Today we held a live Ustream with our co-founders, Michael and David. Hundreds of our community members attended, but many more could not make it. Below the break is a full (lengthy) transcript of the 30-minute conversation.
For quick reference, a summary of the questions David and Michael answered:
1. You have 600,000 devices sitting around. Are you dumping these or is this a software issue?
2. How about giving people an option? Magic = wait until July, non-magic = send it sooner.
3. How do I become a beta tester?
4. How much does HP or ASUS affect this decision?
5. How will you address market traction loss from this delay, Kinect 2 and others that are coming soon?
6. You’ve already changed your dates before, how do you know you won’t delay again?
7. I still want to see an official video showing off Windows 8 support.
8. Why won’t you let developers purchase a device now and access the SDK?
9. But even a long beta test won’t bring you a 100% product. Just release it for Kickstarter and skip the stores and the public. (note, we are not a Kickstarter)
10. What will happen next year after you go in to HP? Will you go into mobile next?
11. Do you have a date for releasing the beta test for developers? More details please.
12. Can you please allow access to cloud points in SDK?
13. Would it be better to order from Amazon UK or Leap directly?
14. As a customer not a developer, how can I be part of the beta testing? You said a small number of people would be able to.
15. How many apps do you predict will be available at the time of the new launch date?
16. Are you planning on building a bluetooth device at a later date?
17. Will it work with a multiple monitor setup?
18. How are you going to reward early pre-order customers?
19. Is the delay coming from pressure from HP or other partners?
20. Why did you wait so long to tell us about the delay?
21. How does this impact the big deals with Best Buy and HP?
Opening remarks:
Michael: We wanted to take an opportunity to talk to people directly about the delay and answer some questions. We are intentionally going to try to answer questions that might be difficult or complex, or go to things that are unanswered in the releases we put out and give people an opportunity to talk directly to David and I. We really believe that the people that are here today, the people who have pre-ordered the device a year ago, you guys are incredibly important members of the community. We are really committed to doing the best job we can communicating with you about this delay and as we go through the next few months to launch and then after launch. We appreciate you being here, and as we are going to go into some questions, please continue to ask questions in the channel.
1. You have 600,000 devices sitting around. Are you dumping these or is this a software issue?
Michael: If you asked us a year ago, we would have told you that if there is a delay then it would have been because of the hardware. We had 12 people in the company. We didn’t know anything about building the hardware. But today, the hardware is actually very mature and very stable. We have 600,000 devices and they’re in warehouses, and if we really had to then we could ship the hardware today. So it really is a software issue, and that’s what we are focusing on.
It’s not one particular issue with the software, it’s a desire to make everything better across the board, and to really focus on testing and focus on polishing. We believe we only have one opportunity to launch, and we have one opportunity to try to prove to the world that this type of control – with the accuracy of what Leap Motion has – is a better way of interacting with computers. In order to do that, we need to make sure that we take every advantage that we can muster to make that argument to the world, and that means a little bit of delay and a little bit of extra time and energy spend on polish. We definitely apologize to some members of the community that this thing that you’ve wanted for a long time is going to take longer to appear.
2. How about giving people an option? Magic = wait until July, non-magic = send it sooner.
David: I think early on it makes the most sense to test internally and test with the developers who are going to be taking advantage of the things that we are going to be pushing out. Towards the end, we will be evaluating what is the best way to bring people in. I think we’ll have a better idea of the right thing to do as that momentum comes.
Michael: We don’t want to charge people 80 dollars for something we don’t love. Our standard is magic, and unfortunately magic means getting rid of all of the little things that remind people that they are interacting with the computer. The reason we built this technology, the reason David spent 4-5 years of his life working on this, is because we want people to be able to interact with the computer and forget that there is this thing between them and the things that they are working on, whatever they are building or creating. That goal is really important, and in this case it means making a difficult decision that we definitely didn’t take lightly, to have extra polish and iron out all the things through additional testing that remind people that there is still a computer here. That’s why we are pushing for magic. But we definitely understand that the delay is frustrating.
3. How do I become a beta tester?
Michael: We don’t want to charge people to beta test the device for the product. There are 10,000 devices that are out there today, and those devices are with developers. Right now they are beta testing and developing the SDK, but not the product. What they have today doesn’t have any OS interaction and does not have browsing interaction. We are going to – at the end of next month – give them access to the final product and use that to get great feedback. We are also going to reach out to members of the Leap Motion community at large and pre-order customers and invite them into the beta program. The main focus there is picking people from a diverse set of backgrounds; we want people with different types of computers, people with different backgrounds. Ultimately, we would love to say anyone who wants to be in the beta test can pass and we’ll give them the device but—I think at this point we are so close, July seems like a really long time away but we’re really close, that’s going to be the date. And the wait will be worth it.
4. How much does HP or ASUS affect this decision?
David: Not at all. If they are getting peripherals, then they are getting it at a similar time as Best Buy, so they’re waiting as much as you guys.
Michael:The HP partnership is embedding and that is totally unaffected, and that was totally not going to happen during this time frame. And for ASUS (and HP), they’re bundling Leaps with their systems. Again, the timing for that is way after we ship to pre-order customers. Our top priority is getting units to you guys that have pre-ordered as quickly as possible, and we want to give them to you well in advanced of when we give them to everyone else.
5. How will you address market traction loss from this delay, Kinect 2 and others that are coming soon?
Michael: We believe that the best approach to making sure that the Leap becomes as successful a platform as it could be, is to make the launch as successful as possible. Ultimately, we are trying to change the way people interact with computers, and in order to do that we need to do two things: we need to convince people that interacting with a computer this way using Leap is letting them do things with a computer that they could not do before and makes the experience better. And we need to empower developers to build things that were not possible before. On both of those counts, in this case, the delay is the right choice. That extra polish is key to regular people – who may or may not be that technical and may or may not be early adopters – picking up a Leap and saying this is an amazing experience. And on the developer side, those people who go to Best Buy and pick up a Leap, having a great experience is key to there being a big market of people that can use the amazing things those developers built. The delay was a really difficult decision, but the extra polish was the right choice for the success of the platform. From a competitive stand point, we are just going to focus on building the best product we can and we are going to focus on making the technology and product better every day. We have a different focus than most of the companies in this space; we are laser focused on letting people – when they are near their computer – interact with it with 10 fingers, nuanced movements, in better and different ways. That focus is going to continue, and I think it will be reflected in the final product.
6. You’ve already changed your dates before, how do you know you won’t delay again?
David: In the past, we only gave one specific date and this is the only day we will move – that one specific date to another specific date (note, July 22). Before that, there were sometimes miscommunications of what time we were actually going to launch the product, so some earlier dates were reported that were not true. It is true that we originally wanted to push things earlier. But making things is hard, making products is hard, making software is hard, doing what we’re doing is difficult and doing all those things together means that sometimes things don’t go out as early.
Michael: We’ve made a lot of mistakes and learned a lot over the last year. When we announced the product last May, we were 12 people. We had ideas of what we would need to do to turn these ideas into a reality, and we had great core technology, but we’ve done so much since then. We’ve grown the company to 80 people, built an App store, made significant improvement to the technology, we’ve built hardware and made it really small. But what’s taken longer than we expected was putting all of those things together and making it this polished thing. Obviously one thing we definitely haven’t always done the best job of is communicating the progress and the changes and the challenges and the victories to the community a- nd that’s something that definitely needs to change and will change today. So, in everyday it seems like a million miles an hour and there are always hundreds of thousands of things happening, but the reality is it’s incredibly important to us that everyone knows the status of the product and project, every day, every week, and that we interact with you guys through chats like this, through the forums, through email. We just need to open up as many channels and be as transparent, so that there aren’t any surprises. Because the reality is we’re trying to do something really complicated that wasn’t necessarily that well defined at the start. There have been a lot of victories. Some set backs. I think we’re going to have an amazing product in July. The commitment beyond that is to do a better job communicating with you and making you a part of the process.
7. I still want to see an official video showing off Windows 8 support.
Michael: That’s a great question and a great point. We’ve been reluctant to show a video of official OS support because we didn’t want to be in a position where we couldn’t tweak things and couldn’t change things as we finalize and polish the user experience. We didn’t want to be in a situation where instead of moving your hand to the left, we make it so you move your hand up to do something and then there’s confusion as to how the product performs once it gets to consumers. And there’s been a lot of iteration and a lot of tweaking. I think we are at the point where we will be able to release a video showing a detailed walk through of OS interaction on Windows 8 on Windows 7 on OS 10 in the next few weeks. The goal is definitely to, when we start the beta, have the full OS interaction out to the thousands of beta testers and you’ll see, I’m sure, lots of videos, lots of comments about that experience. And then we’ll continue to tweak it based on the feedback we get from them.
8. Why won’t you let developers purchase a device now and access the SDK?
David: We’re definitely going to send out more developer units. We’d rather send out free developer units, but we’re trying to figure out, really we’re always asking ourselves what is the best thing to do? What is the best way to get more people on the platform? What is the best way to expand the number of people developing? I think the more important step that will be coming soon will be that we’ll be opening up the developer portal to just everyone in general, and that should be happening pretty soon. We’re trying to add in a few more things before we do that, so that people can also work on software without having a physical device – and I think that’s really the bigger milestone in a lot of ways.
Michael: When we open up the developer portal anyone will be able to see the SDK documentation, they’ll be able to see things that developers are creating, download the official Leap examples – and I think that will be a big step forward. I think at this point it just doesn’t make sense to switch to sending out developer units on a paid basis. That might have been the right thing to do 6 months to a year ago. I think for us right now, in our eyes, we’re really close to shipping the product. We just want to focus on doing that as best as we can and getting units to consumers and developers that we haven’t been able to give free units as part of the beta program to, come July. But to David’s point, we are going to continue to engage with people and as we see people that are really passionate and excited about developing things for Leap, there are definitely still opportunities to become a part of the beta program and part of the developer program.
9. But even a long beta test won’t bring you a 100% product. Just release it for Kickstarter and skip the stores and the public.
Michael: Good question. One of the reasons we actually didn’t do a Kickstarter, one of the reasons we took preorders and didn’t charge anyone’s credit cards, was so that we would feel comfortable waiting to ship the product until we were totally proud of it and it was totally polished. Doing a Kickstarter would have given us a lot of money and without any of the downsides of raising venture money – the dilution and the loss of control. But we are 100% focused on building the best products that we can, and in this case building the best products means waiting. It means waiting even when it’s really hard and when everyone says it’s ready, ship it. The reality is, in March at SXSW we had 6,000 people come to the experience and they used it and a lot of them said this feels ready, why don’t you ship it. But we have really high standards and we have a different opinion of what being ready and finished means. I know that that’s frustrating and I apologize. But in this case I do think that we only have one chance to make our case to the public for why this is the next way that people will interact with their computers. We want to make sure that we make the most of that one opportunity that we have to launch. We want to make sure that when we ship the products the media and consumers of all sorts are blown away, and in this case it means a delay and a bit of polish. I recognize the frustration and I apologize.
10. What will happen next year after you go in to HP? Will you go into mobile next?
David: Well the version of the device that goes into the HP is pretty small. It can probably go in to a lot of different things. I think we’re really interested in pushing down into all corners of technology. I think even in places and devices that people haven’t seen before. Things that didn’t make sense for new types of devices that, for example tablets, didn’t make sense before touch. There are many new types of things that didn’t make sense before our technology, and those are areas we’re excited in as well.
Michael: Mobile is definitely an important part of the roadmap. But there’s also, we’re really excited about opportunities to use Leap in form factors that don’t exist today or at least can’t be controlled independently today like head-mounted displays. Going forward it’s about what are the existing form factors that we can integrate into to make great products, and what the new form factors we can integrate into to make great products.
11. Do you have a date for releasing the beta test for developers? More details please.
Michael: So right now we want to start the beta test by the first week of June, and at that point we want to have something resembling a feature-complete product. So we can have the entire team focusing on testing, iteration, polishing and communicating. And at that point all of the developers will have access to the beta at the same time. For anyone that has a developer unit today, that has access to the developer portal today, we will start to share a lot more information over the coming weeks. But the general strategy is to push out an update that turns what is today the SDK beta into a full product beta.
12. Can you please allow access to cloud points in SDK?
David: So I think sometimes people have a misperception as to really how things work in our hardware. It’s very different from other things like the Kinect, and in normal device operation we have very different priorities than most other technologies. Our priority is precision, small movements, very low latency, very low CPU usage – so in order to do that we will often be making sacrifices that make what the device is doing completely not applicable to what I think you’re getting at, which is 3D scanning.
What we’re working on are sort of alternative device modes that will let you use it for those sorts of purposes, but that’s not what it was originally built for.You know, it’s our goal to let it be able to do those things and with the hardware can do many things. But our priority right now is of course human computer interaction, which we think is really the missing component in technology, and that’s our core passion.
Michael: We really believe in trying to squeeze every ounce of optimization and performance out of the devices for the purpose they were built. So in this case the Leap today is intended to be a great human computer interface. And we have made thousands of little optimizations along the way to make it better, that might sacrifice things in the process that might be useful for things like 3D scanning objects. But those are intentional decisions, but they don’t mean that we think 3D scanning isn’t exciting and isn’t a good use case. There will be other things we build as a company in the future, and other devices that might be able to do both or maybe there will be two different devices. One that is fully optimized for 3D scanning, and one that continues to be optimized and as great as it can be at tracking fingers and hands.
If we haven’t done a good job communicating that the device isn’t about 3D scanning or isn’t going to be able to 3D scan, that’s unfortunate and it’s a mistake on our part – but that’s something that we’ve had to sacrifice. The good news is that those sacrifices have made the main device really exceptional at tracking hands and fingers.
13. Would it be better to order from Amazon UK or Leap directly?
Michael: So ultimately we want people to order from wherever they feel the most comfortable and convenient, so the upside is that you already probably have your credit card information on file in Amazon and they will probably be able to ship it to you in a way that is cheaper than we can. But the downside is that they, like Best Buy, will be shipping after we ship to the pre-order customers – so you’ll get your device a little later. So, ultimately everyone should weigh against those two factors. But at the end of the day we want to provide as many options to people as possible, and let you guys choose. There are pros and cons to both.
14. As a customer not a developer, how can I be part of the beta testing? You said a small number of people would be able to.
David: I think we will either be picking some automatically from the May pre-order set in a non-biased way, or if we decide that we need something more specific we may be opening up some special place for people to opt in to potentially do such a thing. At the moment, the final decision hasn’t been made there yet – but as I said for the public type beta testing that will become more clear after we do the beta test for developers has finished.
15. How many apps do you predict will be available at the time of the new launch date?
Michael: This is not the reason that we delayed, but hopefully its a benefit of delaying and hopefully we’ll have more apps available. If you’d asked me this question a month ago I probably would have said 60 to 70, maybe a 100. But now the answer will probably be 150 to 200, maybe more. And I think this will give developers more time to polish their apps and make them even better and more consistent. Part of it is developers learning, and part of it is the platform getting better. Developers have given us amazing feedback about where the SDK is good, where it’s weak, and we’ve pushed dozens of updates since we’ve started the beta developer SDK test six months ago that have significantly improved the performance of the platform and the SDK. So we’re seeing developers start to implement the changes based on the things that make everything more stable better experience and those improvements to the SDK will continue, and that polish into the applications will continue.
16. Are you planning on building a bluetooth device at a later date?
David: We’re working on a wireless version, but it’s a pretty big challenge. Pretty optimistic about it. Likewise we’re also building other versions. I’m not sure if I can go into more detail than that. We’re pretty excited about that as well.
17. Will it work with a multiple monitor setup?
David: There will be many different ways to work with multiple monitors. We’re asking ourselves what’s the best way to make this work. Because no one has done this before, we’re exploring the best way to do this. Is it one Leap across one monitor, 2 monitors, 3 monitors etc.? We’re trying to make a system that’s flexible enough that will give people access to many of those options. We’ll focus on one screen at the beginning. But as quickly as possible, we’ll be giving ourselves nice multiple screen options as well – because that’s all of our computers here.
Michael: David has 5 screens. Everyone here at the office has at least 3 screens. We really want to support multiple monitors although it probably won’t be supported initially. But developers will probably create support for this independently. Officially this is not a version 1 feature, but we want to get this in as early as possible.
18. How are you going to reward early pre-order customers?
Michael: We want to do this in a few ways. Pre-order customers ordered before the price change so they’ll be getting it $10 cheaper than getting it in Best Buy or Amazon. But the biggest advantage is that they’ll be getting it earlier. We’re totally committed to getting this to pre-order customers well before we’ll be selling these units at Best Buy or Amazon. We want this difference to be even longer than was originally planned.
The people who ordered are an incredibly important part of the community. We want to communicate with you and make you feel like the important part of the process that you are. And we’re going to make sure you get your device early. Of course, we’re not going to charge anyone’s credit card until we actually ship the device.
If you decide to cancel, you’re welcome to do that at any time. (note, email support@leapmotion.com) At the end of the day, we want you to have the best experience that you can. We’re definitely interested in feedback at to how we can make that experience as good as possible. Right now the core features are the price advantage, getting it early, constant access and being part of the process.
19. Is the delay coming from pressure from HP or other partners?
David: No, the delay is completely unrelated to anything else out there. This is an internal decision that was made as we were getting to the ship date. Although we would have everything together, we wouldn’t have any time to test or fix and we don’t want to do a release where 20% of people have a hard time getting it to work on their USB hardware. We don’t want to have one of those releases where people have to wait a month to actually use it because we have to follow up with subsequent patches. So sometimes it takes a little bit of time to QA something after you finish putting it together. And that’s what this is really about.
20. Why did you wait so long to tell us about the delay?
Michael: In this case, it wasn’t so much a matter of waiting to tell people about the delay, we made the announcement basically the day or the day after we made the decision internally. In this case it was a really hard decision for us, because there was a really high likelihood that if we just went heads down we could get the product out and it would be a good product. But we realized that we were a little bit late, that we would not have time for a real beta test. Given that this is the first product we are launching and given that this is a type of interaction that hasn’t be tried before, and we want Leap to work for 90-year old grandmothers and 5 year olds and early adopters and Best buy customers, it needs that proper beta test. So we had a really difficult internal discussion, and we really did not want to delay but given that it came down to a choice of skipping the testing we originally planned for or shipping, we just had to make that difficult decision. As soon as we made that decision, we posted and communicated about the delay to you guys.
21. How does this impact the big deals with Best Buy and HP?
David: HP is after this, so they are unaffected. Best Buy gets the devices a bit later, but everyone is still really excited and because we are doing is really important and interesting, and hard, and a major step forward in technology.
Michael: None of those deals are affected except for the timing shifting back, so you still have the option of going to a best buy store and buying the device it will just be available later than then if you pre-ordered it from the site. But those partnerships are still in place and the device will still be in the same number of stores it would have been, and the same thing is true on the HP side as well.
Thanks guys, if you have more questions you can e-mail us at support@leapmotion.com or post on the forum.