We’re thrilled to announce a new round of funding, following a stream of new developments in both the company and the industry that lay a foundation for growth, growth that we plan to finance with this new round of funding. You can get right to it now on our invest page. Read on to get the full rundown on the developments that led up to this final step.
New IP: Omnidirectional Controls
We do something no one else does, and it’s protected by patents. Our proprietary motion tech lets us design games and apps with unique user experiences that promote deep immersion and replayability – the quality of a game that makes you want to play it over and over again. You’re pulled into physically active game play, and then the action keeps you playing. Exercise is a byproduct, like with sports in the real world.
The application of our tech in our previous products used a stationary bike as a game controller: the faster you pedal the bike, the faster your avatar moves. In the game you might be riding a bike, or driving a tank, or several other options. You steer simply by leaning. In this way you can move yourself through virtual worlds in a way that feels natural, continuous, and free, without motion sickness. (And as I’ll explain in a minute, we’re now able to do this without a stationary bike.)
This is what no one else does. Leading VR expert Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, put it this way:
"I was blown away by the VirZOOM experience. Pedaling as a method for locomotion doesn’t work if you can’t steer the bike; it is critical to leverage the natural leaning movements that our perceptual systems have grown used to in the real world. By integrating head movements with pedaling, VirZOOM’s control scheme was shockingly easy and engaging. They have discovered how to solve one of VR’s hardest problems – moving freely through large virtual spaces without getting dizzy or uncomfortable. I normally avoid any experience in VR that is not based on physically walking, but leaning into turns while pedaling through virtual space is among the best experiences I have ever had in VR in 25 years."
We created exciting physically active games that garnered rave reviews and a deeply loyal following with the bike-based tech, but there was a problem: only a fraction of the consumers who own an XR headset also have a stationary bike. Great and unique as these products are, the size of our potential market (known as our Serviceable Obtainable Market, or SOM) was limited, and that limited our revenue opportunity. There is no research that measures accurately the size of this headset plus bike market, but from our experience we estimate that only about one out of every 100 XR owners also has a stationary bike with which to play our awesome bike-based XR games. Even with the growth of XR in the last couple of years that market simply isn’t big enough to scale the business to its full potential.
To solve this SOM limitation, in 2022 we developed and filed another patent on new motion controls, a variation on our previous IP that delivers the benefits of bike-controlled play without the bike. While standing you control your direction and speed as you move through virtual worlds by simply changing your body position. In effect, your body becomes the joystick. We call them Omnidirectional Controls because you can move in any direction while also controlling the direction you are facing. Bailenson himself made this new assessment after trying it:
"VR scholars have spent over three decades trying to solve the "room size quandary". Virtual spaces are typically huge, but [the] living rooms, bedrooms, offices, and other places we tend to use during VR sessions tend to be quite small. How does one navigate very large virtual spaces when they can't physically walk? Typical methods, for example using an arrow key to move forward, make people simulator sick. Hardware solutions, for example large human hamster balls and omnidirectional treadmills, are not practical and have safety concerns. VirZoom has cracked the code with an elegant algorithm. By turning the body into a "human joystick", VirZoom has created a way to use relative motion to break the typical perceptual template that would cause motion sickness during abstract virtual movements. In 30 years of wearing headsets I haven't seen any system enable smooth translation over kilometers of movement with so few simulator sickness symptoms.``
This new IP lets us design new products that have the same deep immersion and replayability as our previous products, and again exercise results from body movements during game play. Our new products can be enjoyed without a bike, by any consumer with an XR headset. This vastly increases our SOM, perhaps as much as 100x, giving our new products much wider reach.
New Products with Broad Reach
In December 2023, right after the launch of VZfit 3.0, we launched an early-access version of FLY. FLY is a flight-based earth exploration app that uses Google Earth 3D imagery. The project began in a collaboration with Google in 2018. FLY is similar to the popular Google Earth VR app that Google offers on PC-based VR platforms (like the Oculus Rift). Google Earth VR has been downloaded 2.3M times, according to SteamDB. FLY lets any Quest 2 or 3 user explore 196 million square miles of earth that has been mapped in 3D by Google. FLY employs our new “human joystick” motion tech to deliver exciting free flight that you control using body position, without hand controllers. Take off from the ground in Boston, explore the buildings in the back bay district, then fly up into the stratosphere and across the US to land in LA minutes later. Or teleport to any location instantly. If you’ve ever had a flying dream, it feels a lot like that.
The early access version of FLY has over the past month earned a 4.8 out of 5 rating, with reviewers leaving comments like “This is the greatest VR concept of all time.” And Google does not intend to compete with a stand-alone XR version of Google Earth VR; instead they’ve recently made their imagery available to independent XR developers, via an API. We have a big head start thanks to our earlier collaboration with Google, and we plan to launch a fully commercialized version of FLY on the Meta Quest app store in June.
On the heels of FLY we have a roadmap of new physically active games designed around our new Omnidirectional Controls. These retain the unique deep immersion and replayability qualities of our bike-based games, with exercise again a byproduct of game play. When these are released we will have multiple products that can be enjoyed by up to 100 times as many Quest owners than our previous products, opening up very promising new revenue stream opportunities.
What’s beyond that? For us to expand further we would have to have more XR platforms that can run our content, not only the Quest. This too is happening right now, this year!
New XR Platforms are Expanding the XR Industry
Apple, Samsung, Google, Lenovo, and Sony… all of these industry giants are either shipping or have announced new XR platforms.
Meta started the trend withthe first stand-alone XR headset, the Meta Quest 1, in early 2019. When the VirZOOM team received our Quest 1 dev kit in late 2018 we immediately recognized that the inexpensive, easy-to-use, high quality, feature-filled platform would be a winner. We went all-in on it and discontinued development on all other platforms.
That bet paid off: over the following three years the Quest proved so popular with consumers that by the end of 2022 it had garnered an 83% market share, according to Counterpoint Research. In 2023 we were awarded a major grant from Meta to fund development of an entirely new version of our flagship product, and VZfit 3.0: Ring Racer shipped as a Quest 3 launch title last fall. It was both our first “body as joystick” game and an exciting showcase of the Quest 3’s new capabilities.
Analysts report that Meta has sold over 20 million Quest headsets. XR content developers like VirZOOM have benefited from this growth, but for XR to succeed as an industry, consumers need more platform options and content developers need more platforms and sales channels for content. The expansion started with the launch of the amazing Apple Vision Pro in February, and will be followed by the Sony Spatial HMD and Lenovo A3. Samsung has confirmed an as yet unnamed Samsung/Google XR platform. IDC predicts annual XR shipments will increase 4x in 2025 and 2026 as these new platforms come to market.
We’ve already ported FLY to the Apple Vision Pro (AVP). We plan to launch it on the AVP store in Q3, and on the other new XR platforms as they come to market.
The combination of multiple new XR platforms and VirZOOM’s new products and tech lays a strong foundation for our growth. The final growth ingredient is capital: that’s where you come in.
A New Approach to Fundraising: White Label Online Offering
To cap our list of new developments, we’re pursuing an exciting new form of online fundraising with a “white label offering” using DealMaker tools and services. The main advantage of this approach is we’ll have a direct connection with each of you, our investors.
Thank you for your support over the years that brought us to this exciting moment in our journey. Our new IP, that enables unique new products with broad reach, plus FLY, plus the new XR platforms for expanded distribution, together with a new infusion of capital to finance more development and better marketing – that’s a strong formula for growth. We’re excited to initiate this round today. Please visit our invest page now to learn more about it.
