Hiyo Slimes!

Welcome to the 6th official Butterfly Tracker newsletter, and our first newsletter following our successful campaign. Thank you everyone who signed up, pledged, or even just spread the word for Butterfly Trackers. We are already at over $1 million raised of our funding goal, and we are not stopping anytime soon. We are immensely proud of our awesome community, and we appreciate all your support!

Butterfly News

It has been a while since you last heard from us, and not from a lack of news. There is lots to get through, so I have separated each section into subsections to make it easier to digest. Let’s get started!

Reviews

Two new Butterfly Tracker reviews have dropped, and a bunch more are on the way. The first of these is showcased by the frenetic Kokou. It’s an energetic, cute, and entertainingly unique take on what’s so exciting about Butterfly Trackers. It’s not too long, so I highly recommend checking it out if you are interested.

The second of these is showcased by Gago, a very unique creator with a quirky but silly style that leans less on specs and stats, and more towards the experience of using Butterfly Trackers when compared to standard Slime Trackers.

It’s great to see such positive reviews coming out, we are looking forward to seeing the rest of them!

Manufacturing

First up, I’ll get some not so good news out of the way: Butterfly Tracker fulfillment will be delayed by 1 to 2 months. We evaluate our projections regularly as part of our project management, and the fulfillment date has been shifted back to October. This is due to our timelines for case mould production being a little later than we originally expected. As such, our expected shipment timeframe is later than we hoped. We sincerely apologise for letting you down.

We are confident there will be no more significant delays, but it’s not impossible. We will continue to do our best, and we have even more checks in place to find and resolve issues that arise before they become a problem.

With that said, development is still full steam ahead, and we have been incredibly busy nailing down lots of the small details that are required to push such an immense project from concept to reality.

Production

Many of our parts are in production, and thus have already been finalised and ordered. So far, this includes:

• Straps, which saw several very small design changes based on testing feedback to increase comfort.
• Screws, which were ordered early to allow for assembly processes to be worked on earlier (such as our automatic screw machine).
• USB cables, which we chose our favourite from a variety of samples from various manufacturers.
• Dongle Cradle circuit board, a fairly simple design which required very few iterations before we were happy with it.
• Battery, one of the most important pieces that carried incredibly strict tolerances in our unique Butterfly design, which we took very seriously to the point of rejecting samples sent to us that were even 1 mm out of our tight specification allowances.
• Grippy and Iron-On patches, which took a lot of discussions with manufacturers to get our unique wing-shape and perforations just right.
• Plushies!, which are already on the way and should arrive in SlimeVR warehouses very soon. We expect these to head towards Crowd Supply towards the end of June for distribution to backers!

Pre-Production

To add to this, many of our other core components are in the pre-production phase and being prepared for production in the very near future. This includes:

• Main Tracker enclosure, which is fundamentally finished, as our mould is already being manufactured for these. We should receive samples of this very soon, and go into full production after we confirm the samples we receive are good.
• Dongle enclosure, which has a finished design and is about to enter production.
• Dongle Cradle enclosure, which is very close to finished, and will likely already be in production by the time you read this.
• Main Tracker PCB, which is receiving constant attention, but requires the most work to get right. Our team is already ordering parts for this, but the final design requires multiple layers of testing and tuning while inside a production case before we can enter full production.
• Dongle circuit board, which has been checked and tested, and now only needs some minor cosmetic changes. As with the tracker PCB above, we are already ordering parts to shorten the production cycle, but cannot enter full production until all our final tuning is done with the dongle installed in a finished enclosure.
• Boxes and packaging, which are either done or being worked on, depending on the product. Our single Butterfly Tracker box is complete, and our special Sakura Edition Butterfly Tracker set has its box-art done. Our dongle and charger packaging is still under development as we don't have final sizing to complete these.
• Stickers and manuals, which are being drafted and finalised for printing. You can find our latest sticker sheet at the end of this newsletter. We are still deciding how to distribute these between the sets.
• Belt Clips, which are entering final designs soon, they just need some changes to the design to make them suitable for injection moulding.
• Strap hooks, which also need updates to their design to make them suitable for injection moulding.
• Charging Dock enclosure, which is being reworked to make it even better. We found a few minor things we felt could be refined during our testing, so we went back to the drawing board to address our concerns and improve the design.
• Charging Dock PCB, which is effectively complete and just waiting for the above enclosure redesign to be finalized so we can lock in the layout.

Making stuff is hard

There are also other important milestones that don’t involve production, such as certification, but we already have those planned out or booked, so there wont be any surprises. Making VR tech is like juggling 200 balls, but luckily we have an amazingly talented team that has had years of practice in the chaos that was our first VR product launch. We know what the road looks like, and we have plans in place to make sure nothing catastrophic goes wrong. We look forward to seeing you all dancing around and being silly in VR using your Butterfly Trackers later this year.

SlimeVR Software

Steam

We have a few big milestones in our ecosystem. First up, we have officially launched our SlimeVR app on Steam! We mentioned it in the last newsletter, so I won’t go into too much detail here, but if you want to get auto-updates, cloud storage, and all the other good stuff that comes with Steam - Head over to our page on Steam to try it out: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3245490/SlimeVR/

v20.1

After the fantastic launch of v19.0.0 and v19.1.0, we have already pushed out our latest update, v20.1. It includes lots of fixes for some of the more common bugs with v19, such as config and Java errors, as well as a giant list of new additions and Quality of Life changes, including but not limited to:

• Settings quiz on start-up to preconfigure your settings for what you plan to use slimes for (PCVR, standalone, vtubing, mocap, etc).
• Fix for a fairly common floor clipping issue in some setups (base-station tracked headsets). Also makes tracking in Steam Link much better.
• A very important spelling mistake was corrected. Everyone really liked this one.
• Fixes, warnings, and safeguards for lots of common issues, such as SteamVR hand trackers being enabled, onboarding not saving as complete, DIY tool firmware sorting, and a few minor GUI inconsistencies.
• More groundwork to prepare for Steam release.
• Fixes for OSCQuery to make it more reliable.
• Many many more changes and fixes.

Step mounting Beta

We have lots more amazing stuff on the horizon too, including a new alternative method of doing mounting reset which involves simply stepping forward one step. This includes an alternative to our normal ski pose to calculate the trackers orientation on your body, and is a great option for people struggling getting the ski pose perfected. We are hoping to have this ready well before Butterfly Trackers are released, and is already undergoing public testing in the Beta section of our Discord. I will showcase highlights of this in upcoming newsletters, when it’s more ready for you to see!

If you have trackers already and are interested in trying it out, you can switch to this version by choosing step-mounting-beta under the Game versions & Betas settings section of our SteamVR version. Be sure to carefully read the instructions on how to use this in the Discord beta forum post so you don’t get lost, as it currently has no GUI or user prompts on how this works: ⁠Step Mounting Beta v3

Thank you for reading and Happy Pride Month!!

You got all the way to the bottom, well done! As a reward, here is an early work-in-progress preview of the amazing stickers we might be including with each Butterfly Dongle Kit:

Going forward we will be doing more frequent and shorter newsletters, so expect to hear from me again soon. As usual, <strong>join our <a href="https://slimevr.dev/discord">Discord server</a> for weekly updates</strong> and other news or even just to say ‘Hi’! If you don’t have Discord or don’t want to join the server, we have started to post updates and other cool stuff to our social networks as well! Follow us on <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/slimevr.dev">Bluesky</a>, <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/SlimeVR/">Reddit</a>, and <a href="https://youtube.com/@SlimeVR">YouTube</a> for regular updates, news, and other cool stuff! We’re also on <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@officialslimevr">TikTok</a>, <a href="https://mastodon.social/@SlimeVR">Mastodon</a>, and <a href="https://www.tumblr.com/slimevr">Tumblr</a>!

See you next time, from the SlimeVR team! <3
-Spazzwan