exiii

exiii
Information
Industry	Haptics, virtual reality, prosthetics
Founded	29 October 2014
Founder	Genta Kondo, Hiroshi Yamaura, Tetsuya Konishi
Headquarters	Chiyoda, Tokyo, Japan
Notable Personnel	Genta Kondo (CEO, 2014-2016), Hiroshi Yamaura (CTO, then CEO from 2016), Yamato Kaneko (COO)
Products	handiii, EXOS Wrist DK1, EXOS Gripper DK1, EXOS Wrist DK2, EXOS Wrist Hand Tracking Edition
Website	exiii.jp (archived; defunct)

exiii (exiii Inc., exiii株式会社) was a Japanese hardware startup based in Tokyo that made the EXOS line of wearable force-feedback devices for virtual reality and augmented reality. It was incorporated on 29 October 2014 by Genta Kondo, Hiroshi Yamaura and Tetsuya Konishi, three engineers and designers who had left Sony and Panasonic, and was first known for handiii, a low-cost myoelectric prosthetic hand built with 3D-printed parts.

After the prosthetics work moved to a nonprofit in 2016, the company turned to haptics under Yamaura. It announced EXOS in January 2017 and sold the EXOS Wrist and EXOS Gripper development kits from February 2018, mainly to manufacturers who wanted to touch CAD data in VR design reviews. The company dissolved on 30 September 2020. The EXOS rights later passed to Crosstech Management, which licensed the business to Diver-X in December 2025.

Reviewed 13 October 2026. Every claim checked against the cited archived exiii.jp pages, THE BRIDGE, Japan Media Arts Festival, Road to VR, Mogura VR, MONOist, Hermitage Akihabara, @Press and the January 2026 PR TIMES release on the EXOS license. About review dates.

History

Founding and handiii (2014-2016)

The founders worked on the project on weekends while still employed at large electronics makers, and showed it at the Gugen electronics contest before the company was formed. exiii was incorporated on 29 October 2014, with Kondo as representative director and CEO, Yamaura as CTO and Konishi as CCO. According to the company's 2015 team page, Kondo had worked on robotics research and new business at Sony from 2011 to 2014, Yamaura was a mechanical engineer from Panasonic, and Konishi was an industrial designer who had worked on wearable gadgets at Panasonic. The 2015 company page listed its address in Kanda-Neribeicho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo.

handiii was a myoelectric prosthetic hand, driven by the small electrical signals of the wearer's arm muscles, with 3D-printed parts and a smartphone as the controller. The material cost of the prototype was about 30,000 yen. THE BRIDGE noted that conventional myoelectric hands cost more than 1.5 million yen. In November 2014 exiii started a crowdfunding campaign on the Japanese platform kibidango with a target of 700,000 yen. The project received an Excellence Award in the Entertainment Division of the 18th Japan Media Arts Festival, credited to Kondo, Yamaura and Konishi.

On 30 November 2016 Yamaura replaced Kondo as representative director. Kondo moved to the nonprofit Mission ARM Japan to continue prosthetic hand development, and exiii licensed its prosthetic hand data and community to that organization, including the open-source HACKberry project. The company said Yamaura would use the technology and knowledge from the prosthetics work to develop new products.

EXOS announcement (2017)

On 18 January 2017 exiii announced EXOS, an exoskeleton device that uses motors to reproduce the reaction force a hand feels when it touches an object. The company listed VR, remote control of robots and hand rehabilitation as possible uses, and said Asratec Corp. had given technical cooperation on the development. Road to VR described the prototype glove as controlling the thumb on its own and the other four fingers together, unlike Dexmo, which resists each digit separately. The glove was wired and had no built-in tracking; exiii's demonstration video used attached Vive controllers for position tracking.

Yamaura told MONOist that EXOS grew out of the anatomical knowledge, wearability constraints and motor technology from the prosthetic hand work. Instead of vibrating the skin, the device moves the user's fingers and arm, and he said the aim was to reproduce the deep sensation felt through joints and muscles as well as the skin.

Development kits and funding (2018)

On 28 February 2018 exiii released two development kits, the EXOS Wrist DK1 and the EXOS Gripper DK1, together with a "touchable-CAD" 3D design review system. In the same announcement the company said the Nissan Global Design Center, part of Nissan's effort since 2017 to bring VR into car design, was introducing the system so that designers could check things such as the distance between the seat and the steering wheel, or whether buttons were easy to reach. Road to VR reported that the kits were available to enterprise customers and came with a Unity SDK. Yamato Kaneko, who had been on the launch team of the eye-tracking headset maker FOVE, joined exiii in February 2018 and served as COO and product lead.

On 16 April 2018 exiii announced a third-party share allotment of about 80 million yen to a fund operated by the Tokyo venture capital firm Global Brain. The company said the money would go to expanding sales of the DK1 kits, strengthening longer-term haptics research and developing next-generation devices. Road to VR reported the round as 750,000 US dollars.

The EXOS Wrist DK2 went on sale on 2 October 2018. exiii said the DK1 had been made only in limited numbers because of manufacturing constraints, and that the DK2 had been redesigned so that it could be produced in larger quantities. In an interview with Mogura VR, Yamaura and Kaneko said that the DK1 had weighed more than 900 g and that the DK2 could be assembled in outside factories instead of almost entirely in-house. In November 2018 the company started "EXOS for Hackers", a free loan program for independent developers and startups in Japan and the United States. Loans normally ran for one month and could be extended to six months.

Hand tracking edition, price cut and distribution (2019)

On 23 April 2019 exiii announced the EXOS Wrist Hand Tracking Edition. It combined the DK2's force feedback on the palm with hand tracking from other companies' glove-type or optical trackers, so that users could touch 3D data with different hand poses instead of holding a controller. The EXOS Unity SDK v1.1.0 was released the same day. From 28 May 2019 the DK2's price was cut in half, from 600,000 yen to 300,000 yen; the company said it wanted more customers to be able to use the device.

In a joint project with exiii, students at Vantan Game Academy developed two VR games using EXOS, a horror game and a shooter, for the school's booth at Tokyo Game Show 2019 in September. The school's announcement described this as the first use of EXOS in games. When it announced the Hand Tracking Edition, exiii also said that the Tokyo distributor ASK Corp. would handle the standard EXOS Wrist DK2, which had previously been sold only directly by exiii. On 23 October 2019 ASK announced that it would carry the DK2 from November 2019, with pricing on request.

Dissolution (2020)

exiii announced on Facebook on 29 October 2020 that it had ended its business and dissolved as of 30 September 2020, according to Mogura VR. Yamaura said the company had started from what it could do and wanted to do instead of focusing on value for customers, and that it had not generated enough traction to take the company to its next stage. Mogura VR reported that he was joining the teleoperated-robot company Telexistence.

Products

Product	Released	Description
handiii	Prototype, crowdfunded from November 2014	Myoelectric prosthetic hand with 3D-printed parts and smartphone control; transferred to Mission ARM Japan in 2016
EXOS (prototype glove)	Announced 18 January 2017	Wired exoskeleton glove with motor-driven reaction force; thumb controlled separately from the other four fingers
EXOS Wrist DK1	28 February 2018	Two motors, 5 kg·cm torque, USB or Wi-Fi, 11.1 V / 980 mAh battery, 1.5 hours of battery life
EXOS Gripper DK1	28 February 2018	One motor applying force between the thumb and index finger, 5 kg·cm torque, USB or Wi-Fi, 2.5 hours of battery life
EXOS Wrist DK2	2 October 2018	Two motors, 20 N·cm torque, 350 g, USB or Wi-Fi, 11.1 V / 980 mAh battery, 2.5 hours of battery life; launch price 600,000 yen per hand or 50,000 yen per month on subscription
EXOS Wrist Hand Tracking Edition	Announced 23 April 2019	EXOS Wrist combined with third-party glove-type or optical hand tracking

XR work

How EXOS worked

The EXOS Wrist was strapped to the forearm and the back of the hand. Its two motors pushed against the wrist in two directions, flexing it forward and back and tilting it side to side, which made a virtual object feel solid when the hand pressed against it. Because the fingers stayed free, the wearer could hold an HTC Vive controller or Oculus Touch controller, and exiii said this made it easy to add touch to existing VR content. Besides contact with objects, developers could trigger "event-based haptics" such as the recoil of a gun or the press of a button. The DK2's SDK added settings for the hardness, weight and texture of virtual objects. The EXOS Gripper replaced the controller: its single motor could stop the fingers to simulate grasping a rigid object or push back against them, which Road to VR said could suggest squeezing something soft.

The DK2 weighed 350 g, about one third of the DK1 with its Vive Tracker, and its parts that touch the skin were made of water-resistant rubber. It needed no tracker of its own because it was meant to be used with a VR hand controller. Mogura VR's hands-on found that rubber and metal cubes felt different and that a shooting demo gave a clearer sense of recoil than the DK1.

Enterprise use

Kaneko told MONOist that exiii had received requests from fields such as entertainment and remote communication, but also many inquiries from manufacturers, who asked especially for three uses: design review, training and robot control. MONOist reported that EXOS had been evaluated by Nissan, NEC and Denso Wave. NEC used the EXOS Gripper in a VR training solution for manufacturing that it showed at a press briefing in March 2018, and a two-armed "multimodal AI robot" shown by Denso Wave, Beckhoff Automation and others at the International Robot Exhibition in November 2017 used EXOS as the interface for teaching the robot in VR. Kaneko said the company would start with business customers and also consider entertainment through its development kits. At the DK2 launch, the company told Mogura VR that it wanted to extend EXOS beyond manufacturing into games and other entertainment, and that it had received many inquiries related to VTubers.

Other projects

In July 2018 exiii published instructions for building a "simplified version" of Leap Motion's open-source Project North Star AR headset. It replaced parts that were hard to obtain, such as the specified BOE display panel, with parts on the market, including a 3.5-inch Raspberry Pi LCD, CNC-machined acrylic reflectors covered with window mirror film, and a 3D-printed rail in place of the original aluminum one. The company released its 3D data and documents under a CC BY 4.0 license.

EXOS after exiii

After exiii dissolved, the EXOS business passed to Crosstech Management Inc. of Kyoto. On 1 December 2025 Diver-X, the Tokyo maker of the ContactGlove VR gloves, acquired a business license for the EXOS series from Crosstech Management, and it announced the deal on 22 January 2026. The license covers rights and related intellectual property for the EXOS Wrist, a five-finger haptic glove that reproduces fingertip sensations, and the Hand Unit, a base unit for robot hands. Diver-X said it planned to use the technology for XR, robot teleoperation and the collection of training data for physical AI. In the announcement Yamaura, by then representative director of Curious Robotics, said he was glad that about five years of the team's work would be carried on in Japan.

See also

• Haptic gloves
• Force feedback
• Dexmo
• Diver-X