Hello FOVEans!

This month FOVE celebrated its 2nd birthday! With that, once again, we want to share with you the awesomeness that has been going on this month.

Two years ago, Yuka Kojima and Lochlainn Wilson were working from a little apartment in Tokyo developing the very first prototype of a VR HMD that would later be called FOVE.

May 12, 2014, the paperwork was filed and the journey of our Tokyo-based startup began. Our two founders – Yuka as the CEO and Lochlainn as the CTO – started taking things forward with the mission to make VR more immersive by introducing eye tracking to the world of VR. In two years, FOVE has grown to a lively startup with over 30 employees including 19 full-time employees in Japan and the US.

The 3rd year will be the year when we can finally deliver our product to people around the world. To be honest, we’ve been so excited about things moving forward and immersed in our work that we almost missed our anniversary ourselves. Luckily we had fans reminding us!

Hardware Update

In the February update we mentioned that we’d start integrating our own optical tracking solution to FOVE headset. Together with our eye tracking technology, this is going to be another original solution.

We are using infrared LEDs that will be inserted inside the headset. The LEDs will not be visible thanks to the material we use for the cover, and therefore we get to keep the beautiful streamlined design which we don’t want to let go. The LEDs will be tracked by external IR cameras that will recognize how users move their heads. This is how it looks like from the IR camera’s perspective:

Last month was about testing users, and this month has been about testing our HMD in turn. Electronic devices aimed for consumer markets go through electromagnetic interference (EMI) testing before proceeding to mass production. Here is our tiny little FOVE prototype and a PC isolated in a massive anechoic chamber (room that absorbs electromagnetic waves and sound). It was actually a pretty cool experience, and FOVE pulled through with flying colors!

Software Update

Earlier this month we published the early version of our SDK, and we’ve been working on improving that. Here’s what’s new.

As promised, we created a Unity plugin that communicates properly with the HMD and the compositor. Simultaneously we continue working on compositor improvements for late drawing and implementing direct mode. Additionally, our SDK now supports the EVT (Engineering Verification Test) sample hardware. Due to careful design and architecture, there should be no breaking changes with existing software that is using our public SDK despite 100% of the electronic components being replaced. You can find the updated public release of our SDK and the Unity plugin here:

With the SDK released and FOVE moving forward towards mass production, we know that many of you would like to start developing games for FOVE already. Since we can’t provide the hardware for all of you at this point, we have started working on a software emulator. We can’t make any promises on the release date yet, but we want you to have it as soon as possible, so wait for it.

As with complex systems with many developers, we have been continuing to stamp out any bugs we find and as a part of this we have increased our automated test coverage, internal documentation and code performance logging. It’s not glamorous but it has to be done.

A lot has been achieved in these two years, and a lot remains to be done until we have the FOVEs ready to be shipped for all of you. There is a lot to do, but all 33 of us are ever more confident to enter the VR consumer market with a bang, and Yuka and Lochlainn are steering the company forward with the same passion they had two years ago.

Team FOVE