Yes. With every Nimble Sense, we will include a 7-foot, flexible USB cord. The 14-foot gaming grade cable is optional.

Compared to gloves and controllers:

Gloves and controllers certainly have their place in VR input. However, we believe that there are many interactions where putting something on or even holding something in your hand is unnecessary and detracts from the user experience. This development kit is an opportunity to explore these experiences.

Compared to other markerless hand-tracking systems:

Our time-of-flight camera captures a dense 3D point cloud every 20 milliseconds that can be used to bring not only hands, but arms, legs, and even your desk into VR. The 3D point cloud of the real world is rendered exactly at the right scale and location in VR -- regardless of your IPD. The point cloud can even be shared and visualized by other users for multiplayer / social VR experiences.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyiL4zTN_uk

Some stereo systems may only provide two infrared images, rather than dense 3D geometry. It's harder to visualize a stereo image pair from a different user's perspective, and stereo also assumes a specific IPD based on the spacing of the cameras.

Finally, we believe our skeletal hand-tracking technology is the best in the world, and will be rock solid by the time we deliver on the hardware. Here is how it currently compares with the LEAP Motion skeletal tracking:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JM9oFvqJ0o

We'll be showing our current prototype and software at meet-ups all over the Bay area (SFVR, SVVR Nov 6th) and in NY (NYVR Nov 20th). If you're around, come give it a try!

Like the pmd Camboard Pico (Nimble UX), we're using the Infineon / pmd sensor chip--the photonic mixer device. However, the laser, laser optics and receiving optics, as well as the electronics differ from the Camboard Pico. We're designing and building a new camera module optimized for VR, with a much wider field of view, longer range, and higher accuracy for hand-tracking.

We are an independent company from pmdtechnologies gmbh. However, we've worked closely with pmd on both the software for Nimble UX and the hardware of the Nimble Sense.

Unfortunately, not at launch. There are things we can do to the firmware and software to prevent multiple cameras from interfering with each other, but that's not something we can promise right now.

We want to support Android in the future, although frankly, that's not a small project. It likely will involve some image processing computation on the camera itself, bluetooth over to a phone and more processing on a phone. Basically, supporting Android will involve additional hardware and software. We're at least a year out for Android support at this point, but that's certainly on our roadmap.