Human connection in a virtual world: FOVE reads subtle eye movements for more precise control in VR. Missed the FOVE campaign? Head over to GetFOVE.com to get yours! Thanks to all of our Kickstarter backers for making our vision happen!
With the first FOVE 0s on the way, we’d like to announce a call for SteamVR beta testers, and tell you how to track your FOVE 0 delivery.
Call for Steam beta testers
Our SteamVR support will launch as a beta. So far we have only been able to test the FOVE 0 driver for Steam internally, but with the amount of users increasing suddenly, there are bound to be some bugs and glitches. Before making the driver publicly downloadable, we’d love to have as many of you as possible registered as beta testers. Anyone with a FOVE 0 can sign up, and the more feedback we receive after the launch, the faster we will be able to make the appropriate fixes to get the driver running smoothly for everyone.
If you wish to contribute as a beta tester, please fill in the form below and we will send you your access key by email.
Please note that you will need your headset’s serial number to complete the form, so remember to sign up as soon as you get your FOVE 0 to get started with Steam.
Tracking your FOVE 0 shipment
To ease the pain of waiting, a couple of words about tracking your FOVE 0.
First, a recap. The headsets were successfully shipped from our factory January 8, and after a bureaucratic journey they reached our logistics center this week. There the packages have been prepared for delivery and finally a certain FedEx is taking custody of them starting from Monday. FedEx follows their standard shipping times and the headsets’ journey should be straightforward from there on. Therefore, the first Backers can expect to receive their headsets next week!
We are more active on our other social media channels, so we'd like to ask you to send your questions and comments either on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram
Because of the huge amount of headsets, they can’t all be sent in one day, so we have been told that the shipping load will be divided to several days. Kickstarter Backers are naturally first in line, and after that our logistics partner will move on to pre orderers.
After each day’s delivery, we will receive the tracking information from our logistics partner. When we do, we will email the tracking numbers to each one of you right away so that you can see where your FOVE 0 is at any given time.
It was a bigger hassle than we expected, but finally the worries about deliveries are behind us and we thank you all for your patience.
Team FOVE is now working super hard to bring a smooth user experience for everyone receiving their headsets these coming weeks.
As we have mentioned in these past updates, we will move our communications to our other social media channels. We will passively monitor Kickstarter for a couple of more weeks, but we hope to talk to you more on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. We’d love to hear from you as much as possible and are looking forward to your feedback!
FOVE 0 is awesome already, but we want to make it even better - with your help.
2016 has been an amazing year. Before kicking off the next one, let’s take a look back and recap the main stuff that happened.
JANUARY
Our team had grown from 3 to 11 people during 2015. This awesome group of FOVE employees kicked off the year 2016 and has been working hard ever since in the core of FOVE, creating a culture of awesomeness:
Team FOVE in the beginning of 2016
FEBRUARY
We invited people to try FOVE prototypes and gathered feedback regarding the headset fit and design. We had to make the judgement call which delayed the deliveries from Spring 2016 to the end of the year, but we regrouped with an updated roadmap and loads of fighting spirit!
Throughout the year we've held user tests talking with FOVE fans, and developing our hardware and software
MARCH
We successfully raised $11M in funding from Colopl VR Fund and were able to expand our operations. We started hiring more talent to take FOVE forward and moved to a new office in Gaienmae, Tokyo.
We moved to a new office in Tokyo
APRIL
Our CEO Yuka Kojima took the stage in Games & Media Summit at Tribeca Film Festival and talked about the future of storytelling. Gaming is obviously big in VR, but we believe that eye tracking is totally going to change how we interact with anything in virtual worlds within the next few years.
Yuka gave a presentation about the future of storytelling
MAY
In May, we released our Software Development Kit to the public and finally people were able to start developing eye tracking content for FOVE. On the hardware side, we tested our headset rigorously. For example, FOVE went through electromagnetic interference (EMI) testing in an anechoic chamber.
FOVE 0 went through various tests during the development stage
JUNE
Testing was successful and we got really encouraging feedback from people who tried our new prototype in Tokyo. We made a decision we are very happy with and we announced the new industrial design of FOVE 0 on Kickstarter.
We introduced the new industrial design of FOVE 0 in June
JULY
We tested the waters with the newly designed headset right away. We participated in conferences such as Comic-Con and SIGGRAPH2016, having great conversations with VR enthusiasts and industry insiders.
We've done our best traveling to different conferences and showing FOVE demos to VR enthusiasts
AUGUST
We finished some new eye tracking demos for FOVE (it was about time - we had been showing the same ones since the start) and participated in Tokyo Game Show showing them to the visitors. Project Falcon by REWIND was a great hit and really shows the potential of eye tracking in gaming:
SEPTEMBER
While preparing for pre orders that would start soon, we had a major update on our brand concept. We published a new beautiful video too:
OCTOBER
We had a busy month traveling in conferences around the world building connections and showcasing the new FOVE. In the meanwhile, our hardware and design teams were wrapping up with the headset and were already designing the box FOVE would ship in. Almost there!
This is the box FOVE 0 will ship with
NOVEMBER
We opened pre orders of FOVE 0 to the public, and our CTO Lochlainn Wilson together with others from Team FOVE answered all the questions the interned had in store for us on Reddit.
Lochlainn and others answered a bunch of questions on Reddit
DECEMBER
The year is nearing the end. FOVE 0 is ready to ship and the headsets will depart from our factory January 8. Behind all these Kickstarter updates is our amazing team that has grown from 11 to 25 full-time employees this year. With this team of amazing people we will take on new challenges and work our hardest to make 2017 the year VR really takes off.
Team FOVE in the end of 2016
Thank you for your support again this year, and have an amazing New Year!
Finally, we have a shipping date for you - hooray! However, due to a couple of inconveniences, it is about two weeks later than previously anticipated. We’ve been telling you that FOVE 0s will ship by the end of the year, and we apologise for not being able to just achieve that. Still, this is good news:
FOVE 0s will ship from our factory the 8th of January, 2017.
Delivery time depends on your country, so prepare to give it a couple of weeks. Having a shipping date set means that the product is finally ready. From our part, it would actually be ready to be loaded in trucks and delivered. Take a look at this beautiful sight:
First batch of FOVE 0s finally readied for delivery!
We have two main reasons why we can’t send them to your doorsteps just yet. First of all, a product like ours needs various certifications, especially safety-related ones, before it can be freely shipped worldwide. Even though we got what we needed from most countries in time, bureaucracy in some countries took longer than we expected. Secondly, the end-of-the-year timing we planned didn’t go as we hoped. Our logistics ended up using some ports and locations that aren’t operating around New Year’s. We would have been fine if the certifications were obtained in time, but failing to do that the whole shipping chain got delayed a little.
We know many of you had faith that you would be unboxing a FOVE 0 for Christmas. Because that is unfortunately not happening, we wanted to give you the second best thing. We’ll do it for you so you’ll know what to prepare for!
Introducing Tomoko who joined me, Max, for this update to unbox FOVE 0 for you guys
This is what the box looks like. White and shiny
The first thing you’ll see inside is the headset with it’s attached cords
The new industrial design feels polished and durable, and only weighs about 500 grams
Box within a box! The position-tracking camera is packed separately like this
Inside the camera kit you’ll find the camera, tripod, USB-cord and a thicker replacement face cushion
This is what you too will get to unbox in January!
We are heading towards the end of the year and towards the end of our Kickstarter journey. We will get back to you once or twice more with Kickstarter updates. All of you who wish to stay updated on our movements even after that, check out our blog, Facebook and Twitter. Starting from next year those will be our main channels to the outside world.
First, an important reminder! Everyone who hasn’t filled in the address survey we sent through Kickstarter in November, please fill it in by tomorrow, December 1st, 23:59 JST (6:59 AM PST). If we don’t get your address in time, your delivery will be delayed and without knowing your addresses, there is unfortunately nothing we can do about it. We are drafting an update about the shipping details at the moment. We wanted to include it in this update, but we are still working out some last details so we will post it separately next week. We know you are all very eager already, but because there are a lot of variables at work with international shippings of this scale, we ask you to hang in there just a little longer.
Moving on to the updates. Wow, what a month we’ve had again! In addition to opening FOVE 0 pre-orders to the public, this month we attended a lot of events, have been steadily moving towards delivering the headsets, and have of course been thinking about the future of the company after shipping FOVE 0s. There are so many things to be excited about! Here are the highlights from November.
Events and activities
The pre-orders for non-Kickstarter backers (also for you Backers who regretted getting only one headset!) went live November 2nd. Check out our pre-order site here if you still haven’t! We couldn’t be happier for all the orders and attention we’ve received and keep on receiving every day. It is a good indication that people believe in the importance and potential of eye tracking for the future of virtual reality, and have faith in our company. Being a pioneer in this area is an important position to be in and we are honored to, in a way, set the industry standard.
In connection to us opening pre-orders to the public, we attended a bunch of events this month. Here is a short summary of each.
VRDC
The Virtual Reality Developers Conference in San Francisco is one of the biggest events of the VR industry in the US. The atmosphere of the event felt similar to what Tokyo Game Show was in Japan. The attendees, however, were mainly industry-insiders and media representatives rather than consumers. We had a lot of fun and were busy as always, and had the pleasure of meeting and demoing FOVE to many virtual reality influencers.
The setup of FOVEs booth in VRDC
NYC Media Lab
FOVE participated in NYC Media Lab event at Viacom in Times Square. We were on a panel called "technology horizons" with some other people doing cutting edge stuff on AR, tools suites, and what NYU Media Lab called "a sort of Holodeck" that they are working on with Ken Perlin. Since the event was on the East Coast, a lot of the attendees had never tried the FOVE headset before. It was also the first time many of them saw how foveated rendering works in reality, and we think we had the longest lines of the event by far!
Jim loves showing our foveated rendering demo to people - it always gets the wows
G-Star
We recently announced on Kickstarter that we partnered with TechnoBlood Korea and are working on a VR platform for Internet Cafes titled “Virtual Gate”. Millions of users in Asia will be able to try out our VR headset easily, and we think this will be an important step in making VR more mainstream. G-star 2016 was a lively event in Korea where we got the chance to demo the project for many attendees, and give out some teasers regarding our collaboration with Sword Art Online.
The Virtual Gate booth in G-Star 2016
Some visitors got a teaser of our upcoming collaboration with Sword Art Online
TechCrunch Tokyo
Everybody loves TechCrunch, and we got the chance to attend TechCrucnh Tokyo 2016 this month. We were busy showing our visitors some of our newest demos, including Project Falcon by REWIND (it’s mind-blowing by the way), and we also collected user data from VR enthusiasts interested in helping us out in final stages of the eye tracking software development.
Reddit AMA
Any self-respecting tech company can’t ignore the front page of the internet. That is why we pulled an Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) on Reddit. Our CTO Lochlainn, together with our Creative Director Scott and Lead Software Engineer Marcus, personally answered (almost) all the questions the internet had in store for us. It was an intensive session, and we hope you guys got a lot out of it. If you missed the live session, you can read all the questions and answers here.
Our CTO Lochlainn getting ready for Reddit AMA
All-hands
Every month we try to have an “all-hands” meeting for FOVE employees. In these meetings we go through the roadmap of the company, welcome new members to the team and discuss the future of the company. Because we’ve been insanely busy these past couple of months, it had been awhile since our team last got together physically in the same place. We flew our software team to Tokyo to be able to work more intensively around the pre-order launch, and the timing was perfect also because they were able to attend the all-hands meeting. However, we noticed that our meeting space wasn’t big enough for our team (which has grown to more than double its size during the past year!), so we had to use the event-space in our office building for the purpose.
Currently, FOVE has an amazing team of 25 full-time employees and 18 interns and part-time contractors. Here we are in all our beauty:
(Almost the whole) Team FOVE
Hardware news
We can proudly say that there is not much to comment on the hardware side considering FOVE 0 at this point. Since the headset is basically ready, let’s make this section a recap of FOVE’s evolution.
Here you’ll see a lineup of FOVEs starting from the most recent model on the left to early prototypes on the right. We have gone through hundreds of material samples, and chosen only the best for FOVE 0. The parts are custom-made based on the feedback we have gotten from numerous users since the beginning. In the picture you can also see how for example the straps have evolved over time to accommodate as broad user base as possible. All the changes over time have solid reasons in wearability or functionality, and every one of them has been carefully considered.
The evolution of FOVE (so far)
Below you can see some of the recent changes more clearly. Based on the user feedback and experiences we got from our second engineering sample, we experimented with different face cushion designs. We reselected the materials used and changed the width and thickness of the cushion to improve comfort and wearability. We also added a black infrared-transparent cover around the lenses to make the headset look more polished.
Latest stages of development. Before.
Latest stages of development. After.
This is how we have moved forward. One issue at a time and carefully considering and testing all the changes. And that is how we have reached the current state, which is called FOVE 0 - and which you will be able to try out soon.
Software news
We’re getting ready to release v1.0 of our SDK and runtime. We made the decision to remove backwards compatibility at this point so that we have a clean start and moving forwards from here the maintenance will be reasonable. There aren’t too many changes for most people, deprecated functions have all been removed and a few things have been renamed. We’ve been learning a lot over the last few months and we think that we have a system that we can maintain with our modest software team.
Right now we’re making decisions about what features are ready for release and what needs a little more work or polish then we do our feature freeze and then turn all of our focus to testing. We’re already testing as much as we can internally but we would like to also enlist the help of our backers as beta testers. The FOVE software team is going to be asking for crash logs, debug info, and even sample captured data to try and resolve any issues you may encounter. Sending data will be entirely opt-in but it will really help a lot in making sure that our software is as optimal as it can be, so we really hope that you will consider it.
We have a little more work making our currently “usable” software into something that could be considered “user friendly” - we haven’t really needed to automatically check for SDK and firmware updates when they’ve been our own machines - and a few other configuration options that we would like to make into user options. Welcome to the Kickstarter enabled, interactive software development process! We look forward to working with all of you.
That’s it folks. As we mentioned in the beginning, you can look forward to a separate update on shipping details that we plan on publishing next week. We are nearing the end of our Kickstarter journey, but we’ll be there with you as you all get your headsets set up - and you’ll be in our minds forever for helping to make this amazing project come to life.
Halloween is at the door, and after that we’re already headed towards the end of the year. Time really flies - like the FOVE 0s that will soon be loaded into airplanes and soaring through the skies to all of you around the world.
Here is our monthly update once again. We bring you news about events we’re attending, we’ll update you on the stage of FOVE 0’s mass-production, and we have our usual software update for our development-minded Backers. We hope you like it!
Event updates
Let’s start with something we did for the first time and got a really nice feedback from. Our Director of Business Development, Jim, was interviewed by Robert Scoble on Facebook live. It was our first Facebook live, and it was fun! Our CTO Loki is also planning to do an AMA on Reddit a few days after VRDC, so stay tuned on our social media channels! We’ve been trying out different things online recently. What would you like to see more in the future? Would it be more content with a hint of personal touch such as Facebook Live sessions, or maybe some backstage pictures and videos from our office, or perhaps more technical stuff for you engineer-minded Backers? Let us know in the comments!
Jim, reinforced with Abhi from our Silicon Valley office, continued to beautiful Bellevue, Washington in the northwest of the U.S. to take place in the 1-day Immerse Technology Summit. This event was planned near Valve’s “Steam Dev Days” in order to bring together some of the brightest minds working in VR right now. The Summit focused on more enterprise-related companies and FOVE fit right in. We had a great time meeting with everyone from analytics companies to indie game devs and guys selling “4D chairs” that move and tilt when you sit in them and use VR. It was a successful trip and we got to demo to over 50 new FOVE fans!
Abhi demoing FOVE to Immerse Technology Summit visitors
VRDC in San Francisco. In a way we consider VRDC our ”launch event” since - as you all hopefully know - we will start pre-orders November 2nd at 8:00am PST! If you still haven’t, make sure to sign up for our email list on our website to get the latest information!
Exploring Future Reality in New York. FOVE has been invited to participate in a panel and demo our latest headset at the second annual VR/AR event hosted by NYC Media Lab. If you live in New York, come on out to the White Box Theater in Times Square on November 10th and give the FOVE a try.
Be sure to put these three events in your calendars! Let’s move on to hardware and software updates.
Hardware update
Things are moving forward steadily on the hardware side and we are in the final pre-production stage. This means that Kickstarter backers will soon be receiving their headsets. This final stage is about testing the design and functions before starting mass-production. Our hardware team is visiting our factory almost every week making sure that everything runs smoothly.
In terms of hardware updates, we realized that we’ve come so far already that we actually have a sneak peek of our packaging design for you:
What’s in the box?!
Launching a product is really exciting. Also stressful, but mainly exiting! We’ve rigorously tested the headset since early prototypes, received feedback from lots of users and implemented necessary changes. Now, our first fully functional FOVE 0s and all the accessories are almost out of the production line, packed and ready. Hold on just a little longer - we’re almost there!
Software update
As many of you have noticed, we have been working on our new website that we launched around the time of the last update. We opened our Lab page for early developers, so you should check that out. It replaces the GitHub repository that we’ve used until now. In addition to the up-to-date version of our SDK, it contains a link to our Developer Forum as well as resources such as a firmware upgrade tool, unity plugin and unity samples.
This month we’ve been busy supporting our developers and pulling a whole bunch of final pieces together as we go heads down toward the final push to launch.
We are building a configuration tool to help you manage your headset better with an intuitive interface. We have been improving the quality of compositor and client, and frames are now handled more smoothly with fewer frames being dropped. We’ve been supporting our users to do firmware and runtime version checks and updates. All so that you’ll have an amazing first contact with your FOVE 0!
Being busy maintaining what we already have out there, we’ve been pushing our functionality with OpenVR/SteamVR forward. FOVE 0 should be able to support those platforms any day now. Additionally, we have also been working on OSVR support, and it is almost functional too.
That’s it folks. We have two monthly updates left this year. If you’d like to receive updates from us more frequently, don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and Facebook too.
