A cloud MDM platform for VR device management at scale

Summary

StretchSense, the Edinburgh based innovator in human motion capture, turns natural hand and body movement into intelligence that powers robotics, immersive XR training and next generation gaming. As its VR training solutions expanded into schools, colleges and universities, StretchSense needed to manage a fast growing fleet of headsets, gloves, pucks and trackers from a single place.

TulipTech partnered with StretchSense to design and build a cloud based Mobile Device Management (MDM) platform for its VR hardware ecosystem, delivering it from zero to production in around four months. The result is a secure, real time command centre that turns VR device management across educational institutions from a manual, error prone task into a scalable, self serve operation.

The challenge

Every great deployment starts with a bottleneck, and StretchSense had a growing one. Rolling out VR hardware to classroom after classroom meant provisioning each headset, glove, puck and tracker by hand, keeping firmware current and tracking device health across many sites at once. It simply could not scale.

The technical hurdles ran deep. StretchSense needed to support several device enrolment methods, including QR code, HTC and Pico via Android Enterprise, so that very different hardware could be onboarded through one simple process. Administrators needed real time telemetry to watch battery and thermal health and act before a lesson was disrupted. The platform had to offer secure multi tenant access, so super admins could support one organisation without ever crossing into another. It needed live video streaming with proper consent controls. And, midway through the build, the entire authentication system had to migrate from Okta to Auth0 without breaking single sign on or leaving stale user identities behind.

Our approach

TulipTech approached the brief as a custom software development project, not a quick patch. Rather than forcing StretchSense into an off the shelf tool, our engineering team built purpose made architecture for every challenge. Where others reach for a generic dashboard, we engineered for the realities of VR hardware in the classroom.

We created a unified device enrolment pipeline with device specific adapters and deterministic serial number fallbacks, so QR, HTC and Pico or Android Enterprise devices all flow through one consistent journey. For real time device monitoring, we combined TimescaleDB hypertables, a database optimised for time series data, with a background job engine that processes telemetry continuously and raises battery and thermal alerts the moment thresholds are crossed.

Security sat at the heart of the design. We built a tenant scoped repository pattern with per request session hydration and a generation guarded impersonation restore, allowing super admins to act on behalf of an organisation and return cleanly to their own session, with no risk of crossed sessions or data leaking between tenants. Live streaming was delivered through a signalling server with a presence reconciler and a WebRTC ticket broker, keeping every session secure and consent based. Finally, we replaced a risky all at once cutover with per user, login time stale identity checks and automated SSO provisioning, migrating from Okta to Auth0 with uninterrupted access for every user.

Key capabilities

Technology, security and compliance

Engineered for secure, multi tenant device management across web and VR hardware, the platform is built with enterprise grade security and privacy by design. Role based access control, Auth0 single sign on, tenant scoped data isolation, generation guarded impersonation and consent based streaming protect every organisation and every device, whilst a full CI/CD pipeline keeps releases reliable, repeatable and auditable.

See it in action

A closer look at the StretchSense MDM platform in everyday use.

Results

The outcome speaks for itself. TulipTech delivered a production grade MDM platform from zero to production in around four months, spanning 413+ merged pull requests, 28 API modules, 39 web pages and a full CI/CD pipeline.

StretchSense can now manage its entire VR device fleet across educational institutions from a single platform, with real time monitoring, live streaming and centralised firmware and WiFi management. Most tangibly, device onboarding has moved from slow manual provisioning to a single QR scan, getting hardware into learners' hands faster than ever before. What was once an operational bottleneck is now a scalable strength, ready to support many institutions securely from one console.