The VX-800 is a small, entry level webcam with an approachable personality and a price tag that can't be beat! The initial ask for this product came from marketing in the form of a handful of potential, off-the-shelf, "pic" products. Pic products are offered by manufacturers to businesses with the lure of eliminating design time and reducing COGS (cost of goods sold) as well as the cost of tooling. Unfortunately the majority of these products are designed quickly and blindly, without regard for a company's design aesthetic so that they can be shopped around to several businesses.  

As expected, the "Pic" products that were available to us fell far outside of our established design language.  We felt strongly within the ID team that all hardware design must stay in house to insure a consistent design language and a steady ranking of products from the low end to high. ID proposed to marketing that the camera be designed in-house with the promise of record low COGS.

We had only a week to design the product.  The ID group worked to design a camera that would sit firmly at the end of our line, taking design cues from it's siblings without cannibalizing their sales.  The final design leverages the base from the Msft Lifecam VX-2000 and uses only two additional parts to construct the main housing.  The low part count and tooling cost made this camera even cheaper to produce then the "Pic" options originally proposed.