History

We leave away everything before 1993. You may refer to our LinkedIn or Xing Profiles for details.

1993

Elmar and Harald met in a company named NOVECA.

Elmar manufactured 100.000+ RAP//CD (google them, they still exist).

Michael (he came from Olivetti, Nokia and then ATI) joined the team and increased the sales

from 1000pcs per order to 20000pcs per order and sold them to Metro, Media Market, 1&1 and major distributors.

1998

A company named VLS Virtual Laser Systems AG called Harald to manufacture 20.000 pcs of a "very special" laser pointer.

At that time Harald has seen the multi user screen interaction for the first time.

But the existing pointers were not synchronized, so the data modulated into the visible laser beam by different pointers have overwritten each other.

So Harald decided to add a synchronization to the pointers and then made the new electronic fit into an existing plastic case.

The so called target device had 2 motors and mirrors inside. So it only could "look" to a single area on the screen at a time given by the game.

Also 10 positions/second could by sent by the game, it was not a full screen scanner.

1999

After having added the synchronization to the pointers we could create a camera based system

for fullscreen multi pointer indentification. The pointers turned-on/off synchronously to the camera

using an extended Gray-Code. This was a full screen scanner but it was slow.

2000

Harald became the project manager of a motion detection system installed at EXPO2000 Theme Park.

This time we have made a scanner for tracking objects.

We have mounted 129 cameras at the ceiling of a 120m x 30m hall with 72 moving objects.

In each object, 2 LED markers synchronized to all 129 cameras have been mounted

so we could detect the speed and direction of each object individually.

The system was in use every day from June 1, 2000 to October 31, 2000

After having uninstalled the equipment Harald left the company 1 year before it went into bankruptcy

and worked in Elmar's factory in China.

2004

VLS already was dead.

Elmar and Harald decided to create a full screen scanning solution and totally new pointers by their own.

Prof. Mark Overmars (University of Utrecht) already has got a prototype system invented by Harald.

Mark added the interface to his famous GameMaker since Harald always wanted a solution where game studios can develop contents

to overcome the bottleneck of the 10 game developers of VLS.

But the system was very expensive since a lot of sensors were behind the screen.

Still no simple and cost effective full screen scanner.

2005 - 2016

Harald founded a new company and developed and sold a document management system.

Michael also was on board, he did not like to sell low quantity but expensive push products but he did.

2015 Klaus Arndt, a former employee of VLS and good friend of Harald had a first idea

for a new method for a fullscreen scanner.

But unfortunately it did not work so Harald continued selling the DMS in Switzerland.

2016

Harald and Michael had a lot of time while waiting for new enduser appointments made by a large company in Zürich.

Harald came back to the idea of Klaus and found a basic mistake in the whole construction and the idea.

Harald was sure that the new way will work and started development of the new pointer and the new camera.

This time it is a "very special" camera and it will be a fullscreen scanner.

2017

Since Harald financed and therefore had to develop all by himself, it took 1 year to make the first prototype running.

And this time it is a fullscreen scanner at an unbelievable low price.

2018

Harald ran out of money and Elmar unfortunately moved from Germany to an unknown place in Switzerland.

Also his factory in China changed the name and place.

So Harald tried to find investors and learned that a hardware manufacturer does not get money in Germany at that time.

This is a different story.

2019

Harald found a very old german mobile phone number of Elmar and suddenly Elmar was on the phone.

He immediately agreed to make the next version.

Already in 2019 a complete new pointer plastic case has been developed in China including an injection molding tool.

Elmar also made the case for the special camera and this was a really complex design.

2020

Due to Corona we were forced to leave China.

Our engineers there continued working after a 3 month shutdown.

And we learned what remote development with Zoom and Skype is: Time consuming!

Harald found the schematics and also several working samples of the receivers Elmar created in the year 2000.

2021

Whenever an engineering problem was solved, the next one appeared.

We had to invent so much things due to too much light and later due to not enough light.

2022

In May everything was done.

The only thing still to do was to contact game developers to get content from them.

But the game developers have not been able to access the ultra fast shared memory interface we have developed.

Since we already have used this interface for our own demo games (shooter, quiz, voting) we could not understand why.

In September 2022 we had to install and learn the usage of the Unity 3D game engine

and unfortunately also the programming language C# used by Unity.

Now, we understood why accessing the shared memory did not work: C# does not like unmanaged memory!

We convinced Unity and the C# compiler and beginning of December 2022

also a demo game developed completely in Unity worked and it was ultra fast.

2023

In January we had to develop a browser based solution where smart phones could be used instead of our pointers

to allow games developers around the world to develop games without having the camera and the pointers available.

Mid of February 2023 also this was working.

A few sentences regarding investor's view on hardware manufacturers in Germany:

They do not like hardware developers due to cash flow problems financing the stock of materials.

They like software companies because they can easily "scale-up" their business.

On the other hand we know tons of software companies which successfully scaled-down their business to zero

because their approach has simply been copied because software is hard to get a patent for!

Thanks to Elmar who manufactured hardware his whole life this is past for us.

In the past 2 years Elmar's company in China has purchased all the material

for a full one year production.

This he has done due to the semiconductor shortage in the past.

Now we can scale-up as fast as we want.

And we know several more reasons why we do not have a scale-up problem

despite the fact that we are a hardware manufacturing company.

A few sentences here to all good fellows:

Thank you

Elmar Will, Lothar Grün, Michael Dietz, Dr. Ulrich Möllenstedt, 陳鴻文 (Howard Chen), Gerald Nowitzky,

Hans Mühlbauer, Eduard Eras, Christian Brunner, Klaus Arndt, Peter Rosenbeck, Dr. Michael Meder, Ernst Gabriel, Prof. Dr. h.c. Falk F. Strascheg,

Willi Stocker, Thea Urbanek, Andreas Eckleder

and also to Heinz Krier, Rupert Seehofer and Markus Kraus.

Without you all this would not have been possible.

With such a team expertise we cannot fail!

We learn how to do it but also how to not do it!