{"id":16101,"date":"2015-07-14T09:55:43","date_gmt":"2015-07-14T09:55:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/e52.nl\/?p=16101"},"modified":"2015-07-14T09:55:43","modified_gmt":"2015-07-14T09:55:43","slug":"start-up-top-10-manus-machina-and-the-virtual-reality-glove","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/en\/start-up-top-10-manus-machina-and-the-virtual-reality-glove\/","title":{"rendered":"[Start-up top 10] Manus Machina and the virtual reality glove"},"content":{"rendered":"

Seeing your own hands moving on screen as you’re gaming. That’s now possible with the virtual reality gloves created by Manus Machina<\/a>. The Eindhoven start-up began exactly one year ago and has been on a roller coaster ride since then. We’re talking to CTO Maarten Witteveen at the new office on the Torenallee about the sudden interest from the BBC, the first client from Kazakstan and a lesson in the start-up language along the way.<\/p>\n

This is Eindhoven at its best. A start-up at the cutting edge of design and technology that will spearhead developments in the virtual world. (According to the jury)<\/strong><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Bob Vlemmix, Stephan van den Brink and Tim van Veenendaal started Manus Machina in July of last year. Mostly working at the weekends and in the evenings at first. They were all either still studying or had just started a job. Witteveen joined in October and now there are 10 people working on the VR glove. Last month they went to the world’s largest games fair in the United States with a few demo gloves.<\/p>\n

You’ve been working on this for exactly a year now. What’s been the highlight so far?<\/b><\/p>\n

\u201cIt was Startupbootcamp HighTechXL,\u201d says \"Screen<\/a>Witteveen straight away. \u201cOur CEO, Stephan van den Brink, was working at EY (partner of the programme) and saw the announcement in a newsletter. It came at exactly the right time for us. We had just finished the prototype and wanted to move on to production. Something which involved completely different knowledge.\u201d<\/p>\n

Manus Machina began the accelerator programme<\/a> at the High Tech Campus with ten other start-ups in November. It’s an intensive, three-month-long opportunity to work on your company and your products with the help of more than one hundred mentors. \u201cThe information that we gained was overwhelming. Halfway through the bootcamp, one of the Manus team said to me: ‘Maarten, I’m a sponge!’ It’s not just how your business model or the structure of your organisation looks, it’s also the way you sort out your patents: we were terrible at all of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Manus Machina kept their office at the open workspace at the Startupbootcamp until March. \u201cBut then we really began to outgrow it,\u201d laughs Witteveen. \u201cWe needed more tables for our sewing machine, our soldering station.\u201d<\/p>\n

The sewing machine was packed up and Manus \"IMG_3413\"<\/a>Machina moved to the Videolab building on the Torenallee. And there wasn’t much time to settle in. They decided to take their glove to E3<\/a>, the world’s largest games fair, in Los Angeles. This was two months before the fair. \u201cIt was really a case of tunnel vision and then just going! Most companies start preparing six months before E3. We had to do everything very quickly. If someone asked whether we could do this or that in a few months, I said: no, the world stops at E3.\u201d Witteveen laughs. \u201cBut we survived and it was really educational.\u201d<\/p>\n

What did you take from it?<\/b><\/p>\n

\u201cThe big start-up word is validation. Validating your assumptions. An event like this is great for that. Lots of developers and people from the industry come to try out your product. So you hear right away what works and what doesn’t.<\/p>\n

And it’s also educational to see how fairs like this work. Nothing runs smoothly on the first day. Suddenly there were twenty people standing in front of the stand for a demo, the BBC came with a whole camera crew. This caught the interest of other reporters who were there, haha. In the evening we discussed how we were going to tackle the next days and then it went well. Thanks to the fair we got a lot of international attention.\u201d<\/p>\n