YEI’s 2nd attempt at Kickstarting it’s wearable motion control technology, PrioVR, has been greeted warmly, with it’s new (albeit lower) goal being reached in less than 24 hours of launch.
The Suit Is Back
It’s been a long road to Kickstarter success for YEI Technologies, the inventors of the PrioVR motion control / capture system. We’ve been following them for some time now and were a little upset to see them fail to reach their last Kickstarter campaign’s goal back in September of last year. Defiant, Paul Yost, CEO of YEI, proclaimed to us later that PrioVR was “too good to give up on” – the promise was that YEI would regroup and give the campaign another shot very soon.
Last month at we ran into Paul again at CES 2014 and not only were the team’s spirits seemingly rejuvenated, the latest version of the PrioVR motion control suit was being demonstrated and was garnering lots of very positive attention. Paul once again vowed that they’d be back with another Kickstarter, early in 2014.
Last week, that campaign started and, with a more modest (down from the last campaign’s $225k) but still healthy target of $75,000, met the goal within 24 hours. It seems that previous backers were quick to turn out in support once again. Also, the new Kickstarter video – featuring the new Zombie game built with PrioVR suit support, and a reworked set of reward tiers, seems YEI have managed to make things a whole lot more attractive to backers this time around.
The suit is of course an intriguing prospect for gamers, but it’s the ability to offer an extremely low-cost but effective motion capture system for independent developers that offer the campaign a boost in my opinion. In any case, with 43 days of the campaign left to run as of writing, the YEI crew are home and dry. It’ll be interesting to see how much beyond the campaign’s previous finishing total of $113,199 the team manage to raise and what stretch goals they may announce to maximise on the campaign’s success.
Backers can look forward to receiving their rewards shipping around June this year.
Full Disclosure: YEI Technology is running a PrioVR ad on Road to VR.