It was September 2013, and Alexey Volochenko had seen what seemed like a big breakthrough in the emerging field of virtual reality: a controller called the Sixense Stem. Volochenko had been an early adopter of the Oculus Rift — he’d gotten one of its first-generation DK1 development kits, long before Facebook decided the fledgling company was worth $2 billion. Where the Rift had put people’s heads in VR, the Stem promised to track their entire body as well. On the very first day, Volochenko says he put down $300, eagerly anticipating getting his new system in July 2014.
When the Sixense Kickstarter opened, the Oculus Rift DK1 had been shipping for roughly six months. While impressive at the time, the DK1 was far more modest than the consumer-ready Rift that would launch in 2016. It had no external tracking and no controller except the Xbox gamepad — which Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey admitted wasn’t sufficient. So into the vacuum poured small companies with experimental and sometimes bizarre solutions, many of which turned to Kickstarter for funding.
On Kickstarter, you could find the slippery Virtuix Omni treadmill and the very similarCyberith Virtualizer, which let people run in VR. You could help fund the Delta Six, a detailed replica gun. Companies often promised compatibility between different products; a company called Tactical Haptics planned to build its Reactive Grip controllers on the Stem tracking system. Together, all these projects let people envision a future where you could act out almost anything you wanted in virtual reality, mixing and matching the perfect full-body VR platform.
But today, Volochenko and thousands of other Stem backers are still waiting. Nearly three years after its projected launch, the Stem is perpetually a few months away; Sixense CEO Amir Rubin currently anticipates shipping in June 2017. Rubin says these delays have resulted in a better product, and some backers are still confident. For others, the STEM is a lost cause — a once-groundbreaking product that became a casualty of modern VR’s fast-moving and chaotic early years.
“I HAD NO SECOND DOUBTS ABOUT BACKING THEIR CAMPAIGN.”
Unlike many VR companies, Sixense wasn’t a brand-new startup. Founded in 2007, it had worked with gaming hardware maker Razer on the Hydra motion controller, which was released in 2011. The Hydra was a flop at release, but it was rediscovered by Rift development kit owners, who realized they could use it to mimic hands in virtual reality. When Razer’s limited stock quickly sold out, Sixense promised to fill the gap with a new and more powerful successor. “[Sixense] was a real company with experience and [a] track record of shipping production units at this point,” Volochenko recalls. “I had no second doubts about backing their campaign and supporting them.”
The Stem was comprised of one base station and up to five small sensor packs, two of which fit into handheld controllers with an array of buttons, analog sticks, and triggers. A weak magnetic field could precisely detect the position of each sensor over a radius of eight feet, nearly three times the Hydra’s range. Early-bird backers could get the cheapest configuration for $149, and a “maxed-out” version started at $1,000. The Stem didn’t raise as much money as the super-successful Virtuix Omni, which netted a total of $1.1 million. But the controller market was wide open, and it ended with around 2,300 supporters and $600,000 in funding, more than double the $250,000 Sixense had asked for.
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For a while, things seemed to be going fine. But shortly before the projected launch, Sixense announced that the Stem would be launching later because of hardware changes. While delays are almost inevitable on Kickstarter, the controller was soon pushed to the end of the year, then to 2015 after the product failed FCC regulatory testing. It eventually passed, but Sixense had missed its scheduled window for production, and the Stem was officially bumped to 2016.
By that time, the world of virtual reality had drastically changed. When the Stem was announced, Sixense was one of VR’s biggest names in a deeply fragmented industry; my former colleague Sean Hollister named both it and Oculus “fairly safe bets” at the end of 2013. Three years later, the Oculus Rift had its own motion controllers, and so did the HTC Vive and PlayStation VR, neither of which even existed when Sixense’s Kickstarter launched. People would have to actively choose the Stem over several better-known options, and it still hadn’t shipped.
“WE ARE AN R&D TEAM. WE ARE NOT AN ENGINEERING TEAM.”
The problem was that while Sixense had spent many years developing hardware, it had never actually released a consumer product by itself — not even the Hydra, which Razer had a large hand in building. “Razer did all the industrial design and mechanical engineering” on the Hydra, says Rubin now. “We are an R&D team. We are not an engineering team.” As a result, Sixense wasn’t experienced in working with manufacturers overseas, handling regulatory testing, or fine-tuning things like the Stem’s plastic casing.
Other companies have certainly overcome similar hurdles, including Oculus, with itsinfamous manufacturing woes. But the original Rift development kit had surprisingly simple hardware. The Stem is a multi-part wireless tracking system with two gaming controllers, which ended up being far tougher to design than Sixense anticipated. “When you look at the Xbox controller and the Dualshock Controller, the triggers are a hugely complex and challenging mechanical engineering problem,” says Rubin. As of mid-April, the Stem’s triggers were still being tweaked.
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Source: The Verge