Aimpad The Analog WASD Company Kickstarter

Aimpad was founded by a passionate PC Gamer with the vision of wanting analog speed and direction, but not willing to give up the ridiculous number of configurable keys of the keyboard or the aiming precision of the mouse.

Most gaming keyboards are nothing more than flashy versions of a normal mechanical keyboard. It might have back lighting, or macro keys, but these enhancements do not make meaningful improvement in the way you control a game character or vehicle. The computer mouse, on the other hand, has evolved from using a ball, to an optical sensor, and finally a laser. These advancements in mouse technology have made an actual gaming improvement in the way we play PC games. We can aim with much better precision using a laser mouse than we can with a ball mouse. There have not been any similar improvements to keyboard technology that provide any meaningful improvement for controlling PC games… until now.

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jh30uk said:

And loose mouse accuracy?

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H2F Scott said:

No. Watch the video on the kickstarter.

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Wow, lots more activity the last few days! Sorry for the lapse. Let me see if I can catch up.

There were a few questions regarding the use of brown switches. In our testing browns are probably the only viable "tactile" switch that Cherry produces that would have the least amount of impact to the analog readings. There is a noticeable bump but it isn't out of control. The light springs also help mitigate the impact. A linear switch however is definitely the best.

Regarding spring strength I observed some pretty funny things PAX East. For every person that told me they wished the springs were stiffer I had another person tell me that they wish the springs were lighter. This basically tells me that Cherry MX Black springs are probably the best choice in appealing to the most people and those that wanted a different strength spring are likely the outliers (as there weren't many). It would be pretty simple to replace the springs with any desired strength, and maybe we could offer after market springs to fine tune how people want them to feel.

Ergonomics is a very big deal for me. The plan is to design something very similar to what you would find in the Razer Orbweaver and Logitech G13. I think something that has not come across very well in our Kickstarter is that we have the core technology nailed down and are ready to integrate it into an ergonomic enclosure. One of the major things we want to do with the Kickstarter is to generate a community around designing the enclosure together. We want to post several designs and have backers vote on which they liked best and continue to refine the design until we have something that looks and feels great. This was probably a misguided ideal on my part. It seems that unless a hardware product looks like a final product on Kickstarter people are hesitant to back it. Which is unfortunate because I didn't want our Kickstarter to be like a "store" where we have everything finished and polished and ready to manufacture and backers would be just "pre-purchasing it". I want to "build" the product with our backers so that everyone feels like they are participating in the experience instead of just exchanging money for a product.

Lastly there was a question about Wireless. This is something I would like to do. Using Aimpad in the living room to play on Steam Big Picture/In Home Streaming is actually viable. You can use Aimpad on one leg and a mouse on the other fairly comfortably. However, in order to do wireless it would be a very high stretch goal. We do not currently have anyone on the team that specializes in Wireless and so we' d have to either learn it all or contract out the work, and additional FCC certifications would also add to our costs. So, yeah, wireless would be cool but it is also expensive.

Hope I'm caught up now! I need to start filming my next Amped About Aimpad video soon. Does anyone have any games they'd like me to demonstrate?

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jh30uk said:

I thought some peeps get some kit free and some others cheaper dependant of what's getting kickstarted..

Also, who makes you give to it and how many rips of charity's are there today?

You are free to or not to do either.

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Stas823 said:

Don't understand kick starter. So I give them money for their product, they make it and sell for profit and you get nothing? Rather give to a charity if I have to.

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We learned a lot through this process and I'd like to document them here for others interested in starting their own Kickstarter campaigns in hopes that they can avoid our mistakes:

1 - Make sure your product is in a 90-95% final state. We had a grand idea of anything being possible and designing Aimpad with the Kickstarter community. I feel this was to our detriment because the end product was not clearly defined and so many people were instantly turned off to the current state of our prototype without even caring to look at what the technology was actually doing. You might have a grand idea of what you want to do with your project, but unless you can show people what the project actually looks like when they get it then it doesn't matter. We haven't stopped working on making the technology better and our next prototype is a full keyboard (which the vast majority of PC Gamers want). Had we launched with a full keyboard design instead, I am confident our numbers would be much higher.

2 - Marketing - You can't get the word out enough... ever. We reached out to well over 100 media websites personally. These were websites dedicated to PC Hardware and PC Gaming. We had about 10% run any story let alone even respond to us (HardOCP, PCGamesN, The Tech Report, Technabob, Geekhack, Techgage, Overclock.net, and Reddit, you guys are awesome!). Don't think you can do it all on your own. It is better to build a "base" of people interested in the project before you actually launch the Kickstarter so you start your campaign with a very large jump. We tried to use the Kickstarter as marketing tool itself, which to some extent did work, but it could have been handled much better.

3 - Cost - Our cost was too high. We will be spending time next month with manufacturers to find ways to reduce our costs so that we can make a full keyboard version cheaper.

Thank you again to everyone who backed us and and believed in what we were trying to do. If you have any further comments or areas that you feel we could have improved on I'd love to hear them!

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