Since our successful Kickstarter campaign last July, we’ve been working very hard to ship the FOVE developer kit to everyone by spring. As we moved forward from the prototyping stage to the mass production stage, the team has been working to solve some very difficult problems. As you all know, 2016 is a hot year for virtual reality, making us eager to ship FOVE as soon as possible. At the same time we want to improve the quality of the headset as much as possible so that we can prove the power of eye-tracking for the entire VR industry, and so that you can have the best product our little startup has to offer.

Unfortunately, this has forced us to move the shipping date from spring 2016 to fall 2016.

First of all, we sincerely apologize for underestimating the mass production scheduling. Kickstarter backers are the ones who keep Team FOVE moving forward, and we cannot appreciate enough your support from all over the world.

Developer kit shipment has always been our first priority. As to the cause of this delay, we'd like to share the biggest problems we've faced, and how we intend to solve them.

Difficulties we have faced

One of the biggest challenges we faced is sourcing appropriate parts - especially optical components such as IR LEDs, lenses, and OLED displays - that integrate into our unique eye-tracking systems. The biggest obstacle was when the production of our prototype's camera sensors for eye-tracking was discontinued. We needed to find an alternative, which works in stereo with enough brightness and custom lenses with appropriate FOV.

FOVE takes design seriously. While traditional gaming gadgets tend to be black, plastic and bulky, we wanted to reinvent this design by creating a white, streamlined, sleek design as the gateway to the virtual world. While we were able to manufacture this design with a 3D printer during the prototyping stage, mass production required us to make several modifications. Although it wasn’t easy, we have done our best to maintain the original vision.

The last one is Lighthouse integration into our development kits. As soon as Valve announced its open licensing policy for its high-end positional tracking system to 3rd party HMDs, we immediately saw its potential and decided to join the community - announcing Lighthouse integration. As you may know, Valve has also extended its shipping date which directly affects our own shipping date.

Positional tracking

In order to avoid further delays we are making the painful decision to drop Lighthouse support for this Kickstarter release. We will instead integrate our own optical tracking solution.

FOVE’s biggest mission has always been to make high-end eye-tracking technology widely available to VR enthusiasts and consumers as soon as possible. It was a difficult decision to make, but as we weighed our priorities we decided that our best contribution to VR is still our eye-tracking technology. This is where we have decided to prioritize our resources. Make no mistake, we do not intend to provide an inferior positional tracking system - the system being adopted will be sufficient to maintain an immersive experience, especially in conjunction with our awesome eye-tracking. We still believe that Lighthouse is one of the best positional tracking solutions out there, and while we cannot make any promises at this time, we do still hope to integrate Lighthouse into future models of FOVE. This difficult decision was made solely such that we can get our eye tracking into your hands as soon as possible. Considering production speed and the ever-changing market situation, we believe it to be the right decision.

We understand that some of you may have backed us more for our Lighthouse support than our eye tracking, and this news may be an even bigger disappointment. In light of our delay and our decision to drop Lighthouse, we will issue refunds for all who request them for 30 days from today. If you are among this group, please send us a message by 11:59 PM on Mar 20th, 2016 PST and we’ll get that taken care of. Just click on the 'Contact me' button on the FOVE creator profile page and let us know. We will miss you, but we want to do the right thing, and hopefully you can join us again in the future.

To be clear, we have NOT lost any confidence in our product. We believe FOVE will provide the highest-end eye-tracking solution in the VR industry, and we promise that you won’t regret backing us. Yes, we have been delayed; but we are steadily progressing towards our end goal. This decision was solely made out of respect and appreciation for you - our backers.

Roadmap ahead of us

This is the current roadmap for FOVE developer kit shipment along with several hardware mass production milestones.

In addition, we want to add some more milestones along the way.

Pre-order: We are still planning to open post-kickstarter pre-order some time after EVT.

SDK release: Although we had to push back our hardware shipping schedule, our software is still fairly on-track, and we want to release our SDK in April 2016 such that VR developers can start working with it as soon as possible. We are very eager to launch official online forums for discussion between developers, to have hackathons in different cities with early developer kits, and to build the community - together with you.

On-site FOVE experience: As many of you have noticed, we’ve announced our alliance with Technoblood to launch the FOVE VR experience platform in internet cafes in Japan and South Korea. The partnership will enable us to reach 7000 stores with 25 million monthly users. We hope to expand such opportunities as much as possible after the shipment to Kickstarter backers has been completed.

Shipping: Shipping to our Kickstarter backers remains our first priority. First units will ship to our early-bird backers, followed by other backers in the order that you backed us -- it’s only fair that earlier backers will get their headsets first. We will then move on to pre-orders, before finally delivering to other distribution channels.

We have mentioned in various media that we have great plans for the long-term future of FOVE. R&D for features such as facial tracking, more powerful foveated rendering, and even more accurate and robust eye-tracking is already underway (using some additional funding we have received). Yet, by far the biggest focus for us right now is to ship our first developer kit to backers as soon as possible.

We will make sure to update - and communicate - with all of our supporters as much as possible. Thank you again for your support,

Team FOVE