The arrival of Valve’s Lighthouse system is great news for users, but a blow to other control systems born from Kickstarter that can pay dearly for their multiple delays. The creators of Technolust have already acted on this.
In Iris VR they have announced in their latest Kickstarter update that they have licensed the Technolust brand for Steam VR and Project Morpheus. This does not imply that they are going to launch Technolust for these platforms, since they have quite a few differences and want to guarantee an optimal experience in each of them, but it is possible that we will see other games based on this universe. They already have a Morpheus development kit and hope to also get one from HTC Vive as soon as possible.
In any case, the development of Technolust for Oculus Rift is still going ahead, and they confirm that the release of the game will arrive with the Oculus CV1, but they have also announced that support for Sixense STEM has been canceled. After trying to contact the CEO of Sixense, and after having tried other control systems (we understand that Lighthouse), they claim that the STEM hardware has not impressed them much, since magnetic deviation is a big problem, just like the gigantic base station. It is curious, because the last ones who have tried STEM affirm that the improvement has been spectacular compared to the previous prototypes, and the demo of the lightsabers does not cease to reap praise. But the main problem, the lack of a device and an SDK with which to start developing, seems to have been decisive in the decision to abandon Sixense.
Projects like Sixense and PrioVR have been months and months behind the dates announced on Kickstarter, and the arrival of Lighthouse can be a serious blow to these two projects that we have been following with such enthusiasm since their beginnings. Without a doubt, the next few months (maybe the next few weeks) are going to be decisive, but our feeling is that they are going to have it really complicated to survive. The developers want to publish their games with the arrival of the first commercial virtual reality devices and they can’t keep waiting for them to deliver products and an SDK that have suffered one delay after another since the campaign ended.
As one button shows, or rather two: according to its Kickstarter campaign, Sixense would send STEM in July 2014, and PrioVR announced in his that it would do so a month earlier. Since then, those who supported his campaigns have helplessly attended the announcement of one delay after another, and to this day it is not known for sure when they will be sent. Sixense has delivered a few hand-built prototypes, and in January it stated that the final devices would be shipped in March, a month that is about to end with no new news. For their part, in PrioVR they were somewhat more ambiguous indicating that their product would be shipped in the spring. It seems that both have joined the OSVR initiative, but it seems that the Lighthouse announcement has made both have missed a train that will not happen again: the opportunity to be the first.
