Ximmerse

Ximmerse
Information
Type	Private
Industry	Virtual reality, Augmented reality, Mixed reality
Founded	2015
Founder	He Jie
Headquarters	Guangzhou, China
Notable Personnel	He Jie (founder and CEO)
Products	Motion controllers, optical tracking systems, AR headsets
Website	https://www.ximmerse.com

Ximmerse is a Chinese technology company that develops motion tracking systems, motion controllers, and Augmented Reality hardware for Virtual Reality and Mixed Reality applications. The company was founded in 2015 and is headquartered in Guangzhou, China, with additional operations in Shenzhen. It is led by founder and chief executive He Jie.

Ximmerse first drew attention for low-cost optical tracking aimed at mobile VR, building hardware-agnostic controllers and a stereo camera that could add positional input to headsets such as the Samsung Gear VR, Oculus Rift, and OSVR. Its tracking technology was later licensed to other companies and was used in the HTC Link mobile headset, and the firm subsequently pivoted toward standalone Augmented Reality hardware and mixed reality systems for industry and enterprise.

History

Ximmerse was founded in 2015 in Guangzhou, in China's Guangdong province. Founder and chief executive He Jie positioned the company around input hardware for mobile virtual reality, arguing that the smartphone-driven headsets of the era were one-sided. "Current mobile VR devices only have good output functions. They need good input devices to really work well," He told the South China Morning Post in 2016. The company set out to sell controllers and sensors as accessories for smartphones and headsets, including devices compatible with Google Cardboard and the Samsung Gear VR, with consumer kits expected in the second half of 2016.

The company showed early tracking hardware at SIGGRAPH 2015 and VRLA, and demonstrated a controller and camera system at CES in January 2016. Over the following years it shifted from selling tracking peripherals for third-party headsets toward licensing its tracking technology and, eventually, building its own AR headsets. By the early 2020s Ximmerse described itself as a developer and manufacturer of mixed reality hardware focused on industrial, training, education, tourism, and medical applications, delivered through a virtual-and-real integration system it branded "Xingkong."

Funding

Ximmerse has raised money across multiple venture rounds. According to CB Insights, the company has raised roughly 21.19 million US dollars over several rounds, with backers that include Acer Capital, Hongtai Investment, Qianhai Ark Asset Management, and Dynamic Balance Investment, among others. In June 2022 it announced a Series A4 round of 125 million Chinese yuan (about 18.7 million US dollars), with participation from investors including Zhongyuan Qianhai Equity Investment, Dynamic Balance Capital, Hongtai Jingying, and Telecom Ark Venture Capital. The company said the funding would go toward research and development and new product launches, including an upgraded generation of its Rhino X hardware.

Technology

Ximmerse's early systems were built around visible-light optical tracking. Handheld controllers and headsets carried glowing markers, often described as "orbs" or "blobs," that were captured by a wide field-of-view stereo camera; embedded inertial measurement units handled rotational movement while the camera supplied positional data and corrected drift. The company claimed its stereo camera could track up to 240 individual markers at once without interference, and it pitched the approach as a low-cost, hardware-agnostic alternative that worked with many existing headsets.

The most detailed public specifications came from the Neon tracking system used in the HTC Link headset. In that implementation, markers on the headset and on each controller were read by a small external stereo camera in an outside-in configuration, an approach comparable to the camera tracking used by PlayStation VR. Road to VR reported that the Neon camera ran at 960p resolution and 90 Hz, with claimed tracking precision (jitter) of 2 mm and accuracy of 10 mm, latency around 16 to 17 milliseconds, and a roughly eight-by-eight-foot front-facing tracking area. The system provided six Degrees of freedom for both the headset and the controllers, and the controllers used a magnetometer, accelerometer, and gyroscope with about 40 hours of battery life on two AAA cells and a 2.4 GHz wireless link.

For its later standalone AR products, Ximmerse moved toward marker-based world anchoring and on-device tracking, and it has published software development kits for the Rhino X platform on GitHub to support third-party developers.

Products

Ximmerse's catalog has moved from VR input accessories to optical tracking systems and, more recently, to standalone AR headsets.

Product	Year	Type	Notable details
X-Hawk	2016	Tracking camera	Front-mounted positional camera connected by USB; tracked the light marker on each controller in 3D; sold with the X-Cobra controllers for around 150 US dollars as a pair
X-Cobra	2016	Motion controllers	Pair of handheld controllers, each with a glowing marker and an IMU for rotational tracking; worked with the Samsung Gear VR, Oculus Rift, OSVR, or any headset with USB input
X-Swift	2016 (announced)	Body tracker	Chest-worn wireless device for tracking body movement as an additional input; shown but not fully operational at CES 2016
Outside-in / Inside-out tracking kits	2017	Tracking kits	Mobile VR kits shown at CES 2017; the outside-in kit used an external camera with a 120-degree Field of View over a 3-by-3-meter space and was slated to ship in March for 99 US dollars; an inside-out version mounted the camera on the headset
Neon	2017	Tracking system	Visible-light outside-in stereo-camera tracking licensed to HTC for the HTC Link headset; 960p, 90 Hz, 2 mm precision, 6 DoF for headset and controllers
Rhino X	2019 (announced)	Standalone AR headset	Self-contained AR headset previewed at Mobile World Congress Shanghai in June 2019; Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 chipset, around a 57-degree Field of View, marker-based tracking, bundled with a tracking pad, polyhedron beacon, and 6DoF controller
Ximmerse Rhino X Pro	2022	Standalone AR headset	Upgraded standalone AR headset built on the Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2, with a roughly 70-degree Field of View and 2160 by 2160 resolution per eye; aimed at developers and enterprise users rather than consumers

Star Wars: Jedi Challenges

Ximmerse has been reported as a technology supplier behind Star Wars: Jedi Challenges, the smartphone-powered AR experience that Lenovo launched with Disney in 2017. The product paired a Lenovo Mirage AR headset with a lightsaber-shaped controller and a tracking beacon, and used the headset's cameras to track the beacon as a reference point for inside-out positional tracking. Reporting on Ximmerse's own Rhino X headset noted that the company had supplied technology for the Jedi Challenges playset, contrasting the self-contained Rhino X with the smartphone-tethered Mirage design.

Market position

Ximmerse occupied an unusual niche in the VR and AR hardware market. Rather than building complete consumer headsets in its early years, it focused on the input and tracking layer, selling affordable controllers and cameras and licensing tracking technology to larger partners such as HTC and, reportedly, to the Lenovo and Disney Jedi Challenges project. As consumer mobile VR cooled in the late 2010s, the company refocused on standalone augmented reality and mixed reality systems for enterprise, industrial training, education, and cultural tourism, backed by multiple rounds of venture funding from Chinese investors and the venture arm of Acer.