are a mirror of the soul”. We don’t know about the soul-part but we can confirm that bright blue eyes with contact lenses are actually almost like mirrors when looked through the cameras located inside our headset. Obviously FOVE needs to work flawlessly on every user, so these individual differences are what we are studying right now to make the eye-tracking more stable and even better than it is now.

Eyes aren’t the only thing we are tracking. As you know, we’ve been developing our own positional tracking system as well. It has improved a lot from when we first started developing it, and everything is working well.

Our software team is working hard to support all of you who are supporting us by developing. Here are the main things that are going on with the SDK development. As the ES2s are starting to flow in our office, our SDK is now supporting the ES2 too. The emulator that we talked about last month is also ready to be released this week, so look forward to that! Next thing on the list is support for OpenVR. We are starting to work on that next to have as many doors open for you as possible. Since we have a lot going on with the software side all the time, we’ve been improving our backwards compatibility – supporting old clients while making those updates that make new information and features available.

That’s about it for now. End of August marks the end of summer, but when it comes to FOVE, things are only starting to heat up. Stay tuned for more updates!

Team FOVE