tl;dr — a series of posts about things that have happened to me since 2013 in VR.
Settle in folks, this could be a long one. [EDIT: yeah 13,500+ words long in total! Actually now multi-part unlocking daily.] As I sit to start to piece this together, it’s mid-July 2022, the weekend after the week I was offered my soon-to-be new role as Content Partnerships Lead at HTC Vive // Viveport and subsequently handed my letter of resignation in as Immersive Partnerships Director, at Make Real Ltd.
I‘ve ended up being a visible public face of the studio for 8 of these last 9 years, which has sometimes led to people hilariously confusing me as the CEO, MD, founder etc. Whilst outspoken and passionate about the direction and strategy for the studio, this always has been and will continue to be Robin (MD) and Ben’s roles (co-founders) as I move on.
Anyway with that cleared up, a 3-month notice period awaits that will take me up to October. I’ve plenty of time to put some thoughts into words here, covering some of the [sharable] experiences and times had since I joined the company back in May 2013. Plenty of public posts, thoughts and opinions have been made online already over the years, the full collection of which you can read over on my pinned post “Adventures in VR Babysitting” here on Medium.
First I guess we should look at a little bit of backstory to help position where all this fits in. I first tried VR in the 90s, at the Trocadero Centre in London where they had Virtuality machines running Dactal Nightmare. For those who have tried it will know it was, as expected from the computing power available back then, low-poly, un-textured, low-res, high-latency and pretty headache-inducing. Like most people back then, I was impressed by what VR could be but knew it had a long way to go until it would get there, and mostly forgot about it. I studied CAVEs and VRML at uni in the late 90s, watched The Matrix, read Snowcrash and followed relevant tech around gaming and immersion where I could.
I’m not a programmer, I dabbled with design on and off around a couple of previous roles but my core strengths were within QA and project management. I’ve tried learning to code on a number of occasions but I just don’t get on with it. So when 2013 turned up with the Oculus Rift DK1, for me it was a rebirth of opportunity for VR but with a mature mindset. Over the following years, this meant doing what I could do best to help others understand and make them believe through honest critique and awareness, whilst helping building teams of highly skilled people who could make stuff.
This last point is key moving forwards. The industry around VR and other immersive tech has become heavily influencer-driven and we sometimes forget the pioneers who over the previous waves, have gotten us to this point. VR has become a hype-focussed industry, certainly around the rebirth in 2013–2014 leading up to the commercial launches in 2016. There were many pivots by various companies hoping to cash in a quick buck on the latest buzzword or hashtag. Periodically there’s a culling of the dead wood, or some of those companies go back to what they were doing beforehand.
But with each new term or cycle of tech, from the initial swell to standalone and most recently, around the metaverse, new faces jump on the bandwagon or adjust their job titles to remain relevant as an influencer or paid voice. Look to find the builders behind the speakers and pay attention to what they’re doing rather than those who just shill others work for their own credit.
So over those 9+ years we’ve seen multiple iterations of headsets released, some more successfully than others, hardware companies come, and go or never deliver, acquisitions for better or worse and multiple Years of VR heralded as success or failure, depending upon the pundit. But as with every story, we must start at…
The [Re]Beginning
Through the mists of time, there’s one event that sometimes gets mis-credited to me. This event was pretty pinnacle to what the studio became and whilst I was responsible for taking the Oculus Rift DK1 KickStarter backer reward units and running with them in 2013, it wasn’t me who convinced the MD to originally support the campaign in 2012. VR is powerful but can’t do time-travel with it (although Lucus Rizzotto will claim otherwise).
However these two units arrived towards the end of my initial 6-month contract and turned everything upside down. I had been originally hired as Project Manager to deliver the next “3D team” solution, an updated version of a multi-channel projected construction site training simulator. This was first deployed at Coventry University a few years before and was being repeated, albeit with updated content for Australian regulations, for the BLSC (Building Leadership Simulation Centre), in Melbourne.
At the time the team was small, consisting of myself (PM), a senior designer, a senior artist and a senior developer. We worked with an art outsource agency for much of the 3D content but the final “timeslices” were positioned, built and configured in-house.
The project was all-consuming but once done, involving the senior developer having to travel to Melbourne, Australia for final alignment and performance checks, literally a couple of hours work, we were without the next project. But the Oculus Rift DK1s had arrived and we’d played about with them a bit.
At the time, the company (known as Makemedia then) was a web company first, 3D company second. The web-side were working with RS Components to create the online user tool for electronics, “Design Spark”. Client stakeholders would often come through our little area, initially laughing at us looking goofy in headsets but were soon keen to have us build something for them. But what?
Thankfully the company were planning to announce their presence in China in early 2014, launching their electronics components catalogue at a trade show “Electronica Productica”. So we started talking about how we could use VR to make something unique for their booth to attract the crowds. But again, what?
We already had experience of Unity and had been building screen-based 3D applications with it for some time. Early, rough VR SDKs and plugins were available but this was back then when it was all tethered and a fairly high-end Windows-based [gaming] PC (at the time) was required. It was 3DoF, no controller or hand-tracking was available, everything was Xbox gamepad-based.
It was decided to build a multiplayer racing game, set within a cityscape styled as oversized electrical components to create skyscrapers and cables becoming the tubular race track. Based upon a Unity spline plugin tool, a track was made and comfort tests carried out, whilst the artist worked on the environment and cockpit. With no up and no down, no horizon to visualise 360º rotation, stomach contents were kept where they should be.
Tentatively adding the environment, we jumped in again to see if it was any less comfortable. By now we also had the final cockpit 3D assets in place and overall, the level of comfort remained high. I wrote (& got paid!) about the design aspects for Polygon a few years later, after a longer featured blog post originally on GamaSutra.
So as not to dwell on this too long, suffice to say our first VR project deployment went off without a hitch (start as you mean to go on etc). Four high-end gaming PCs, two laptops to run the spectator screens and four Oculus Rift DK1s were sneaked into China, taken to the event under lock and key, setup, operated and returned to the UK safely. Overall the installation and experience was such a success, other booth operators were unimpressed by the audiences it drew and the event organisers had close eyes on the numbers, as the photo below shows!
