??? Massless Pen - The Pen for VR

For thousands of years humanity has used pens to capture our ideas but we have been confined to the surface. I often start my problem solving with a sketch, schematic, or diagram. I think of the paper like an expressive working space for my mind with the added benefit that these pictures can be used to communicate with others. However, the limitation with paper is that 3D thoughts must be projected to 2D. I wanted push the boundaries of my spatial thinking by adding 3D sketching into the feedback loop of the creative process.

It made no sense to me that we design 3D things using 2D tools. We are missing an entire dimension adding much frustration and friction in the process, so I created a Pen for VR.

"Where are my hands!" is a natural reaction when first using VR. As we move into MR/AR this will be less of a problem as our hands will be visible by default. The new generation of VR headsets have onboard hand tracking which is suitable for general purpose interaction but still suffers from "dead space" where the hand pose is not visible to the cameras. See ? Massless Hands for a solution.

Humanity evolved beyond using our hands onto specialized tools. It is natural to think this will be repeated in spatial computing. A fundamental consideration for the experience and interaction is the grip.

Controllers use a "power grip" (left). We use this grip in activities like baseball, tennis, archery, shooting a gun, or fighting. This is suitable for gaming but nature of the grip is one of imprecise gross movements. By association it also doesn't put us in the right mindset for creative work.

A "tripod grip" (right) is used with precision tools like a pencil or scalpel. Having the fingers placed in these three positions, along with movement of the wrist, allows us to access as small but highly precise region of 3D space.

I wanted to create something that looks and feels just like a regular pen. But cramming all the technology in this form factor and accurately tracking its position and orientation is no small feat. As far as I know, no other technology company has been able to reproduce something so pen-like…

A lot of the smart stuff is happening in and around the tracker. This is an infrared stereo camera that is precisely calibrated and tuned for the Massless Pen. I wanted everything about this product to embody precision and elegance to empower designers to create beautiful things.

There are many approaches to tracking objects in 3D. One simple way of thinking of this is you either need one camera and many tracking points on the object, or many cameras and few tracking points. Controllers use the first method this is why they need those bulky ring like regions seen on the Oculus and Vive controllers. These regions provide enough spatial separation for the marker so "Constellation" tracking can be used.

The stereo cameras in the tracker give us two views. By matching the same point across the two images we can triangulate the 3D position. In this debugging video it can be seen that the ID number of the marker is encoded in binary by varying the LED intensity.

For the best ergonomics, precision, and experience I wanted the Massless Pen to be as close as possible to a regular pen. This meant rethinking the tracking from first principles. The approach taken by Vive/Oculus was to try repurpose existing technology, essentially use the same controller, but holding it backwards like a pen.

We developed many techniques for tracking pen-like objects, including a novel method from single cameras. If you're interested in learning more then check out our patent Single View Tracking of Cylindrical Objects, US 20210110556 A1, 2021-04-15

By using our own external tracker we could integrate with other hardware like Oculus

And Vive. We can integrate with any headset as long as we can connect the tracking spaces.

Being the first pen to market for VR we had to create the first pen-based VR design software to show its potential. We found ourselves in a lot of blue ocean and created a ton of novel UI/UX for 3D pen-based design. More on that soon…

We shipped this product to leading artists in media & entertainment, automative, architecture, fashion and product design. We had some incredible customers that I loved working with and learnt a great deal from.

The funding climate for VR hardware startups in 2019 become particularly tough. Facebook/Meta had sucked all the air out of the space. Then the pandemic hit disrupting supply chains and causing us to shut down our manufacturing.

But the VR/MR/AR market is heating up! With Apple entering the market soon there will be a surge of interest from professionals, creatives, and consumers alike.

Let me know your thoughts! Please share with anyone you think would be interested and sign up to our mailing list at massless.io to keep up-to-date.