Scathing report levels a litany of charges at China’s homegrown VR startup, ANTVR

China’s ANTVR billed itself as a universal, one-stop virtual reality solution when it launched its Kickstarter in mid 2014. The campaign went on to raise well over US$200,000, and expectations were high, driven primarily by the claims the company was making. When I spoke to him just before the Kickstarter launch, ANTVR founder Qin Zheng told me that his product would be better than the Oculus Rift or Morpheus, due it its superior optics and control system, as well as its plug-and-play abilities. But the headset had a couple of other things going for it, too: it was relatively cheap (Kickstarter backers could grab one for under US$300) and it was slated to be released in 2014. Understandably, it turned a lot of heads inside and outside of China.

The reality hasn’t been quite as rosy as the Kickstarter suggested, though, and that was driven home in the Chinese tech press this week with the circulation of a scathing report about ANTVR on Leifengwang. The report, which cites interviews with several anonymous former ANTVR employees, alleges a lot of things, but much of it boils down to mismanagement. It claims that founder Qin Zheng is far more concerned with presenting an impressive public image than he was with creating a good product, and his co-founder and wife Nie Jingzhou is an inept and paranoid manager who makes it difficult for employees to work effectively. One former employee called the ANTVR “a company that likes to brag rather than do anything.”

Tech in Asia contacted ANTVR to request a comment about the Leifengwang report on Monday, but has not heard back. The company has not yet addressed the allegations on its Weibo account.

One story that’s indicative of the tone of the Leifengwang piece: an anonymous former employee told the site that Nie ordered a hundred rendered product shots from an ANTVR partner, demanding them by the end of the day. The employee, knowing that each render also needed to be edited like a photo in order to look attractive, suggested that she ask for just ten or twenty instead, since demanding 100 be produced in just a few hours was sure to result in rushed work and uselessly unattractive renders. According to the employee, Nie’s response to this was to “rain curses on me, screaming and crying in the office. She asked ‘Who are you really in league with? Who are you really working for?’ and a lot of people in the office could hear it.” After that, the employee said, he wondered (not for the first time) if he was an idiot for working there.

Of course, accusations from anonymous former employees should always be taken with a grain of salt, especially in the Chinese tech press. But it’s clear that something isn’t right at ANTVR. There were questions about the company’s claims from the beginning, and reviewers have not been impressed with the device. Our own Paul Bischoff was underwhelmed by it, for example, and other reviewers have been much harsher.

But perhaps most telling: the comments on ANTVR’s Kickstarter page and on many of its backer updates contain quite a few complaints about defective units and a lack of support, although many do give the company credit for having followed through with its promise to deliver higher-quality replacement lenses to backers last year. At the very least, the company doesn’t seem to be doing a great job communicating with its English-speaking backers. On ANTVR’s latest update, an especially irate backer named Nadim Alam wrote: “Your product has been awful and nothing [sic] what was promised, your support has been even worse! You don’t deserve any success, hope your company dies a dog’s death!”

It’s not at all clear that the accusations in the Leifengwang piece are genuine or fair. But if they are, it would certainly go a long way towards explaining the apparent trouble the company has had delivering on the eye-catching promises that first lifted it into the limelight.