TALKING TECH
Carl Silbersky and Chris Suess give their insights
MaximumPC talks to Carl Silbersky, CEO at Mionix.
Without the mouse, our computing experiences would be very different. There’s a model for everyone, and a style for every shape of hand. However, the industry is under a lot of scrutiny. We spoke to Carl Silbersky, CEO at Mionix, and Christoffer Suess, VP of marketing, to understand how they go about the design process, what prompted them to add a GSR and heart rate sensor to the latest Naos, and where they think the industry is heading.
Maximum PC: Can you tell us what exactly prompted you to integrate a heart rate sensor into a mouse?
Carl Silbersky: If I take a step back there for a moment, I would say that I didn’t come from the hardware industry— that’s the first thing. And my observation, when I first came to Mionix, which was two and a half years ago, was that I just laughed at the whole hardware industry. Like, Jesus, what’s happening here, you know? Where’s the innovation? What’s been happening in the last 10 years with gaming hardware? I mean nothing, basically nothing. I mean, what we’ve [peripheral manufacturers] done is we’ve put bears, and snakes, and things like that on the mice, and we call them gaming peripherals. And then, suddenly, we tried to shove—well, they’ve been trying; I mean, Chris here has been very successful, when he was at Razer—a snake down into a 14-year-old’s throat. I mean, you did this very successfully, Chris, I have to give it to you.
Anyway, it was seen as obscure people who used to game—that’s how it used to be viewed. And from my vision, when I came, I was like, gaming is completely exploding, and it’s what we are all going to do. I mean, when you look at Steam, it was going through the roof—it’s going to be a natural thing, what we’re all going to do, gaming in one way or another. And when I looked at the peripherals at hand, the basic peripherals, which we’re trying to fix here at Mionix—the mouse, the keyboard, the headset—I was like, OK, what has happened? Nothing. So we started with that: OK, nothing has been happening, so let’s at least try to get the basics in there. The basics for us, you call innovative; for us, it’s like, of course there should be a heart rate sensor in there. And the thing is, I think what I missed, and what we’re completely open with, was that, OK, so I’m watching somebody gaming, which we all love, when we get together at Mionix. We looked at Twitch, and were like, wow, this is going to really take off. It’s entertaining, it’s more fun than a lot of the sports displayed in the world, and you can interact with the gamer etc, etc. But why can’t I see the actual reaction of the person when they’re playing Deadby Daylight, or whatever? So that was one reason.
The second reason was actually that we did hack at it in the office, when we looked at, y’know, what can we add to these mice, and what came out of it was that we had this idea like, let’s add a layer, so I can actually see someone, and see what their reaction is when
they’re gaming, and that’s when we started to integrate sensors into the mice. And one thing lead to another thing, and we said, you know, we should have a GSR sensor in there as well, so you can overlay, and see their reaction in gaming. But I think what you’re going to see from us is that there’s so much more to be done, there’s so much still missing for us. For me, this is basic, this is what we needed, this should have been done— why hasn’t anybody else, with a budget that’s probably 10 times the size of ours, like Logitech, which is 20 times bigger than us, done it? Where have they been for the last 10 years?
MPC: With all that in mind, then, who is the Naos QG mouse aimed at? Is it solely the Twitch streamers? The YouTubers?
Carl: This is the way we look at it: they’re streamers—but, actually, they’re creative people. The streamers we like are entertainers, you know? Like
The basics for us, you call innovative; for us, of course there should be a heart rate sensor in there
Pewdiepie—he’s an entertainer, isn’t he? Is he a gamer? No— he’s not a fantastic gamer. But I want to see, when I watch somebody stream, someone who entertains me. I want to see a reaction from them, and this is a great layer for someone to display their reaction on. So, it’s for the creators; it’s for the streamers to start with, I would say.
Secondly, it’s for the group of people, like esports people, who want to get super-hardcore data, and crunch data when they’re gaming. Or even poker players, who we’re getting a lot of interest from.
So, first, it’s the creators, the streamers, who want to display what they’re doing, and want to show off and create entertainment value, and make people understand. Then, the second market is the poker players, the gamers, the esports people, who just want to understand—the more serious data-crunching people.
MPC: Speaking of the heart rate sensor in particular, is that something that’s proprietary to Mionix, or will you be opening that up to other peripheral manufacturers?
Carl: Let me say it like this: We’ve started some discussions, and people have reached out to us—a very interesting group has reached out to us, in fact— and we might be considering something. If you’re asking whether we will go deeper into other areas, and collaborate, then, yeah, maybe. We’ll see where this leads us. But the more interesting part is that we have a set of open APIs, so developers can actually use them, and integrate them any way they want, in any gameplay, or whatever they want to do with them—they can make use of those open APIs. I can say this: Several universities came to us, and asked us to do research things with them. We thought that was super-interesting, and that lead to another thing, which lead to another thing, and now we’re having some pretty interesting discussions.
Chris Suess: What we can say is that we were actually approached by one of the other peripheral manufacturers, right, but we have not decided how to handle that. Interest is there from other parties, but without going too much into detail, it’s an open discussion.
Carl: Chris, I’ve said too much, but we have the other manufacturers, as we’ve said, we have the universities, which is for research, we have game developers, and we have open APIs. So, for us, it’s open as to where we’re going with this.
MPC: So, it sounds as though you’re looking to innovate not only at Mionix, but also across the entire industry?
Carl: To be honest, I don’t even know what Mionix is. Are we a hardware company? Yeah, today we’re a hardware company. What are we tomorrow? Well, you know, we might not just stay true to hardware.
MPC: OK….
Carl: So now you’re going to get even more confused, because, er, yeah… But it’s true, what we’re doing is not just, “Oh, let’s just bring out another piece of hardware.” I think the world has a lot of pieces of hardware, so let’s see where we can go with this, and where that leads us—that’s our interest. We’re weird, I know we’re weird, I know you’re going to perceive us as weird.
MPC: Not at all! But, pushing the Naos QG aside for a moment, how do you go about mouse design in general? Where do you start with that?
Carl: It starts with an idea and a shape for purpose. We want to create mice that, regardless of grip, can serve people while resting the fingers—usually right-handed mice. That’s the idea we had from the starting point, and from there on, it’s a process. The whole design goes into process, and we’ve been famous over the years for creating great ergonomic mice. It’s almost a shame that, with the size of the company when we took it over, and given the products Mionix produces, up until then it only had the Naos and the Avior. It was a shame, because I thought they were fantastic pieces of hardware. They had not been recognized for their ergonomics. So, when we created the Castor, we went after a specific ID for a specific kind of mouse. Then it starts to go into an iterative process of shaping and reshaping, again and again, and it’s actually physical work, like craftsmanship. You sit down with a block, and then you iterate that one over, and over, and over, and then you have people coming in and feeling it, and understanding. And saying, “No, I want this, and this, and this.”