The moment a lot of you have been waiting for has arrived, as the first Butterfly Tracker review has been proudly dropped by none other than YouTuber Jacobfov:

We know many of you were waiting for independent reviews to start coming in, so we hope this can convince you to give the Butterflies a chance as your FBT or Mocap solution! Our campaign is going strong with funding closing in on $500,000 USD this week. Now, with reviews starting to release, we are expecting a surge in interest leading up to the end of our campaign in two weeks. Go spread the word and follow us on your social media of choice if you want to see more reviews as they drop! Links at the end of this newsletter.

Plushie!

We finally have a plushie! After nearly a year of back and forth with our designer and manufacturer, we have arrived at a finished design which we are extremely excited to announce is available for preorder now on our Butterfly Trackers campaign page. Custom designed by CorgiBeans and based on our mascot, Nighty, this big soft slime is the perfect size for cuddling up to and protecting you from all the spooky things lurking under the bed. It’s very friend-shaped!

Butterfly Trackers Developer Notes

While it may be a little less exciting than big numbers and cool reviews, the design and development team has been busy perfecting all the little details required to make an exceptional product. The iron-on and hook & loop patches are having their designs finalized to allow us to start ordering production samples for testing.

Technical drawing for hook & loop patches and iron-on patches

In response to testing feedback, we are also adjusting how our tracker straps are manufactured. To improve comfort, we are adjusting the strap loop sewing direction from inside to outside. It might seem silly, but this means there is no scratchy corner aimed towards you. Very small change, sure, but all these small things add up!

In other news, we have received the latest batch of Dock and Dongle cradle prototypes. The new PCBs feature a vertical USB-A port to lovingly hold the cute little Butterfly Dongle in an ideal configuration, similar to the intimidating T-Pose. Do note, however, the quadruple USB cradle is just for testing and won’t be included.

We have also given strict battery tolerances guidelines for our battery manufacturers to ensure consistent and predictable sizing on the batteries we receive. Very important for such a tiny little gadget where every spare millimeter counts!

Meanwhile, ominous servo noises have been haunting the Slime Cave, with our team creating a jig to test the limits of the Butterfly Trackers flippy-floppy middle section. Nicknamed the ‘FoldMatron 9000’, this little guy will continuously wiggle a Butterfly Tracker until told to stop, so we can put a tracker in there for as long as we want and see how long it can last. While science slimes are curious how long our 3d-printed prototypes will last, the real data will come in once we get our injection-moulded prototypes up and running.

Another aspect we wanted to renew was our USB cables, as we wanted to ditch the basic plastic ones we have historically used in favour of premium, braided, cables. This includes both the USB-A-to-C cable and USB-A-to-C adaptor included in our Butterfly Dongle Kit. Samples have already arrived from our suppliers, and so far are meeting our expectations.

And last but not least, we have been given the official Valve blessing to post a video of the Steam Frame running SlimeVR natively. Super cool to see it running so cleanly and, with our server on Steam, installing it will be just a click away.

Thank you for reading! See you next time…

The SlimeVR Team

As usual, join our Discord server for weekly updates and other news! 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 Bluesky, Reddit, and YouTube for regular updates, news, and other cool stuff! We’re also on TikTok, Mastodon, and Tumblr!