Hello from Seattle! I don't work at Valve, Oculus, HTC, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Magic Leap, Unity or Unreal. But every single one of those companies has an R&D lab in Seattle that is working on VR and AR, and I have at least one friend who works in each of them, plus a dozen more in small VR companies you have never heard of.
So, in Seattle I started a VR company called Invrse, and 3 years later you could say I am one of the leading experts in Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality. We've made games, including one that made decent money. We've also experimented with things like locomotion and text input...challenges that not even the big boys have really solved yet.
I'm also a 3D Modeler, animator, and generally useful guy to have around when you want to make something look cool in Unity or Unreal.
For background, roughly 8 years ago I started an iOS mobile gaming company with a programmer friend of mine, but our paths diverged when he went into crypto and I [eventually]went into immersive technology. Since then I have worked on almost two dozen games and demos for the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, Windows MR including HoloLens, and crazy stuff like CastAR Augmented Reality glasses, Meta, and the recently launched (in China) Vive Focus. I literally can't confirm or deny if I have tried Magic Leap, so we should all take a moment to be in awe of how good their NDA is!
Last year my company got into ViveX, the VR accelerator run by HTC, and Oculus LaunchPad...at the same time. It was a hell of a year, but the realities of an emerging market are pretty dank...after working with nothing but start-ups since 2014, I'm pretty beat up. Getting investment for a tech startup is something I'll probably write about, but it will come with a trigger warning for suicidal references, because trying to raise money for the last 7 months has made me want to kill myself.
Part of my reason for coming here, aside from easily a million dollars worth of "I told you so's" from my old video game partner who tried to get me into bitcoin in 2011, is that my influence on Facebook has gotten a little out of control, and I have too many business partners on the site to be able to speak as openly as I want. Even now, I haven't gone as anonymous here as I probably should have, and there is a non-zero chance that my candid take on things will make it to an important contact and get me scolded. (I am not Palmer Luckey, but I sort of feel his pain) This keys in a bit with the fundraising nightmare, as keeping a public persona and being followed by potential investors has made me unable to speak my mind on pretty big issues.
Since I am not fully anonymous, and my company title is plain to see, I will not be leaking confidential info, breaking NDAs, or venting too hard...though damn that would be cathartic.
I'm also not here to try and sell games, especially since our newest release is only on the Vive Focus and only in China (called Hero Sword VR) But I'm happy to link to our projects, blog about a million mistakes we made, and maybe make friends who want to jump in a game together. Our biggest title is called The Nest, and is one of the coolest multiplayer VR shooters you can find...if there are people online to play against. (My picture above is a render of our Sniper class from the Angroid faction, which I kit bashed from existing 3D meshes)
If folks want the take of an industry insider, I'm a useful resource, and will be posting more about some of our projects (not the super secret ones...yet) and the industry at large.
Immersive tech is coming, and surely intersects with Blockchain in a million ways, but it has a few hundred hurdles left to overcome. The first of those hurdles will be if bitcoin miners can please stop buying out all the GTX 1070 and 1080 cards, which is making it super expensive for people to get a VR gaming rig!
Lastly, I have spoken on almost a dozen panels in the last few years, so if you have good questions, I have good answers.
Cheers,
Invrse.
P.S. I messed up the tags and my original ended up in the VR section. Hopefully this will post in the right place!
You should add more tags bud, to make it more available. Also props on what you are doing (: I'm also new on here.
Thanks for mentioning it. I had just posted this with the Introduceyourself headline, assuming that this would tag it, but my first tag at the bottom was VR, and there was no way to fix it. So to be extra careful I only put the introduce in the tag, to make sure it ended up in the right place.
Hey, I'm Oatmeal Joey, and I love robots but will we let the Matrix or Wall-E happen or what can we do?
I went to CES in Las Vegas a month ago, and the robots are getting bigger, more useful, and ultimately more terrifying. A human who weighs 200lbs is designed with 2 legs to push all that meat around. People often can't do pull-ups, and can't curl, press or extend heavy weights.
A robot that weighs 400lbs is moving that much weight around. They are being built to carry heavy loads, exert superhuman force, and be as efficient as possible with their leverage.
And once you see them walk around, carry things, play ping-pong, or any of the other tasks that robots do at CES to impress onlookers, it gets scary as fuck. They will be able to exert so much force, it would make the Terminator look like a chump.
The silly answer to threatening robots is that the ones aimed at consumers all have big bobble-heads, expressive eyes, and no arms to speak of. They want to make Amazon Echo with a head and a face, but no ability to massacre a household.
This is all a little morbid and off my usual VR topics, but I've seen a Boston Dynamics dog robot in person, and at CES I saw an 18' tall riding mech for some "Mech Racing League" TV show. These things are being built, but any idea that clever humans will beat them or knock them over is naive. They are ALL built to get up when they fall over, and thanks to machine learning, they simulate ways to avoid falling over billions upon billions of times until their "brains" can adapt instantly.
It will take a lot of wisdom...and well placed fear...to avoid having dangerous robots and drones become part of daily life. I definitely recommend heading to CES next year, because each year things get bigger more sci-fi.
There will be good and bad robots, like guns. We will need to have robots to protect ourselves from evil robots if there were any.
sigh. we've all seen the movie. it doesn't end well. robots hate us.
This is so interesting! I love gaming, I always post stuff related to gaming articles, reviews, or just funny compilations. VR is the future of gaming and I am excited to see what is to come! Welcome to Steem my friend.
It's easy to imagine VR as the future of gaming once you have tried it, but the lack of $100m big budget titles is certainly holding back widespread adoption. Bethesda spent over two years just porting their existing games to VR, and the risk was minimized because they had already made a over billion dollars on the initial releases. (Fallout 4, Doom and Skyrim)
As I've tried to chart a course through dangerous waters, the one notable thing is how once you fall in love with VR, you don't want to go back to 2D games. I could play Breath of the Wild for days on end, but if there was a VR version and I could BE Link in that world, I would probably never leave.
Awesome post. Im really interested in tech and VR but never have the money to purchase any. Maybe one day when thet become more mainstream or I can convince someone to do a review on one. Your website looks very nice 😊
Prices are coming down (they dropped almost 50% in 2017) but I feel you on the mainstream thing. They need to be easy to use, have tons of content, have effortless ways for communicating and sharing with your friends...just like existing consoles. The first gen was for early adopters and die-hard (and devs) but over the next couple years they will get better in literally every way, until an inflection point happens, and then people will not hesitate to go buy the newest one.
That is still a ways off, but I've staked the last 4 years on the vision of a world with VR and AR that is just around the corner, and that bet may pay off soon...or I'll die wishing I had just been mining crypto the whole time.
This is true. The only thing I had a go on recently was the Google cardboard which was such a tease it just gave me an idea about VR. It was fun but glitchy and unrealistic. I would love to try the Hollowlens! I hope this comes in the next year or two because I do think that VR is the way of the future.
Good luck and im following your page and updates - maybe one day I can let you know I have tried the Hollowlens :)
Welcome, it is always nice to have people passionate and willing to share in the community. I also just joined, am sharing manga related information, feel free to drop by, god bless!
Welcome to Steemit @invrse!
I wish you much success and hope you find Steemit to be as rewarding and informative as I have. @bycoleman
Thanks! I actually started a Medium account a few months ago just to talk about this stuff in a longer format with images added, so this is a MUCH better format to scratch that itch.
I've been programming for nearly 40 years, absolutely love learning more everyday, but I have to admit, VR and AR are totally out there for me. Good for you, hope your business is wildly successful.
Check out by blog if your into crypto, alt. energy and marketing.
Loved reading this post, man! Good luck in all of your endeavors, and let me know when you find a 1080! (I'm also looking for an affordable one.)
you should write up all those cathartic posts and set them aside for maybe being anon in the future or just to purge :) thanks for sharing! Happy to have you here
LOL, that's pretty close to the truth so far. I find myself writing in stream of consciousness, then reading it again before hitting "Post" "Submit" or "Send" and immediately realizing I went too far.
So...I don't send them. I bottle them up, censor myself, play nice, and convince the world I am not a huge opinionated asshole.
My email drafts folder is full of shit that would burn bridges, salt the earth, and end my professional career forever. I'm not sure if the change over time is that I am more careful of what I say out loud on digital platforms, or if I am just more of an asshole than I used to be, and must therefore censor myself more. It's a mystery.
Welcome. New here myself, and I can relate to the bit about facebook :)
Good
Welcome to steemit!!
glad to have you here stay stunned...
You can follow my blog @hrishikeshmatre
Welcome to steemit ..
I invite you to visit my blog