For most users who have discussed the multitude of peripherals on offer for PC users, Logitech is a name that features almost every time. I remember my G7 wireless mouse and G15 keyboard combination back in 2005-2006 when I was clan gaming, but Logitech’s history goes back way beyond this to some of the first early iterations of mouse design. As a result, Logitech is always on the periphery of discussions when it comes to building systems. In recent years however, Logitech’s focus has not always been obvious due to their splitting out into other segments such as audio and touch screen remote controls. That lack of focus has been examined internally and repurposed into targeting their core demographic. Now armed with their Logitech G brand for gaming for a number of quarters, Logitech invited influential media to their Daniel Borel Innovation Center in Lausanne, Switzerland, to get a taste of the company and their efforts moving forward.

Whenever the media are invited to a tech day like this, it is usually derived from the need to tell a story (and promote products). Logitech has many angles for a story, but the one they want to promote is the ‘Win with Science’ ethos. As someone with background in scientific research, it makes complete sense to me to take this approach, although it does not tell the whole story when developing a product. But Logitech is perhaps in a better position than most on this front.

Logitech is highly integrated with EPFL, the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, a top-20 university worldwide with a focus on engineering. This gives several distinct advantages. Firstly, access to engineers and professors to collaborate on research. This means, in part, cooperating with professors with research grant funding to analyze various concepts of human interaction or developing better ways for that interaction. Secondly, it gives them access to students who have grown up with Logitech, offering a different perspective having grown up with the company in their gaming life as well as new ideas. With these in hand, when new inventions are made, it allows Logitech to invest in cross-licensing deals with the patent holders and to work closely with them for new technology. Part of this is benefited from Logitech’s testing facilities, which became part of the tour.

This mini-article from the event will cover two main topics – the tour, and the products.

The Tour

Maxime Marini, the Senior Director of Engineering, Gaming and Retail Pointing Devices at Logitech, started the day recalling Logitech’s history and work ethic. We recorded the video here, where Mr. Marini described that the company was founded in a town called Apples, and this was one of their first mice designed in 1980/81:

As mentioned earlier, part of the design process for Logitech involves bringing in students and gamers (see later) to discuss and help design the products. Insert obligatory ‘brainstorming’ interpretation:

As part of the involvement with the EPFL, Logitech sponsor a biannual LAN event as an additional source of feedback on new designs and concepts. Part of what makes a company successful is the experience and design, hence Logitech’s goal of the day to talk to the media. Mr Marini also touched upon Logitech’s manufacturing, indicating that they own their own factory in China rather than outsource to existing companies. Mr Marini was based in Asia for 10 years with Logitech, spending time at the factory actually being hands on assembling the components and talking to line operators about process optimizations and product control. We were told that the factory in Suzhou produces 3 million products a week, shipping to over a hundred countries. I can imagine at a future date that Logitech might invite media to the factory itself in order to get an even closer look into this side of the business.

Logitech G

The focus of the day was more towards Logitech G, the gaming arm of Logitech. In a presentation by Vincent Tucker, the director of Research and Development at Logitech, he took us through the thought process behind the G range. Despite Logitech always being associated with a gaming range, over recent years they have moved into many different peripheral areas.

Some of these are areas hotly contested by bulk production companies in China, such as tablet folios and Bluetooth keyboards, but some require significant research such as audio and focused peripherals. The G branding is a refocus towards the gaming crowd, with the discussion of the day around mice and keyboards more so than audio. With this comes Logitech sponsoring professional gaming teams such as Cloud 9 and other LOL/Hearthstone players, which they had invited to the Tech Day for some Q&A and gaming later in the day.

One of Logitech’s focuses is towards MOBA gaming (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena, or what we used to call Real Time Strategy but now controlling a single character rather than a god-view [thanks to Murloc for the context]) such as League of Legends (LoL) and Dota 2, as well as regular FPS and other genres. Mr Tucker described some of the processes that go towards designing a MOBA mouse, such as the G302 Daedalus Prime:

This includes analyzing where players need extra buttons, hand placement, grip type (claw vs. finger-tip) and the level of consistency in the clicking performance across a game.  We were shown diagrams of where parts of the hand exhibit more tension for different designs as an example of the type of research Logitech performs. For wired mice it also extends to the flexibility of the cable as well. One might argue that what is good for professional gamers might not necessarily be good for general users. When this question was presented to Logitech, they answered with reference to the wired cable - where professionals prefer something simple and flexible, whereas home gamers might prefer a braided design for longevity.

Without trying to turn this into a slide fest, ultimately Logitech’s own images put it better than my phone could capture. Something such as click response over the range sounds simple enough when mentioned, although I remember devices such as my G5 having a differing click response over the range. Even my current non-Logitech mouse has an irregular click force profile over the range, though as a writer that does not affect me much, but I can understand the importance.

With the pro-gamers, we were told of the iterative design process, such as what is here above. This includes the arch position, the size of the device and even the materials used. Some gamers prefer a soft grip on the sides and hold onto their mouse tightly, whereas others keep a loose grip.

Along with function, in order for Logitech to produce a marketable product, there has to be an element of style to the device as a whole:

As part of the tour it was explained how even the presentation of the LEDs through parts of the device are modeled via ray tracing so the position of the LED can be optimized to give the glow desired.

As part of this R&D Talk, we were also introduced to the G910 Orion Spark keyboard. This keyboard was a major part of our tour, due to the new Romer G mechanical switches, but also due to the elements of design needed for it.

This means orientation of the keys (particularly WASD), wrist positions depending on the type of activity, and what looks like a lot of thermal imaging to see where the stresses of long-term gaming using the device can be reduced.

The shape of the keys on the G910 were also subject to research, whereby the angled design above allows gamers to slot their fingers into position easier, especially when they need to reach over for other keys away from their normal resting place. We were told that here is another point where professional gamers and regular users differ in preference – the regular users wanted a shallower dip into the key, whereas the professional gamers were happy either way.

The Romer G switch is new for the G910 as well, being a mechanical switch similar to MX Browns but of Logitech’s own design, featuring a shorter actuation time due to the shallower actuation depth. The profile is almost identical to the Browns, requiring the same force, but narrower in terms of distance.

Aside from the force profile and the key shape, the Romer G key features a double redundancy for connection to the motherboard, a PMMA based lens for shining the LED and a Logitech designed cap. Similar to the mice, the Logitech key was designed via ray tracing to find the optimal placement for the LED and lens for full brightness coverage. This ends up being important for keyboards that have multiple characters per key but require an even brightness throughout. Overall these new keys are designed for 70 million presses each, and the fact that Logitech is the sole producer of these keys allows them to bin for accuracy and performance rather than buying batches from Cherry and binning those separately with no guarantee.

As part of the discussion we were also joined by Ujesh Desai, a veteral of marketing formerly from NVIDIA who recently took on a role at Logitech involving management, marketing and brand direction of the whole Logitech G ecosystem.

I spent a good while speaking with Mr Desai about the direction of Logitech and the importance of gaming. Despite only being in the job for a few weeks, he said that the interesting work dynamic between his old company and Logitech, and despite moving from inside the PC case to the outside there was still a focus towards the user and he is able to bring ideas to the table immediately.

The Testing Facilities

When we looked at ASUS’ testing facilities back in June, my experience in motherboards gave me a sense of what I should expect at the time. Though despite being a keyboard user since my Commodore 64 and on the mouse since the Acorn, the phrase ‘testing facilities’ for these products produced an almost blank mental image. After taking the tour at Logitech, I came back with a large facepalm because ultimately this testing is part obvious, part stretching the limits of the technology.

Testing keyboards for those 70 million keypresses seems a bit arduous to do manually. So the obvious thing is to automate the process. We were shown two different ways of testing the keys – either as a process or specifically in a gaming orientation:

Similarly, testing mice for longevity requires its own system:

Another element of the mouse is also the sensor, firstly in terms of angular accuracy:

And then for circular motion on different surfaces, such as glass:

We have a series of videos on YouTube showing these in action here.

One of the elements of the mice to test would be the effect of acceleration on different surfaces, for which Logitech developed this machine:

With this machine the mouse would be glued to this arm and the surface would be spun at up to a couple hundred inches per second (ips). This test would take place on a set of prepared surfaces:

There were boxes in this testing room labeled ‘standard testing kit’. I wonder where the ‘advanced testing kit’ was and what was in it.

(Apologies for the off color images, my DSLR failed earlier in the day and my cell phone has a low light sensor defect)

How mice respond to speed was an important aspect to the tour. In this poster, as was mentioned several times, speeds of up to 400 inches per second can be reached by professional gamers, particularly in intense MOBA or FPS type environments. Due to this speed, Logitech had to develop some interesting equipment to not only test their solutions, but also develop new sensors that could cope with it.

One of the bits of equipment is this above – an arm designed to move a mouse up to 500 ips on a gaming mat surface. In this mouse, the sensor response is calculated based on speed. A normal mouse fails with this equipment, and as a result Logitech developed a new sensor which uses a combination of optic tools and accelerometers to determine the position in order to update the PC. Normally the mouse works on the optical sensor, calculating overlap of the position of the mouse to tell the PC where it is. When the speed of the mouse is faster than the optical sensor can compute, the mouse switches over to the accelerometer:

Using the G402 mouse, the blue line represents the optical sensor and the red line for the accelerometer. When the optical sensor gets too fast (in this case, a negative acceleration detected), the message back over USB is one of garbage because the optics cannot determine where the mouse is in relation to where it was. This is where the accelerometer takes over until the mouse is back to where it can understand the situation again. One might wonder why not use the accelerometer all the time? We were told that the accelerometer is actually not that good at determining position when at slow speeds, but is ideal for this sort of scenario. We have a specific video with Logitech discussing this equipment here.

An element of discussion I was interested in was the development of wireless products, particularly mice. I keep referring back to my wireless G5, which I thought was great. The stigma of wireless mice for professional gaming is still alive and well, to which Logitech’s engineers say is now unfounded due to their design and testing.

This is Logitech’s RF anechoic chamber, designed for testing radio frequency response of wireless peripherals. The room cost several hundred thousand euros in terms of building and equipment, but the basis is to characterize how wireless performance changes as you rotate a device.  The best way to describe this is with a diagram:

Here we have the result of a wireless mouse and the strength of the response dependent on the angle on which it is pointing. Logitech uses the anechoic chamber as well as modeling software to design the mice: imagine that you can stick the wireless antenna on the mouse anywhere you like within the shell, but certain areas are affected by the composition of material in that location (a hard rubber, plastic, or metal frame). By using a combination of simulation and real world results, Logitech can optimize the design along with gamers to avoid dead zones and maintain a high bandwidth throughout. The use of simulation allows Logitech to test designs before prototyping, and confirm a good correlation between simulation and real world (similar to lots of other areas of manufacturing).

Some of those hundreds of thousands of monies are spent on this sort of equipment. Logitech also addressed a question about batteries, stating that their gaming mice can support up to 250 hours of use between full charges. Makes a difference to the 8-12 hours I used to get, for sure.

Some More about Romer G and the G910

Being their first own-designed mechanical switch, Logitech wanted to go in a bit more detail. The switches were co-designed between Logitech and Omron, with manufacturing occurring in Japan. The aim was to emulate Browns, the most common gaming type of mechanical switch, but offer something scientifically better in every way. This means a shorter actuation time, a smaller actuation point, a longer lifetime and a brighter switch overall.

Each switch has an RGB LED, allowing for a full 16 million color customization in each key. This is controlled by the Logitech software which in itself requires a completely separate article going through all the separate per-key and per-application lighting arrangement it can support. Several media during the day amusingly set the colors of the keyboard into the flags of their respective countries – the UK flag would be a bit difficult. But Logitech (like Corsair in many respects) is still exploring the ways that a full RGB keyboard might be useful for users.

The G910 supports ARX Control, which is Logitech’s next generation of on-keyboard display. Rather than implement an LCD panel on the keyboard in previous generations, Logitech is leveraging the fact that most gamers have a smartphone on hand with its own high quality LCD display. With the Arx Control app installed (both iOS and Android), the user can have in-game stats, peripheral management, media management or even use the device as a form of control. Arx itself is still somewhat in a development phase, with all the required SDKs available for programmers to design their own tools either for gaming or as something to optimize the workflow.

As a writer, I almost exclusively use Cherry MX Blues at home. There’s something of a whiff of nostalgia when all the clicking is going on, and the only beings I annoy with the noise are my two cats during the day. I am a gamer, and while I enjoy twitch style gaming, I end up being a bad loser and prefer to play against easy bots. Romer G is aimed more at the competitive gamer for sure, where faster reactions matter most. The G910 will retail at $180 in the USA, or £160 in the UK.

Meet the Gamers

As with most PC part manufacturers, sponsoring one or more professional eSports teams has now become the standard in trying to promote the brand.

At the Tech Day were the CS:GO team from Cloud 9, along with a Hearthstone player, a member of the Alliance LoL team and also the LoL Team SoloMid. Some of the day’s Q&A was directed at the gamers, and although I have been away from semi-competitive clan gaming for almost a decade it is interesting to see how the professional scene has grown.

Logitech’s involvement, as with many others, is pretty obvious given how much viewership of eSports is now growing beyond most of the high profile sports in parts of the world. It still has a way to go before catching up with the World Cup, Super Bowl or Formula 1, but it might make sense that companies like Logitech latch on because the point of advertising is to pinpoint eyeballs on your product.

As part of Logitech’s sponsorship to teams like Cloud 9, they are one of 3-5 sponsors that cater for the basic needs of the team. A professional team has to cover housing, hardware, salaries, training and housekeeping on their base line, followed by boot camps, tutors, pay-to-enter events as a secondary tier. Talking to the managers of the gaming teams at the event, it would seem that prize money is an extra bonus on top of this, being split between the players. This means that Logitech has no formal equity in the team as an investor, but their benefits are eyeballs on their brand, discussion and development of the product for the wider market as well as the ultimate potential to be featured in a large final tournament somewhere. I remember a graphics card vendor telling me that advertising on streams ends up with a nice percentage of clickthroughs than some other advertising, especially when it comes to large events.

As part of the event, some CS:GO machines were set up for contests, although I declined on the fact that while I have played Counter Strike, I had not touched Global Offensive. That was rectified in the steam sale this week, along with a couple of new benchmarks for next year’s reviews.

The Future of Logitech

Part of the event was the official sale dates of the G302 Daedalus Prime ($50) and G402 Hyperion Fury ($60) mice as well as the G910 Orion Spark ($180) keyboard with Romer G switches. It was discussed at the event about future product, particularly those aligned with certain types of game or even branded by the teams that Logitech sponsor. Naturally discussion of future products was kept to a minimum, except that iterations on a theme are particularly common and that the SDKs surrounding their software packages are continually in development, especially for Arx Control.

Now as part of the media inner circle, we hope that we can get some of these products in for review. We would like to thank Logitech for the trip to their base in Lausanne.