July was going to be ‘the month of VR’, with the expected arrival of several major virtual reality accesories from previously successful Kickstarter campaigns, along with the Oculus Rift DK2. PrioVR, the motion capture suit for VR, is the latest to announce a delay in shipping. A new video shows briefly demos that will ship with PrioVR and serve as a starting point to familiarize developers with integrating the system into their games.
While delays are disappointing, I can’t recall a Kickstarter campaign that I’ve followed that actually hit its ship date. YEI’s PrioVR VR motion capture suit follows Sixense’s STEM motion input controllers, and the Virtuix Omni VR treadmill with an announcement that they won’t be hitting their original deadline. YEI notes in a development update on Kickstarter:
Many of you have been asking about shipping dates so I thought it best to address the question directly. The short answer is that we will not be shipping the suits in June.
I know this will come as a disappointment to many of you, and some of you may be saying, “great, another Kickstarter delaying their shipping.” Our decision didn’t come lightly, but more than anything, it’s because you deserve a quality product and we don’t believe the product we can ship next month will meet that level of quality. We have a strong engineering team and we hold our work to the same high technical standards that you expect, so rather than rush this out, we want to make sure it’s something we can stand behind.
The update goes on to say that PrioVR is expect to ship “a little later this year.” PrioVR had one of the shortest planned turnaround times—they had anticipated shipping in June 2014, just three months after finishing the Kickstarter at the end of March.
Along with that unfortunate news comes a brief video showing some of the alpha demos (developer examples) that will ship with PrioVR:
YEI says they are working behind the scenes with select developers to ready additional content for the launch of PrioVR. If you’re working a project that could use PrioVR, you might want to get in touch:
Working with developers + alpha suits. We’ve mentioned the alpha suits a few times, and you might be wondering what it’s all about. The alpha suit is a hand-built suit that we’ve supplied to selected developers and Mocap artists currently building content for full-body motion tracking. This is an invitational alpha program designed to get us direct feedback, and allows us to work with developers building supporting content on an ongoing basis.
We can only produce limited quantities of these suits and therefore need to be very selective. Things we are looking for in alpha developers: experience with early hardware and SDKs, the ability to provide detailed feedback to our team, and currently building a software/experience that will be widely available to our community and backers when completed. If you think your project fits, please contact us at priovralpha@yeitechnology.com.
