December Update
over 2 years ago – Sun, Dec 12, 2021 at 02:11:26 PM

Season Greetings Zapboxers!

First off, you might notice a slight change in this update and in further branding; we are officially swapping out the capital “B” in ZapBox for a lower-case one. We feel this is sleeker and a bit cleaner (and easier to type!). Going forward you can also expect to see fewer mentions of “All-new Zapbox” as this will eventually just become “Zapbox”.

While the holiday cheer is underway here in the UK, the work does not stop on Zapbox - this month we have a few milestones to share with you that are already completed, and some more work still to do before we take a short break to spend time with our loved ones.

CE/FCC Testing Completed

We have finished up the testing of the controllers and we’re happy to announce they have passed with flying colours. In addition to the documentation sign-off and ensuring all the right marks and requirements are met on our labelling and packaging, we’re in position to meet compliance on the marking required for the devices (CE, FCC and new ones like UKCA amongst others) as well as approval to be sold in specific markets (Australia).

This was a big effort by the Zapbox team as we mentioned in the previous update, and it’s great to get this across the finish line. It certainly gives us a new appreciation for all the little symbols you will see on any electronics you buy for the holidays this year!

Packaging Design Updates

In other good news, we have some images to show off the packaging designs which we've been iterating on for the last few months. Steven (Head of Zapbox Product Design) and team have been hard at work putting together a sleek and polished finish of the box and the unboxing process that goes with it. 

 After some back and forth on getting the pulp insert just right, and some intense debate around the packaging sleeve, we are getting to a place where we are very close to final approval by the Zapbox team. We're anticipating locking in the final packaging design in the next few days.

You might notice the little cross-piece accessory in the front of the internal box in the final images - that’s a new addition that is a small guide to help you align the wide-angle lens adapter on the centre of your phone’s camera lens. It’s another example of the care and thought that we’ve continued to put into every aspect of Zapbox as we bring it to production.

Physical Production Timeline

We shared our tentative production timeline in the previous update and have been working hard to keep things moving along. We're sorry to report there has been a little bit of slippage in the timings - we had hoped to have moulding complete and PCB manufacturing finished by 15th November, but our latest information is that this date has moved back by a month. Our manufacturing partner informs us these milestones should now be complete by 15 December.

We had previously said that our aim was to have manufacturing complete this calendar year which is unfortunately not going to be possible. While this is frustrating, we are very close to getting the physical production components completed and we have received back imagery of the first parts coming out of the moulds. We will soon have some test samples off the line being shipped to us for our review and feedback. We're keeping everything crossed that the units come out in good quality and only need some minor tweaks; we have been impressed with the pre-production samples from our manufacturer so we are hopeful this will be the case. After approval of those first samples we'll be off towards assembly, final QA, packing, and shipping them out before the Chinese New Year, so we can get them delivered to backers in Q1 2022. We will be making good use of all the time before you receive the product working on the software side of things and aiming to make your Day 1 Zapbox experience as good as it can be.

Speaking of logistics, we have identified our fulfilment partners for last-mile deliveries and are working to ensure a smooth shipping process once we have the product ready to ship. For our European backers - you’ll be happy to note that we will have a local fulfilment option in place for both the initial backer shipments and ongoing orders from later next year. There was a bit of a learning curve for us as a UK company importing into the EU in a post-Brexit world, but we'll have everything needed in place within the next few weeks so it shouldn't cause any delays to your shipments.

A Look to Next Year

As the year winds down, we are excited for what 2022 will mean to Zapbox. A year ago we would have liked to be in a position to have Zapbox in your hands by this point, however we feel the post-campaign updates we have made to the controllers and our commitment to deliver a PC VR streaming solution will overall offer an incredible improvement to the product you pledged for just over a year ago.

The Zappar team is chomping at the bit to get their hands on completed headsets to start to build new content for the Zapbox ecosystem, however first and foremost we want to ensure we get these out to you, the backers, as soon as possible. This journey started with you pledging and believing in our mission to democratise MR and VR and bring it to the masses, and we thank you again for your support in 2021 and beyond.

Wishing you all the best for the festive season,

  -  Team Zappar

October Update
over 2 years ago – Fri, Oct 22, 2021 at 03:05:41 AM

Hi ZapBoxers,

Sorry it’s been a little while since the last update post, but that means we have plenty to share this time around.

CE/FCC Testing Underway

We received some final prototype controllers from our manufacturing partners and they’re looking great, as you can see in the video below. The first controller shown in the video has been finished and polished up to match the final product as closely as possible (with the exception that the buttons will have a gloss finish on the final products, and the top end pieces will have the D3 marker pattern printed onto them). The second controller shown is unfinished in the final ABS material – this one is being used for the fire safety aspects of the testing process. You might also notice the wrist straps on these test units – we’ve updated the design to incorporate a loop for attaching a wrist strap but we are not currently planning to include any straps in the box.

The testing is well underway now, having started back in mid-September. Part of the test requirements that we weren’t fully aware of at the start was the need to have all compliance documentation in place, so a big thanks to all the members of the ZapBox team that have been churning out pages and pages of documentation and safety information to keep things on track.

Software Updates

The focus over recent months has been on ensuring we can deliver the physical products as quickly as possible, and this has taken priority over some of the work on the software side and the Unity SDK.

There are various parts of the software stack for ZapBox – at the lowest level is the “ZapBox Runtime” which has various responsibilities listed below, shown along with the people on the Zappar team who are working on those aspects:

• Detecting and tracking the D3 markers both for world markers and controllers (Jordan) 
• Running our “World Tracking” algorithm to provide smooth tracking updates even when world markers are not in view of the camera (Shuang / Simon)
• Connecting to the Bluetooth controllers for motion and input updates (Simon)
• Combining data from motion sensors and camera to provide the lowest latency possible for both controllers and head motion (Jordan / Simon)
• Exposing an API for engines to render content (Simon)
• Late-warping content and compositing with most recent camera frame for lowest possible latency (Simon)

As you can see there’s a small team working to deliver this core runtime component. Once that’s complete then there are a couple of dependent projects – there’s the PC VR client app using NVIDIA CloudXR (Simon) and the Unity wrapper around the runtime (Shubham). We’ll also need to move over the Zappar Platform integration which is currently used in the ZapBox app over to the new ZapBox Runtime (likely Connell or Simon). Our content team are also chomping at the bit to start building new ZapBox experiences as soon as the Unity wrapper is ready.

We’ve made good progress on many of those aspects – Jordan has completed the first version of the detection and tracking code for the D3 markers, Shuang has completed the bulk of the work on our world tracking implementation, and Simon’s got the Bluetooth client code for controller connections completed (this needed prioritising as it is also being used for QA during manufacturing and for the CE/FCC testing).

An example image from our initial D3 marker implementation, demonstrating both the controller and a world anchor being successfully detected.

D3 marker detection for the world anchors continues to work when the anchor is pretty small in the camera images.

For the missing parts we’re aiming to implement relatively quick initial versions so that we can get an early version out to our beta backers and unblock the dependent projects as we continue to work on the core runtime in parallel.

The missing parts for an initial release (essentially an API to integrate with engines, and the VR compositor) are assigned to Simon in the list above – he’s currently working with Shuang to get our World Tracking implementation out in beta for users of our WebAR platform, and his focus will then shift to pulling all the pieces together for the initial ZapBox Runtime, and then the Cloud XR client so beta backers can start streaming PC VR experiences (and hopefully Unity’s Play Mode too).

Expanding the ZapBox Team

We’ve welcomed a couple of new faces to the Zappar family over the last month as part of our continued investment in ZapBox as a product.

First up is Richard Hess, who has penned a few words to introduce himself:

Hi all - excited to introduce myself to the greater ZapBox community! My name is Richard Hess and I have joined Zappar as the Product and Sales Manager for ZapBox. My day-to-day job will be working with Simon and the R&D team on the launch of the latest version of ZapBox, establishing the product roadmap, and incorporating feedback from the community to continuously improve ZapBox and make it the best affordable and delightful Mixed Reality headset on the market. I am ecstatic to join the Zappar team and have seen first-hand how they are a world-class leader within the XR industry.

For my background - I have spent the past 12 years working in the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) industry focusing on digital transformation and technology adoption. For the past 5 years I was leading the global AR/VR/XR strategy at Nestlé, evangelising use cases across marketing, sales, supply chain, manufacturing and more. The bulk of the work was around industrializing XR capabilities that can be leveraged at scale across 170+ countries and 400+ factories, and I hope to bring that pedigree to ZapBox to scale affordable, democratized Mixed Reality headsets and products to the masses. 

I am currently based in Barcelona, Spain however I will be relocating with my family to the UK shortly to join the Zappar team in London. In my spare time I enjoy playing ice hockey, going to live music/concerts (when COVID permits!) and spending some quality time with family and friends. I’m passionate about the AR/VR industry and a “full believer” that this is the next computing platform; I couldn’t be happier joining the Zappar team and continuing to help push the technology forward.

Thanks Rich! We’re thrilled to have Rich on board in Zappar's first ever role dedicated 100% to ZapBox, and he’ll play a massive part in delivering on the promise of ZapBox in the months to come.

Secondly, we’ve welcomed Tao Jiang to Zappar’s Computer Vision team. Tao has a very strong academic background – since completing his PhD he has most recently been researching sign language detection in videos as a research fellow at the University of Surrey. Tao’s first project at Zappar is looking at the possibility of adding hand tracking support into our ZapBox SDKs.

Hand-tracking for MR and VR using only a single camera is a challenging project, and at this point we can’t give any guarantees that we’ll be able to hit the sweet spot between quality of tracking and high performance across a range of devices – this is very much a research project so we’re not yet able to commit to this being part of our future SDKs. That said, we’re really excited by the possibilities here and keen to give it a go!

Physical Production Timeline

In our previous update we mentioned a target of having the products complete and shipping by the end of Q4. We’ve now got some more detailed timing plans for the physical product production that we’re able to share with you all, which does see us hit the Q4 timeline and have products ready to ship around the middle of December:

The biggest uncertainty in the plan above is around any modifications that may be needed after we receive the first off-the-line samples in mid-November. In normal times we’d have Steven (Head of ZapBox Product Design) on the ground with the manufacturer to give the fastest possible turnaround time for tweaks and approvals, but ongoing travel restrictions mean that isn’t going to be possible.

The high-fidelity prototypes we’ve received so far give us a good deal of confidence in the quality that our manufacturing partner can deliver, but there’s always a chance some modifications will be needed when we see the final products assembled from the first mass-produced components. As ever we’ll keep you up to date with all the news as we get through these final few stages.

Rich has already started planning the logistics for the fulfilment process so we can get your ZapBoxes to you as quickly as possible once manufacturing is complete – the Amazon route that we used for the ZapBox Cardboard kits for US Developer Bundle backers took much longer than we expected to get the items into the Amazon warehouse network, so we’re hoping to find a faster option for our Kickstarter and Pre-order backers.

Until next time, ZapBoxers!

- Team Zappar

Final designs and a manufacturing milestone!
over 2 years ago – Wed, Aug 11, 2021 at 03:30:13 PM

Hi ZapBoxers,

We hope you’re all doing well. This time around we’re excited to share renders of the final product designs for both the headset and controllers, along with updates on our manufacturing progress for the first batch of all-new ZapBox kits.

Thanks to everyone who attended the ZapBox session at our AR Pioneers virtual summit just over a month ago. There was a lot of excitement and energy in the live chat and it was great to see some Kickstarter backers sharing their enthusiasm for all-new ZapBox! If you missed the live stream, or if you just want another chance to marvel at Simon’s crazy lockdown hair, then the recording is now available to watch on-demand here.

Final Designs

Now we’ve completed the “Registered Design” IP applications we’re able to share renders of the final designs for the all-new ZapBox product.

First up - here’s the final headset design:

The only significant change from the initial design is that the phone grips are no longer designed to flex outwards to grip the phone from the bottom corners, and instead simply grip around the bottom edge of the phone.

This change allows the headset to accommodate a wider variety of device sizes, both in terms of height and thickness (including most device cases). The grips are positioned so they won’t overlap the visible portion of the screen when displaying content, and have rubber inserts which protect the device screen and give a very secure hold. A further advantage is that the distance between the device screen and the lenses is fixed at the optimal distance for the best focus, regardless of the size of your device.

Next up, here are the final designs for the active controllers: 

We think these are looking pretty sweet! The majority of the design is identical for both left and right controllers which simplifies the manufacturing process and will help keep costs as low as possible. The only difference between the left and right controllers is which side has the grip switch. There will be a dark grey insert on the opposite side which will also give a handy visual indication of the side that should be in contact with your palm.

Finally we’ve made some further tweaks to the marker design for our new D3 world markers to increase the detection distance as far as possible. Here’s a video render showing the final headset and controllers together, and an image showing all the final bits and bobs you can expect with your All-New ZapBox kits:  

Manufacturing Updates

Alongside finalizing the outer appearance of the controllers ready for the design registrations, we have also worked to ensure the design is manufacturable - ensuring all of the component parts are suitable for injection moulding and that the manual assembly process in the factory will not take too long. The PCB layout has also been completed, allowing us to 3D print and assemble a complete and working prototype controller. There have been a few further tweaks to the design since this video, but it gives the general idea:

All of the required external components for the PCB for our first batch have been sourced and secured ready for the electronics manufacturing. We’ve also finished up the final firmware and provided a build to the supplier of the Bluetooth modules we are using. The modules will be flashed with our firmware and tested before being shipped to the electronics manufacturer for assembly onto the final boards.

Sticking with the controllers, the battery situation generated a bit of discussion and some questions in the ZapBox session at our virtual summit. The controllers are powered by 2x AAA batteries each, and will work with either single-use 1.5V cells or standard NiMH 1.2V rechargeable batteries. You’ll need to supply your own batteries - we looked into including them with the product but decided against it as that option added lots of additional complexity for storage and shipping along with the extra cost.

We’ve measured the controller PCB as consuming around 6mA when connected to a phone over Bluetooth and transmitting high-frequency motion and input updates. Typical AAA batteries offer around 900 mAh capacity, so we’d expect a set of batteries to give over 100 hours of usage. Compared to Oculus Quest, our controllers use the printed tracking marker for 6-DoF tracking rather than high-powered IR LEDs, and we don’t have a vibration motor, hence we’d expect better battery life than seen with the Quest controllers.

On the headset front, we received the first high-fidelity prototype from our manufacturing partners just in time to show it off in the live AR Pioneers event. This prototype was produced with a combination of 3D printing and CNC milling from the correct materials to allow us to verify the tolerances and mechanical properties were as expected. We suggested a few further tweaks based on the prototype but overall we were really impressed by both the looks and functionality of it as a first prototype.

The first high-fidelity headset prototype from our manufacturing partner, next to one of those ridiculous looking fully-enclosed VR headset things 😀

The biggest news from the factory floor is that tooling manufacture is underway as of this week 🎉. These are essentially the moulds that will be used to mass produce all of the custom-designed parts that are needed for all-new ZapBox. It’s the first step of the mass production process and marks the end of the last couple of years of design iterations and 3d-printed prototypes, so it’s a major milestone and something we’re really excited about!

Timeline Updates

We’re doing all we can to get the products completed as quickly as we can whilst ensuring they meet our quality standards. We’ve previously mentioned aiming for October for completing the production of the all-new ZapBox rewards and getting shipping underway, and although October remains an optimistic possibility, “Q4” is probably a more likely general estimate at this stage.

There are still a few moving parts on our timing plan for getting the products completed and shipped, but as soon as things settle down and work slots are booked in we will be able to share a more granular timing plan to take us to completion and shipping.

The workstream that looks likely to be the critical path for delivery is the compliance testing for the controllers. These are Bluetooth peripherals, so they need to be certified as meeting all of the relevant radio emissions standards around the world, and that testing needs to happen with “representative” products - 3d-printed prototypes aren’t acceptable.

We’re working hard to compress the timeline as much as we can for this task: we’ll be using a high-fidelity representative sample for the plastic parts so we won’t need to wait for tooling to be fully completed, we have sent flashed sample modules to the final PCB manufacturer so we don’t need to wait for the full module order to arrive, and we’ll book in and pay for the testing in advance of the test samples arriving with us. We’re also likely to kick off the mass production of controllers after we’ve verified the test samples ourselves, so we can overlap that with the compliance testing.

Many of these decisions involve a bit of additional cost and risk on our side, for example if the compliance testing identifies anything that needs to be adjusted it will be more costly for us to rectify after manufacturing has started. However we’re happy to take on these additional risks in the interests of pushing as hard as possible to get the products complete and shipped as quickly as we can.

ZapBox Cardboard Kits

Everyone who pledged for a “Developer Bundle” and were therefore due one of our existing ZapBox Cardboard kits should now have received it. NB: This doesn’t apply to most Kickstarter backers and all pre-order backers - your pledges or pre-orders only include the “all-new” product, which as discussed above is still being made and should be complete and shipped in Q4.

Contact us at [email protected] if you are expecting a ZapBox Cardboard kit but have not received it yet, there are still a few backers who are due these but haven’t filled in their address survey.

That’s all for this update. In the next one we’ll provide some more updates on how we’ve been getting on with all of the software and SDK side of things.

Until next time, ZapBoxers!

- Team Zappar

Component order news, live design reveal on Wednesday, and yet another US Developer Bundle shipping update...
almost 3 years ago – Tue, Jun 22, 2021 at 06:56:14 AM

Hi ZapBoxers,

It’s been a busy couple of months behind-the-scenes on all things ZapBox.

Active Controller Updates

We’ve continued rapidly iterating on the physical design and firmware for the new active controllers. The physical design is now finalized, and we’re expecting the firmware to be complete in the next few weeks.

Now all the design work is complete, we’ve also been working on sourcing the components for the first batch of products. Our custom PCB was designed with an IMU (the motion sensor chip) that had good stock levels at the start of the year, but in the last month or two stock of those parts has also come under severe pressure, and manufacturer lead times have increased up to around 6 months. There are effectively no IMUs from any manufacturer available right now from the main western component distributors.

The good news is we did manage to track down a distributor in China with sufficient stock for our first batch of ZapBoxes, and our manufacturing partner was able to visit the supplier to check that everything was in order before we went ahead with the purchase. As you might expect given the competition for these parts the prices have significantly increased - we’ve paid around three times the usual list price - but overall we’re thrilled that we have been able to secure these IMUs to remove that risk factor from our production timeline.

We’ve also got the order in place for the Bluetooth modules that will run our firmware and handle the bluetooth communication.

We’re now the proud owners of two full 5000-unit reels of IMUs for the new active ZapBox controllers, and are reel-y [sorry!] excited to have secured this stock given ongoing component shortages!

Final Designs Revealed on Wednesday!

We have also now completed our applications for design protection for the final headset, controller, and world anchor designs, so we’re now able to share images and renders of these in public.

Join us at Zappar’s AR Pioneers virtual summit for the exclusive world-first reveal of the final designs. Caspar and Simon will be speaking about All-New ZapBox in the session on Wednesday at 14:50 BST. Along with the final designs we’ll also be able to share a progress update on our detection and tracking algorithms for the new controller and world anchor marker designs.

All the talks at the summit will be recorded and available for viewing after the event if you’re not able to watch live, and we’ll be posting the final renders up here as a project update too, so there’s no chance you’ll miss them!

US ZapBox Cardboard Kits

We have been posting regular updates on the general project comments page on the status of the shipment of the ZapBox Cardboard Kits for US-based Developer Bundle backers.

The current status is the batch of 240 units has now been “checked in” at an Amazon warehouse in California. The individual units are still being “received”, and it seems Amazon have in their infinite wisdom decided to move some of them to alternative warehouses across the US so they will be more local for the final shipments. Unfortunately we have no control over those choices and it looks like we can’t actually request the deliveries to backers until we have sufficient inventory in the “available” state. We’ll keep posting updates on that comment thread as things move forward.

We’ve certainly learnt a lot about the ins and outs of using Fulfillment by Amazon rather than couriers for the fulfillment of ZapBox. Once the stock is in the right place it’s hard to beat Amazon on price or delivery speed, but getting the stock into the Amazon system is a much longer process than we expected, so once again apologies for the continuing delays on these deliveries.

Wrapping up

That’s it for this time, but we’ll be back soon to share the finalized design renders. We hope to see some of you at the AR Pioneers virtual summit on Wednesday for the live reveal!

Until next time,

- Team ZapBox

Powering up the controllers for all-new ZapBox with a game-changing upgrade
almost 3 years ago – Fri, Apr 30, 2021 at 12:18:35 PM

Hi ZapBoxers,

We know things have been a little quiet around here lately, and that this much-promised update post is about a month later than we would have liked. Hopefully you’ll forgive us when you see what we’ve been up to…

We’ve been slightly in stealth mode since around Christmas looking into the feasibility of a major product update to all-new ZapBox, and investigating whether we would be able to include it in the first batch of products that are destined for our awesome Kickstarter and pre-order backers.

We’re thrilled to share the news we’ve wanted to talk about for months - we’re going to replace the passive all-new ZapBox controllers that you were expecting with brand new, all-singing[*], all-dancing[*], custom-designed, battery-powered, Bluetooth Low Energy controllers: featuring on-board accelerometer and gyroscope sensors and loads of additional inputs for your VR and MR experiences.

[* The updated controllers do not actually sing or dance. Everything else is true 😀 ]

 The first fully-functional prototype for our upgraded controllers for all-new ZapBox 🎉

This is a really game-changing product update that we genuinely didn’t start considering until late December, so as you may imagine this does impact on our production timeline. We now expect to be ready to ship the first batch of the upgraded all-new ZapBoxes in October, representing an additional 6 months from our original timeline to deliver this major upgrade.

Of course you won’t need to pledge any additional funds to get the upgraded products - we’ll cover all the additional costs ourselves as an investment in the product and honour all the current orders.

If you don’t want to wait for the extra six months or have changed your mind about your pledge or pre-order for any reason then reach out to us at [email protected] and we’ll cancel your order and refund any payments without any quibbles. That said, we hope that most of you will be as excited as we are about the new possibilities that this upgrade unlocks, and that you’ll consider the delay worthwhile for the additional awesomeness that it will bring!

Read on for the why, the how, and the what - or skip on down to the bottom where you can see a cool video walking through all the features and showing off how well our functional first prototype is working right now.

Why we decided to make the change

The passive controllers depend on being detected by the smartphone camera for both motion tracking and for detecting the trigger being pressed. Relying entirely on the camera data for the controllers has a number of drawbacks - motion blur means there’s a limit to how fast the controllers can be moved without losing tracking, and the controllers are completely non-functional as soon as they’re out of view of the camera. The input latency and tracking quality is also quite device-dependent as the performance is so tightly coupled to the specifics of the camera implementations on the smartphone being used.

We knew that making the controllers active peripherals with their own motion sensors could really help with the tracking quality, but given the price point we were targeting and the additional complexity we didn’t give it too much consideration when planning the all-new ZapBox Kickstarter campaign.

What changed our thinking in December was our investigation into using ZapBox as a client for streaming PC VR content. The single trigger input on the original controller design was a limiting factor for compatibility with the existing content available in the PC VR ecosystem. Similarly the need to re-think and simplify input systems posed a barrier to making native ports of existing mobile VR apps such as Tilt Brush. Microswitches cost just a few cents each so we knew adding additional inputs would be relatively trivial after making the leap to active controllers.

In short, we realised the combined benefits of improved tracking and improved input compatibility for both streaming PC VR and ported content were too large to ignore. We kicked off a project to investigate if we could produce an active controller design that would work for both iOS and Android, not add too much to the unit costs even at the relatively low volumes we are making for the first batch, and be deliverable within a matter of months.

How we’ve made it happen

We knew that Bluetooth Low Energy would be the best choice for the wireless technology to use as it’s supported in both iOS and Android apps, and appeared relatively cheap to implement given cheap bluetooth camera remotes are widely available for under a dollar.

We didn’t have enough in-house electronic design experience to tackle this ourselves, but Simon did know the right person for the job - ZapBoxers, meet Gordon Williams!

Simon and Gordon know each other from their university days, and in recent years Gordon has run multiple successful Kickstarter campaigns around making programmable microcontrollers that run his Espruino open-source JavaScript interpreter directly on the device. Gordon’s Puck.js product features a Bluetooth Low Energy module which can be programmed to behave as any sort of BLE peripheral device, and includes general purpose I/O pins so it’s possible to hook up additional switches and buttons easily enough. The new Puck.js v2 model adds a better motion sensor chip featuring both gyroscope and accelerometer sensors. It’s a really great product and was the perfect platform for prototyping the active ZapBox controllers.

Along with using off-the-shelf Puck.js v2 devices for prototyping, we’ve also secured Gordon’s services on the project. He has been assisting us in putting together the custom design for the new controller PCB, selecting and sourcing components, and writing the custom native firmware that will expose the motion and input data in the most performant and lowest latency way possible. We’re thrilled to have him on board for this next exciting chapter in the ZapBox journey!

Detailed specifications for the upgraded controllers

The new controllers will feature an on-board accelerometer and gyroscope to allow much improved motion tracking. We’ll still be using D3 markers on the controllers to allow accurate 6-DoF tracking when the controllers are in view of the smartphone camera, but we’ll also combine that visual tracking with the motion sensor data to allow tracking much faster movement and provide a lower-latency experience. When the controllers are not visible to the camera they will still deliver 3-DoF orientation-only updates, and all the buttons and switches will still work.

Talking of buttons and switches we’ve based our choices on the Oculus Touch controllers - these are commonly used in both PC VR and the standalone Quest setup, so use an input configuration that should already be broadly supported by existing VR content.

On the front of the controllers we’ll have a 2D analog thumbstick with a “click” action, alongside 3 other simple buttons. Around the back we’ll have an analog trigger, and a grip switch on the side. All in all that should give a massive boost to the “input compatibility” with existing content.

The Oculus Touch controllers have a few features that we will not be replicating for cost and complexity reasons - we’re not adding a vibration motor for haptic feedback, we’re using a simple on/off switch for the grip input rather than the analog one on the Oculus Touch controllers, and the inputs won’t have capacitive sensing (the Oculus Touch controllers can tell when you are resting your finger on a button without even pressing it - neat, but seldom used). In practice we don’t think these omissions will have much impact on compatibility with existing content.

Enough already, show us the video!

Check out the video below to see our first functional prototype working with low latency across both iOS and Android.

We’ve also validated that we’ll be able to connect to two controllers with the same low-latency updates across both platforms, which was the final question mark that we wanted to just check off before fully committing to this product change and sharing the news with you all.

What’s next?

We’re already pretty far advanced on the final PCB designs and the product design work for the updated controller - Steven Spong and the team at Runnerfly have thrown themselves into the product design for the new controllers and have some awesome looking renders and 3D prints already in hand. When we’ve finalized the design we’ll apply for “registered design” IP protection, and then we can share those images with you.

We should have the first functional and complete 3D printed prototype in the next couple of weeks. We’ve also been working closely with our manufacturing partner to understand the impact on the manufacturing timelines and processes, and looking into component sourcing to ensure we are designing around components that have good current availability levels given some of the global electronic supply shortages happening at the moment.

Finally we’ve taken some external professional advice on the additional complexities involved with electronic products from a regulatory, compliance, and legal perspective. All of which means we’re pretty confident that our revised October shipping timeline is achievable.

What about Developer Bundle backers?

The position for Developer Bundle backers doesn’t change that much - the PC VR streaming client and the Unity SDK will support the ZapBox Cardboard products too, and Developer Bundle backers will receive early access to these as soon as they are in a usable beta state. Work on these projects has taken a back-seat to the initial active controller investigation but will now be a higher priority once again, and we’re aiming to share things with the Developer Bundle backers months before the final products are shipped in October.

We know Developer Bundle backers in the US are still waiting for their ZapBox Cardboard kits to be delivered - we hit a snag with our Amazon Seller account that needs a bit more paperwork to be resolved and that was another issue that took a back-seat in the priority list to the controller investigation. We’ll get back on fixing that now. In the interim you can download a “Print at Home” ZapBox Cardboard kit from this link and develop for it using the ZapWorks Studio integration. Your physical ZapBox Cardboard kits will arrive before we share any of the exclusive betas of the streaming client or the Unity SDK with Developer Bundle backers, so you won’t miss out there.

Wrapping up

We think the upgraded all-new ZapBox product will sit in a really interesting space on the price point vs capability spectrum, and the more we have progressed with the development the more convinced we are that this is the right move to set up the entire ZapBox ecosystem for the biggest chance of success going forward. We’re super excited by the possibilities of this new product configuration and can’t wait to get it built and into your hands.

It’s going to be a really exciting next 6 months as we work on bringing this out to market. No more secrets and no more scope creep from now on - we promise!

Until next time ZapBoxers,

- Team Zappar