The Surreal Touch Kickstarter campaign was successfully funded.
The Surreal Touch controllers were first announced back in July. Their Kickstarter campaign launched last week with a goal of $50,000, and has to date received almost $90,000 from 330 backers.
What Is Surreal Touch And Who Is Making It?
Apple Vision Pro’s gaze-and-pinch interaction system can feel like telekinesis at times, and makes watching media and simple interactivity a breeze. But the lack of tracked controllers makes it unsuitable for many kinds of games and experiences playable on other headsets.
Surreal Touch is a self-tracking controller designed to solve this problem. It uses two fisheye tracking cameras and an onboard chipset to determine its position in space, similar to Meta’s Touch Pro controllers but with one fewer camera, and has the same design and control elements as Touch controllers including two action buttons, a thumbstick, an index trigger, and a grip trigger.
The startup is claiming less than 10mm positioning accuracy. It describes this as “unparalleled tracking”, an odd claim given Meta and Valve targeted less than 1mm for their VR controllers.
Surreal Touch is designed to be used either standalone on Apple Vision Pro using the startup’s upcoming SDK or for PC VR via the startup’s visionOS app Surreal Link, a fork of the open-source ALVR with additions such as an interface for pairing the controllers. Yang tells us the native visionOS SDK is already being tested by Open Brush contributors working on a port.
Surreal Interactive was founded by Zhenfei Yang, who has eight years of experience with SLAM computer vision technology and tells UploadVR he formerly led DJI’s entire robot computer vision group. Yang says his team at Surreal includes former Alphabet engineers who worked on Google Glass, Google Maps, and the Waymo self-driving car project.
Alongside launching the campaign, Surreal Interactive also revealed new PC VR streaming gameplay footage. Most notably, while the startup previously only showed Beat Saber on Normal difficulty, it’s now showing its founder using Surreal Touch to beat Rum n’ Bass on Expert.
It also showed PC VR footage of Real VR Fishing, Superhot VR, and Gorilla Tag.
Surreal Touch connects to your PC via the startup’s Surreal Link software, which is a fork of the open-source tool ALVR. To demonstrate that its software is ready for buyers, Surreal also shared a video showing the full controller pairing and setup process of Surreal Link, taking just over 90 seconds in total and ending with arriving in SteamVR Home.
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For those without a gaming PC, or for travel, Surreal says it’s still working on its native SDK which will allow developers to add support for Surreal Touch in their visionOS apps.
The startup says its “goal” is to have a dozen visionOS games with Surreal Touch support by the time the controllers ship to backers. It claims it’s working with “multiple studios” behind “sword fighting, table tennis, fishing, golf, boxing” VR games, and specifically confirmed it has seeded hardware to the developers of Contractors and Grimlord.
As a teaser of the SDK working, Surreal showed footage of open-source Beat Saber clone Open Saber with Surreal Touch support added, running standalone on Apple Vision Pro.
Surreal is offering backers “early bird” discounted pricing of between $250 and $318 depending on how early they pledge, and plans a regular retail price of around $370 after the campaign ends on October 10.
The startup claims the first 300 units of each of the two color options will ship in December, and that all backer orders will have shipped by the end of January.
Surreal claims it has partnered with “a trusted manufacturer” and will keep backers informed of any delays or issues with production. Making a prototype of a hardware product is relatively easy compared to mass-producing it affordably on time and at scale, and the past ten years is littered with VR startups with impressive demos and confident claims that failed to make this leap. But if Surreal can pull this off, it could make visionOS a viable gaming platform for genres simply not practical with hand tracking.
