If they had enough sales why did they need 3 rounds of investment? Because they ran out of money and were about to tank. Sales were not enough.
Pimax are half way through their last investment round which means they have around 18 months left. With all that Portal investment down the pan, wide FoV lens development coming to nothing and shifts in the 12k year to year Pimax needs a new HMD to keep any USP.
Kickstarters should be honest and have a set target $ to get the project out the door. Low-fi realistically needed $500,000 minimum so that should of been the KS cut off point. Anything less and everyone should of got a refund. Otherwise we could all live in a dream world where we kid ourselves and tell everyone else to believe in the dream. But reality always wins.
Kickstarter & Indiegogo are honest in the platform. The problem more is in those who invest with the idea of the rewards.
Take away the rewards and you have only people who invest that believe in the idea and hope it comes to fruition.
Rewards are Bait and so people associate it more with a pre order rather than backing an idea.
That being said there are some very well thought out & organized projects. Unfortunately with tech KS are very flakey.
Remove the rewards and most would not invest.
Now you look at Seb his was well organized and didnât offer things that would be hard to fulfil.
Well to go completely off topic, but something that cost the same as my Low-Fi Kickstarter backing pledge!
This just arrived from CEX for ÂŁ30 with 24 months warranty. Working as new 
Great for older games and beat saber, got another on the way same price.
Insane value considering they used to sell for ÂŁ386 for the pairâŚ
Well, I backed Low-Fi (what should I say - for 300 CAD) and I backed the Yaw 2.
Low-Fi has been discouraging in the sense that it could be seen coming for years as he has released the build and from what I could see (I never downloaded it as I wanted to fully enjoy it when complete and not spoil myself with early builds) it seemed to make little progress over years, he was mentioning the same few areas (the coroner, the diner, police station?) over and over again, and then for what felt like a year it was all about the speedway. And I thought to myself that this is pretty thin in terms of content, if he is coming back to these time and again. But okay, it is what it is, lesson learned.
The Yaw 2 luckily turned out well for me, I was pretty early (no.26) and received my unit and I am enjoying it quite a bit, I have to say. The concept is great, the execution partially fine, quality assurance poor though - my yaw module didnât connect properly and when trying to disassemble, the screws proved stuck (possibly due to the weight of the upper module). Iâd need to summon to pairs of hands to raise it a bit to unscrew it, but thatâs some effort and Iâd risk ruining the performance of the upper module if I mess with it - so I didnât, as yaw is the least relevant axis by far for me from the three. Itâs great fun as it is.
But yes, the vast majority of backers are still waiting, and I guess it is to be expected that many of them will never see it materialize.
So, I am better off with not backing any crowdfunding projects (I had a big time fail with the FeelThree rig) and rather spending more on proven products. At the end, in sum it wonât cost me more and I know exactly what I will get for my money.
Donât confuse a productâs success with a companyâs good planning. Though typically this usually goes hand in hand.
Iirc Somnium also went through 3 rounds of investment finding and theyâve only just released a product.
There was a very successful KS for a haptic vest. I donât recall the name now. But everything looked great. A year after the ks they were selling the best for less than the ks pledge price. Never fully fulfilled the rewards like the wireless module and folded making the best Open-source.
Pimax regardless is still selling 8kX and is still around. The early days they had very poor planning like deciding last minute to attend an event spending a fortune on travel, accommodations etc⌠I am sure they are getting better but ultimately only time will prove where pimax will be. So far they are treading water.
If weâre honest Apple Vision Pro is the current champ for best device due to penetration in the market and the XP it provides. @Djonko & @twack3r among others have been able to confirm this in their own experiences. Adding ALVR support has helped with seeding more experiences to be able to enjoy.
Had Apple not blocked porn it would likely have increased their sales beyond their production capabilities.
Twack3r even shelved his much more expensive Varjo as it was providing too much instability with software releases.
Sure we can say Quest is the most successful seller but that is by design and selling the hmd at a loss making money off of content sales.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Pimax/s/8N7AHkvDwP
Seeing more and more positive posts like the one above. And the picâs closing statement is often true.
Iâm not sure what you mean. If you look at Steam Harware Survey all Pimax HMDs seem to be lumped together now and are at the same the same 0.36 level as Bigscreen Beyond. Lets face it Big screen beyond had no prior VR hardware experience yet match Pimax in terms of Steam Market share. Thats a bit pitifull.
Literally any startup company could match Pimaxes âsuccessâ with their very first product.
Iâm not just picking on Pimax as I would include any company that needs external revenue on a regular basic. Varjo is another on a unsustainable business model. To be sustainable you have to make all your costs back, make a profit and have enough profit to produce the next product. Successfull does not compute when youâre existing only on investment unless youâre making major strides into market share which Pimax are not, nore have ever made.
For PCVR 100FoV headsets are not finacially viable and Iâm not sure why people keep making them. Sure for Standalone with limited battery and compute FoV is a limit. But PCVR is an open door. Pimax should of refined wide FoV as going the standalone route with no store was a very costly mistake. Crystal Super is going to be another mistake imo.
Iâm optimistic for Pimax now that Jaap is onboard as he seems more grounded in reality than Kevin, Martin or Josh were. I just hope he has enough sway and gets Pimax on a 5 year plan or trajectory to 2 future generation wide FoV HMDs before the unthinkable happens like Hypervision beat them to a wide FoV headset.
Steam Survey is quite known for not being a great metric. Being that pimax hmds are more unique and at a higher tier for price the market share is not likely to jump leaps and bounds
Had pimax created a legit economic successor to the Artisan pimax would have a greater increase in share for a more affordable model.
To which had pimax truly focused on getting the portal VR frame working well with a pcvr mode etc. they would have a greater impact in the general VR adoption. Though it is extremely difficult to compete with Meta in that area as they have much easier time as they sell the hardware at a loss.
With being able to launch games without needing the steam run time also makes these metrics harder as well to rely on.
Jaap has helped indeed. But I wouldnât really say Kevin, Martin & Josh were not grounded enough. Plus your also not counting the tireless efforts of Calvin who has been the longest public front man to date working exceptionally hard to help keep things moving forward.
I believe we are more seeing pimax as a company overall maturing and starting to listen to their employees feedback and input that is gained from their direct involvement with consumers.
There is an extremely long list of past & present employees that have been pushing pimax to do better and it is finally starting to pay off with those in the upper levels actually listening with their ears.
However there is still a lot of work ahead as there is always is. With a company that embraces continuous improvement model across all areas of the company.
Every person that has been apart of this journey deserves recognition. Even those who needed to move on. Without their devotions and passion pimax would not be where it is today.
That for me would be the most significant upgrade since DK2 went to CV1. I just wish Meta would release this as a second option for PCVR use.
Well, they obviously have all the money to play around with all kinds of approaches, but unfortunately they have little interest in making higher end headsets available to the market, their strategy is primarily in getting casual users engaged, and that will only work with a modest price, as long as it is not a very convincing package.
From Metaâs point of view it will be more important to get an integrated eco system of VR, AR, social media, productivity and AI working, so that people start to spend time in the headset just doing what they currently do with their smartphones. This is where the RayBans & Orion come into play, they are the form factor they ultimately are looking for.
Is a wide FoV critical for that goal? I donât think so, itâs a nice to have which may have too many downsides in their books to make sense at this stage.
If they ever come to the point where the offer a fully engaging package, AI probably being a vital part of that equation (think of natural speech used to interact with agents/NPCâs, services, tasking them to carry out complex tasks for you, sort of the Oasis, Second Life), they may be able to offer differing levels from entry level to 8,000$ devices, simply because the value proposition of their package would be compelling, and people would spend significant amounts of time in there and be more willing to dish out a lot of money for a great experience.
Looking at how Meta has been struggling for many years so far to even get a basic meet your friends in a VR game feature going w/o any hassle does make me sceptical about the prospects of Meta being the one who pulls it off. Theyâve got all the tools, assets, but do not seem to have the structure to drive this towards satisfactory customer experience on the greater scale. Donât get me wrong, I really like the Quest 3, but the elements Meta is so eager to get going, where VR was just supposed to be a tool to open the door, just donât seem to come together: Spaces, Horizon, etc. a number of them were announced and somehow never came close to the promise.
So Tim Cooks admits that a $3,500 device is not a mainstream product but aimed at developers and early adopters, that their sales realities are in line with their expectations (how does a third party form an idea of what is lackluster and what isnât?) which are a result of their poduct strategy (be best, not first) and that Apple sees this investment as necessary to âget you on a different technology curveâ?
If that is a truth that needs admitting, I am most likely way out of touch with the meaning of either of those words.
Well the publication is a Mac dedicated site. Sure we all know that the AVP is a well planned refined beta release. As you & the article says for early adopters & DeVs.
There 2nd headset is said to more target regular users.
Hence why 
blocked porn on the AVP to help curve sales. 
I keep hearing this.
Where does this idea come from?
You & Djonko mentioned porn was blocked and some workarounds to get it working.
Imagine the 180/360 vid player is now available.
That was in initial misconception.
As the article states, WebXR was in dev mode for the first few 1.0 iterations. It was always possible to enable it, since 2.0 itâs enabled by default.
Given the panel quality, it still isnât anywhere close to the same experience as downloading an 8K video and play it in a dedicated player.
I donât know if the latter is a limitation of Safari and WebXR specifically or if that is simply the quality people put up with when engaging with WebXR content in general.
