Razer

Razer Inc.
Information
Type	Private company
Industry	Consumer electronics, Gaming hardware
Founded	2005
Founder	Min-Liang Tan, Robert Krakoff
Headquarters	Irvine, California, United States and Singapore
Notable Personnel	Min-Liang Tan (co-founder, CEO and chairman)
Products	Gaming mice, keyboards, headsets and laptops; the Razer Hydra motion controller; OSVR headsets
Website	https://www.razer.com

Razer Inc. is a consumer electronics company that designs gaming hardware and software, dual headquartered in Irvine, California and Singapore. It was founded in 2005 by Min-Liang Tan and Robert Krakoff and is best known for gaming mice, keyboards, headsets, and the Blade line of laptops. Min-Liang Tan has been chief executive officer since September 2006 and chairman of the board since June 2017.

In Virtual Reality and Augmented reality, Razer is known for two efforts. In 2011 it released the Razer Hydra, a pair of motion controllers developed with Sixense that used electromagnetic tracking. In 2015 it co-founded the Open-Source Virtual Reality (OSVR) ecosystem with Sensics and shipped the OSVR Hacker Development Kit headsets, the OSVR HDK1 and OSVR HDK2. Both VR programs have since wound down: Razer deprecated its OSVR work and became a founding member of the OpenXR standard, and the Hydra is long discontinued.

Company history

Razer traces its origins to a high-precision gaming mouse, the Boomslang, sold in the late 1990s by a company called kärna LLC. After kärna went bankrupt, the Razer brand was refounded in 2005 by Min-Liang Tan and Robert Krakoff, with Tan taking the chief executive role in September 2006. The company expanded from mice and mouse mats into keyboards, headsets, laptops, and software such as Razer Synapse and the Razer Chroma RGB lighting system.

Razer held an initial public offering on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in November 2017. In 2021 and 2022 a consortium led by co-founder Min-Liang Tan, founding investor Lim Kaling, and the private equity firm CVC Capital Partners moved to take the company private, citing low trading volume and an undervalued share price. Shareholders approved the buyout, which valued Razer at about 3.2 billion US dollars, and the company was delisted from the Hong Kong exchange on May 13, 2022. Razer has remained a private company since.

Razer Hydra

The Razer Hydra was a pair of handheld motion controllers for the PC, developed by Sixense Entertainment and branded by Razer. Announced in April 2011 and released on June 16, 2011 at 139.99 US dollars, it was marketed as the world's first gaming-grade motion controller powered by Sixense. Unlike camera-based systems, the Hydra used electromagnetic tracking: a small base station generated a weak magnetic field with a radius of about six feet, and sensors in each wired controller reported their absolute position and orientation within it with six degrees of freedom.

At launch the Hydra was sold both on its own and in a bundle with the game Portal 2 that added six exclusive Sixense motion-control levels. Although it predated consumer VR headsets, the Hydra's six-degrees-of-freedom tracking led the early VR community to adapt it as a hand controller for development kits such as the Oculus Rift DK2, and Sixense reused the underlying technology in its later STEM wireless tracking system. The Hydra has since been discontinued.

OSVR

Razer and Sensics announced the Open-Source Virtual Reality (OSVR) ecosystem on January 6, 2015, at the Consumer Electronics Show. OSVR had two parts: an open-source software framework, released under an Apache 2.0 license and running on Windows, Linux, and Android, and an open hardware reference headset called the Hacker Development Kit. The software used a plugin system intended to let any engine or device work together: it supported game engines such as Unity and Unreal Engine, and abstracted hardware including the Oculus Rift DK2 headset and the Leap Motion hand-tracking sensor. Razer published the headset's production files so that anyone could build or modify the design.

Hardware

The OSVR Hacker Development Kit was a tethered PC head-mounted display. The first kits shipped to selected developers in mid-2015 and went on public pre-order on October 23, 2015 at 299.99 US dollars; revisions through the OSVR HDK1 series carried a single 1920x1080 OLED panel. The OSVR HDK2, released on October 3, 2016, moved to a dual-display design at 2160x1200 (1080x1200 per eye) on a 90 Hz low-persistence OLED panel, matching the resolution of the first consumer Oculus Rift and HTC Vive while aiming for a lower price.

Headset	Released	Display	Resolution	Refresh rate
OSVR HDK1 (Hacker Dev Kit)	2015	Single OLED	1920 x 1080	60 Hz
OSVR HDK2	October 3, 2016	Dual OLED, low-persistence	2160 x 1200 (1080 x 1200 per eye)	90 Hz

Wind-down and OpenXR

The Khronos Group announced the OpenXR initiative at the Game Developers Conference in early 2017 to create a single cross-vendor standard for VR and AR, the same goal OSVR had set for itself. In 2018 Razer confirmed it had stepped back from OSVR and redirected its people to the new standard. A Razer product manager told Tom's Hardware: "Our efforts around OSVR have indeed been deprecated, and we moved our resources to merge efforts with the Khronos Group as one of the founding members of OpenXR." Sensics was left to handle remaining OSVR distribution, and Razer's own VR hardware line ended with the HDK 2.