project-image

All-new ZapBox: 6-DoF Mixed Reality for $40 (USD)

Created by Zappar

A radical new approach to 6-DoF MR and VR powered by your smartphone. Includes two fully-tracked controllers and a Unity plugin. Now including upgraded “active” controllers!

Latest Updates from Our Project:

AR Pioneers Highlights and Shipping Update
over 1 year ago – Tue, Nov 15, 2022 at 03:14:35 AM

Hi Zapboxers!

Another update for you to catch up on recent progress here at Zappar Towers, share some pretty cool info from our recent AR Pioneers event and further information about the shipping timeline (and one more unexpected hurdle to overcome).

AR Pioneers Highlights

Zappar’s second AR Pioneers Summit last week covered a whole host of topics from panel discussions on the Metaverse to a sneak peek at Zappar’s “next generation” of developer tooling. Of course we also had a Zapbox session with some exclusive reveals.

All of the sessions are available on demand now. You’ll need to register first here, and then you can either visit the event home to browse all the sessions, or head straight to the Zapbox session. You can also read on for some of the highlights.

Runtime and Unity SDK Updates

Simon showed a live capture of the progress we’ve made recently with controller tracking. This demonstrates both the impressive 6-DoF controller tracking work (props to Jordan), and the additional inputs working correctly, as shown in the top right hand corner of the screen.

Controller tracking running on an iPhone 12 Pro using the built-in ultrawide camera. It’s running smoothly at 60FPS - the jerkiness is just down the GIF we’ve embedded here.

We also shared a screen recording of Shubham’s work on our Unity XR Provider plugin. This shows 3-DoF controller and phone updates on Android for now - we’re currently integrating the computer vision work too so we can report full 6-DoF position and orientation data for the controllers and the phone.

What you can see here is Unity’s test scene for their cross-device XR Interaction Framework running with our work-in-progress provider plugin. This demonstrates that you’ll be able to bring existing Unity XR content across to Zapbox without too much hassle.

First build showing the controllers working with the Unity XR Interaction Framework

Simon also discussed the work going on to reduce the camera latency to make for a more comfortable experience and showed some demos of the difference this will make.

Finally there was a sneak peek at Tao’s progress on hand tracking for Zapbox - we’re now fitting a deformable 3D model of the user’s hands to the camera images so we have an accurate estimate of the full 3D hand pose. Note this isn’t likely to be part of our initial SDK (it wasn’t one of our campaign goals) and it may not be possible to support hand tracking on all devices, but it’s too cool not to share… 

An early look at real-time 3D hand tracking running on an iPhone 12 Mini.

Initial “Developer Release” Pricing

Simon went full-on Steve Balmer to announce the initial launch pricing for Zapbox for the full Developer Release in Q1 next year.

At just $79.99 (+ taxes and shipping) Zapbox will be 5x cheaper than Quest 2, and almost 20x cheaper than Quest Pro. We think that offers great value given the feature set and our ongoing commitment to bringing great content to Zapbox for free, but also means our wonderful Kickstarter and Pre-order backers benefitted from a significant discount.

If you (or your family and friends!) missed out on the Kickstarter and Pre-order phase, there’s a form to sign up for updates about the full Developer Release on our shiny new Zapbox site.

Zapbox Pool First Look

We were thrilled to share an initial glimpse at Abdi’s work on the first experience we’re building specifically for Zapbox. Windows 1.0 had Reversi, and Zapbox is going to have… Zapbox Pool!

Simon and Abdi discussing rules during a recent IRL pool session

Zapbox Pool will support a single player practice mode and also multiplayer with either remote or co-located users. Remote multiplayer games have live voice chat and cute little Zapbox-themed avatars to represent the remote player, complete with fun customizable expressions.

If you’ve got a big enough physical table then you can place the virtual table on top, and walk fully around it as you’d do in real life. If you don’t have enough space for that you can always adjust the position and rotation of the table as you line up each shot.

Here’s a little clip of a remote game between Simon and Kirk just before our AR Pioneers talk. When the opponent is taking a shot (as shown here) their device is in charge of the physics simulation - that’s why the cue appears to go through the cue ball in the other view and there’s a bit of a delay before the ball positions are synced. It's an early pre-alpha build but its already great fun to play with real replay value.

Get that beer off the table!

As mentioned previously we’ve been using Quest during development but we’re looking forward to moving development across to Zapbox as soon as we have a feature-complete build of the Unity SDK available. With the open peripheral design of the Zapbox headset and the full colour passthrough we expect it to be even better on Zapbox, and much more natural for co-located multiplayer games.

This will be a free download for all Zapbox users, and we’ll share internal testing links with backers over the coming months as we work on polishing the experience ready for release.

Shipping Update (and one more hurdle)

We were really excited to share all that progress at AR Pioneers and looking forward to pressing the button on shipping. As often seems to be the case, the universe had other ideas…

After Jordan had pulled together the code for the controller tracking demo shown above, he put batteries in his second controller to start testing with multiple controllers in view. Unfortunately he discovered the second controller in his Zapbox was faulty. It worked for short periods of time (which explains how it passed QA) but wasn’t reliable.

It's in the post back to us here in the UK (all the way from Australia…) so we can do a physical inspection but from the photos we think we know the cause of the issue and we expect it to be a very rare problem. We’ve done detailed inspections on the 20+ controllers that we have easy access to and they have all been fine.

However we want to have a bit more confidence that it’s a rare problem before we do the first batch of shipping. We’ve got a load of test equipment together and have a visit to our UK warehouse booked in on Monday next week. We’ll run tests on an entire pallet of Zapboxes (240 units, so 480 controllers). All being well, that will give us the confidence to ship out the Kickstarter and Pre-order units. Of course we’ll send out replacements if there’s anything wrong with the products when you receive them but it is sensible for us to check that’s not going to be a widespread occurrence before we ship.

The good news is Amazon has finished redistributing the stock around their warehouse networks in the US and Germany, so we have units ready to ship as soon as we want to take that step.

Until next time

Well, that was a pretty content-packed update! Expect another (shorter) one next week after our trip to the warehouse.

Thanks as always for your patience and support.


- Team Zappar

October Update
over 1 year ago – Mon, Oct 31, 2022 at 11:17:10 AM

Hi Zapboxers!

It’s been a little while since our last update, so allow us to fill you in on our recent progress and our latest estimates for the shipping timeline.

We’ve also got some news about software updates, a save-the-date for the Zapbox session at our upcoming AR Pioneers event, and a welcome for another new face on the Zapbox team.

Shipping - into the final stretch

We’ve reached a few milestones on the shipping front. The UK batch is now with our fulfilment partner here and ready to go - we’ll also be shipping the international orders (excluding US and EU ones) from the UK.

The US units required for our backers in the US are now in Amazon’s fulfilment network and have been spread all over the country to reduce the final-leg shipping time.

The EU batch was the latest boat to arrive and clear customs, but we’re happy to report that those Zapboxes are now with our warehouse partner in Germany. The kits we need for EU backers will be forwarded on to Amazon’s German fulfilment centres this week. Unlike in the US, we don’t expect Amazon to do any redistribution of the stock in Germany, so we expect those to be ready to go to backers in around two weeks from now.

We want to do the final shipping at the same time for all backers, so we’re waiting until the stock has reached all of the fulfilment centres before kicking off the individual deliveries. We’ve also been using the time to make further progress on the software side of things so you’ll have some Zapbox-specific content to play with when your Zapboxes arrive.

Locking address and closing pre-orders

Now we’re within touching distance of shipping products to our Kickstarter and pre-order backers it’s time for us to lock the address details on the BackerKit surveys. We will be doing that in the next couple of days - you’ll receive an email from BackerKit giving you 48 hours to make any final changes to the address details you have provided before they will be locked. It’s important that you check your address details are still correct - the last thing we want to do is send your Zapbox to the wrong address!

There are still a few backers who haven’t filled in their BackerKit surveys with their address details. You can always request that your personal survey link is re-sent to your email with the form here.

We’ll also be closing the pre-order store at the end of this week as we prepare for the more general post-Kickstarter product launch in the new year. If you want to order any more kits at the $40 pre-order price point, now is your last chance!

Software and Unity SDK updates

A Unity SDK is our initial target for content development for Zapbox. We’ve been exploring using OpenXR as the native API for our runtime but hit some challenges with that on iOS -  the OpenXR specification doesn’t currently define any bindings for the Metal graphics API used on iOS, and the Unity OpenXR plugin contains some closed-source components that are not available for the iOS platform.

Therefore we have for now reverted to our original plan to implement a custom Unity XR SDK provider plugin. This won’t change much for Unity content development - it will still work with the cross-device Unity XR stack and offer a straightforward way to write apps that can be built for Zapbox alongside other headsets.

We’re intending to revisit OpenXR in the future, by defining Metal bindings alongside the OpenXR working group and then collaborating with Unity to add iOS support to their official OpenXR provider plugin. OpenXR support will also ease integration with other game engines such as Unreal.

WebXR also remains an exciting cross-platform way to deliver content that we’re keen to further explore in the future, but in the short-term our focus is on delivering our initial campaign commitment to the Unity SDK.

The team have made some good progress on the native runtime work across areas such as low-latency rendering, the computer vision algorithms for detection and tracking of the world anchors and controllers, and the fusion of computer vision estimates with data from motion sensors in the controllers.

Now we’ve finalised our approach to the initial Unity SDK, Shubham has been hard at work plumbing through the controllers into Unity’s input system. Abdi has also been making great progress on some exclusive Zapbox content.

We’re looking forward to sharing much more on our progress on all these fronts in our AR Pioneers event in just over a week’s time. On which note...

Save the date for AR Pioneers!

Zappar’s AR Pioneers Summit is back for 2022 and there’s a session about Zapbox on November 8th at 13:25 - 14:15 GMT.

In the Zapbox session we’ll be sharing the very latest news and updates on the Zapbox product and software and giving you a first look at the exclusive Zapbox content that we’ll be releasing for free to all Zapbox backers. We’ll also leave plenty of time for Q&A and more general discussion.

We’d love to see some backers live in the session, but don’t worry if you can’t make it - you’ll be able to watch the recording on-demand afterwards. We’ll also post a round-up of the updates as a project update after the event.

Introducing… Kirk!

Finally, a big hello 👋 goes out to Kirk Ewing who is joining the Zapbox team as the General Manager for Zapbox.

Kirk’s a familiar face at Zappar HQ as he is one of the original co-founders of Zappar. Kirk brings decades of experience of the games industry and has been a big internal champion of our vision for Zapbox from the beginning. We’re thrilled to bring Kirk into the Zapbox team full-time to help drive the product and ecosystem forward.

Here’s a quick welcome note from Kirk:

Hey everyone, Just a quick note to say how excited I am to be joining the Zapbox team for this next part of the journey. It’s been a long road for everyone to get to this point but as we move into the new phase of Zapbox development I look forward to supporting the backers and our own devs at Zappar to see what we can build together to bring some truly amazing new content to the platform. Cheers!


That’s all for now. Thanks as always for your support!


- Team Zappar

Quick update on the Zapbox team and locking orders
over 1 year ago – Mon, Sep 12, 2022 at 05:12:52 PM

Hi Zapboxers!

Hope you all have had a chance to relax and recharge during the summer holiday period! As we move into the end of summer and into autumn, we’re gearing up for the final stretch of delivering Zapbox to you and getting you started on the world’s most affordable mixed reality headset!


Increasing the Team

We are incredibly excited to announce that we have increased the size of the Zapbox team, and welcome Abdimalik Mohamed as a full time Zapbox Content Developer, working to build some amazing mixed and virtual reality experiences to be leveraged on Zapbox. Let’s hear from Abdi himself:

I’m really pleased to have joined the team as Content Developer. Having previously developed VR games/experiences and with many years in the web industry, I hope to bring my knowledge and experience to develop amazing content, showcasing the ability and power of Zapbox. I also look forward to supporting developers interested in producing content with it. I believe that Zapbox will play an important role in democratizing XR, and I’m excited to be part of this journey.

Welcome Abdi, newest member of Team Zapbox!

We’re very lucky to have Abdi, and he has jumped straight into starting to build awesome experiences for Zapbox. To start, Abdi is building in Unity and testing on a Meta Quest 1 (to ensure good performance across a range of smartphones), leveraging the passthrough capabilities of the headset to simulate the mixed reality format we will have on Zapbox. Abdi’s using the Unity XR Interaction Framework for controller inputs, which we are intending to support directly in our Unity SDK, so bringing his work over to Zapbox should be straightforward.

Once we have an initial version of the Unity SDK for Zapbox ready for testing, Abdi will work on porting these experiences to Zapbox (which will also give us the chance to document the process and make it as smooth as possible for anyone looking to port content this way). We will release the Unity SDK to backers who purchased the Developer bundle at the same time we will be leveraging it internally to ensure we are meeting your pledge expectations and you are getting the latest developments on our end.

We’ll tease some of the experiences Abdi is building out within the coming months and will share them here with you!


Locking Orders and Shipment

As the first batch of Zapboxes have started to arrive in fulfilment centres, we will soon be moving forward locking the orders to prepare for shipment. You may receive an email from Backerkit confirming this, with a chance to change any details 48 hours after we lock the orders. This is a good chance to check if your addresses are up to date (to ensure we can ship you a Zapbox!) and make sure your payment details are correct if you have not paid yet or if you added any add-ons that have yet to be charged.

As we mentioned last month, at any time you can access your backer survey and update the address yourself at your convenience.

If you need your survey resent to you, you can have it sent again via this link:

https://all-new-zapbox.backerkit.com


That’s all for now, check back later this month for some more updates on software and content.


- Team Zappar

Quick Shipping Update - August 2022
over 1 year ago – Sun, Aug 07, 2022 at 04:30:13 AM

Hi Zapboxers!

We’re back with a bit of a short update for you, just to keep you up to date with the latest in terms of hardware shipping and delivery. Many of you have reached out to ask when exactly you will get your headsets, so we want to provide some transparency into the process.


Sail Away


In the last update we showed you that the product was completed and was waiting for pickup by freight forwarders to be sent out to different fulfilment centres around the globe. The good news is that this has taken place, and the units are now on ocean freight heading towards the countries where the fulfilment centres are located as we speak. So in other words, your headset is on its way in an official capacity.

The harder part is to say when *exactly* will your headset be delivered to your door and in your hands. As we have mentioned in the past, the entire process of manufacturing a new product in China has been hampered by not only COVID shutdowns but global supply chain disruptions as well. As such, current estimates wildly vary on timing - from 18 days to 66 days in some cases - of when the product will reach the port, pass through customs, and be received at the fulfilment warehouses. This makes it extremely difficult to give you a specific date or date range on when your headset(s) will be shipped out, and why we have been a bit vague on current timings - we are unfortunately beholden to the logistics reality that every other company is impacted by.

We’re an optimistic bunch here, so we’re hoping many of you will have your kits delivered in September, but in some cases it could take until early October. We are sorry for any delays that occur, but just want to repeat that we are committed to getting your headsets as soon as possible. Rest assured you will be the first people to get your hands on the product and fulfilling the Kickstarter and Pre-order backers is our top priority.


Make Sure Your Address Is Up To Date!

We’ve also received enquiries from some of you that you have moved since you initially backed. We’re happy to help update your address details, but it’s a good reminder that at any time you can access your backer survey and update the address yourself at your convenience.

If you need your survey resent to you, you can have it sent again via this link: https://all-new-zapbox.backerkit.com


It’s a good time to check and make sure the right address is there, or if you’ve input an address at all! 5% of backers have not given us an address, which will delay our ability to send you a Zapbox once we have them ready to ship from our fulfilment centres.


That’s all for now, check back later this month for some more updates on shipping and software.


Team Zappar

July 2022 Update - Packed and Ready!
over 1 year ago – Wed, Jul 20, 2022 at 03:26:42 PM

Hi Everyone!

It has been a while since our last update, so we are going to try to cram in as much information as possible into this one!

Locked, Stocked and 625 Cartons

We are proud to announce we have now completed the manufacturing for the initial run of Zapboxes and that the products have been given the green light after the final inspection from our independent Quality Assurance (QA) partners. Earlier QA visits identified some tweaks to the assembly process that were swiftly implemented, but overall the process was smooth and successful.


A big shout out to our manufacturing and QA partners to get it over the finish line, in what sometimes felt like a case study on remote manufacturing collaboration in a COVID-impacted world. Next time we will need to run our weekly stand-ups in the Metaverse!


QA Team hard at work
Anyone order in bulk?

From here, we are having our freight partners pick up the completed units and start to send them out to our fulfilment centres located across the different regions. Pending a smooth process with customs for importing and last mile delivery, we hope to start getting these units into your hands within the next 1-2 months. We’ve selected the shipping providers for our 3 separate destinations, and we’ll share updates on pickup and shipping timelines in future updates as they are confirmed.

As we have said before, there is no way we can thank you enough for your support and backing over the past 2 years other than to work our best to get Zapbox into your hands so you can start getting to building and experiencing mixed reality. Thank you so much for your patience!

Stacked up and ready for cartons
Palletized and ready for freight!

(It Was Indeed) AWEsome

Last time we checked in we were on the eve of the Augmented World Expo (AWE), the world’s premier XR industry conference out in Santa Clara, California. It was great to be back around the XR industry stars and experts in person for a few days, and it was great for us to be in the thick of it. We had a successful kickoff party where Zappar sponsored the bar (with the Zapparol Spritz line out the door), and had a chance to demo Zapbox and meet some of you who attended in person!

Apart from a near-miss wind incident with an umbrella that nearly wiped out the Zappar executive team, it was amazing to spend some time with those who made Zapbox possible, and some new converts who we got a chance to pitch to as well.

The bar is now open

In particular, I’m very encouraged by the large educational cohort I met. Those who are looking to use Zapbox not only for having students to experience mixed reality educational content, but to use it as a tool to train the next generation of XR developers and workers - whether as an entry-level MR device, a tool for game jams and hackathons, or as a remote learning tool out of the classroom. It was great to hear your thoughts and gave us a lot to think about how we can support you better.


Demo and a cocktail, what better combo? [the almost deadly umbrella can be seen top-right!]

It wouldn’t have been a Zappar AWE without a quick stop at Pedro’s for our AWE VIP dinner, where we also got to spend time with some friends and have an unveiling of Zapbox.

Finally, the creme de la creme… Although not directly Zapbox, Zappar itself took home not one but two Auggie awards - Best Developer Tool and Best Creator Tool for ZapWorks. What shouldn’t be understated is the same “brain trust” that is sweeping industry awards is also the ones working on the developer tools for Zapbox, so you know you’re in good hands when you get your hands on some of these tools later this summer!

The 2022 Two-Time Champ!

Software Updates

When we were demoing Zapbox at AWE we were mainly focusing on the physical product aspects, and generally showing 360-degree videos as a way for attendees to get a feel for the visual experience of the open-peripheral headset design that provides “immersion without isolation”.

Much work has been going on to get the new Zapbox runtime in shape to deliver on the full promise of the product. Although right now there’s still not a lot to show, we’ve been working across lots of different aspects of the software stack:


  • Investigating approaches to implementing asynchronous timewarp on iOS, and getting the lowest latency possible (including having a useful chat with someone on the Apple GPU driver team during the WWDC Developer Labs).
  • Modifying the previous Zapbox Cardboard app to use the ultra-wide camera on iPhone 11 and later, which works well and will avoid the need for the fish-eye lens on those devices.
  • Getting hold of some recent popular Android devices (Samsung S22 and A53) and investigating the Android low-latency display APIs, and how they interact with the variable-rate-refresh displays that are increasingly common on newer devices.
  • Reading more about the OpenXR API and engaging with the community behind Monado, an open-source OpenXR runtime we anticipate using in our runtime implementation.
  • Successfully demonstrating that Unity’s OpenXR provider plugin can be used to target the Monado runtime on Android phones by swapping the loader component.
  • Positive initial discussions about adding “official” iOS support to the OpenXR API and Unity OpenXR provider plugin with both the Unity and Monado teams.
  • Starting implementation of our own Unity provider plugin to fill in the gap for iOS before it gets more upstream support.
  • Continuing work on the custom computer vision required for high-quality tracking of the D3 markers for both the controllers and the world anchors.
  • Further work on sensor fusion and world tracking implementations which will form an important part of keeping content well anchored in the world as you move around, especially when looking away from the world anchors.

All of these pieces are coming together and as soon as they do we’ll be sure to share some more exciting visual updates to show the progress being made!


Usage survey

Hopefully we are not asking too many questions, but we have another (very short) survey to discuss some areas that will help inform our team on how you will use Zapbox when you finally receive it. This will help us ensure everyone on the software side is prioritised and focusing on what the community wants most.

You can fill out the survey here: https://forms.gle/wW6A87h4YgXQwfRu7


Have a content idea?

Do you have any idea you want to bring to life on Zapbox or want to work with us building Zapbox experiences? If you want us to partner with you on content, reach out to us at [email protected].



That’s all for now, thanks again for all the support. Looking forward to telling you a bit more about the software development roadmap and some of the first content experiences you will see in the next update.