Many gamers have. Playing videogames with voice communication is limited by time and place, being many families and housemates disturbed for being loud, especially at night.
Our mask, the PHASMA, solves that. It is comfortable, soundproof, and adjustable.
I would like to tell my story, and although we haven’t launched yet, it is being hard and at the same very challenging and thrilling.
Beginning last year and before corona times I met Andy, a medicine student and competitive gamer, through a freelancing network while I was looking for some new projects. Here I have to tell you a bit about me: I am mechanical engineer with 10+ years of experience in design, simulation, product development. A couple of years ago I decided I wanted to work for myself, in smaller and newer projects. When you say you are doing simulations of a A350 sounds awesome, but the daily work is so repetitive and bounded to norms that you cannot decide anything for yourself. If you are not the guru of engineering the flexibility and ideas that you can bring is practically none.
Coming back to Andy, he had this idea of a soundproof gaming mask as he couldn’t train with voice communication, having continuously fights with his mother. I am an older generation gamer, but for me the product made sense, it was a large niche, and I engage the challenge. After some time he had to return to his studies and is only following the project on the side, and for me it has become my day and night.
After convincing a couple of friends ( an engineer friend of mine from Spain and a branding expert from California) and lots and lots of hours of product design we got functioning prototypes. It was a hard pathway: the first prototype didn’t muffle the voice much, the voice was intelligible, and look pretty bad. From there we had to start again from requirements and take out some assumptions from the competitors. The main issue was the space before the mouth. As it happens with our competitors, it is too small so that the reverberating is too high. The solution was making the mask larger, up to the neck. That was a big problem for aesthetics, as it looks bulkier that we wanted. But hey, functionality is key. People that cannot play want something that works. Coolness is secondary. That is only one of the many issues, but now we have a good functioning prototype.
So here we are so far. Now we are preparing the Kickstarter campaign and spreading the word. Since we are dealing with a niche it is hard to find supporters, and together with our lack of resources it makes the campaign very challenging. Also, people are quite tired of masks and have a negative disposition for criticism. Investors say that we are too early for investment, at least the ones we dealt with, thus crowdfunding is the best way. A few guys with no money and a great idea, some prototypes, and a good amount of motivation. The pure spirit of crowdfunding.
Our next steps are preparing the campaign and launch towards the end of March. I will update this and explain more about the process and how we are dealing with the problems. I have to tell that this forum has great ideas that we will try to follow. Happy to be part and engage in discussions.
By the way, if you need a mechanical engineer to discuss technical problems, here I am
Andrés