Four Podcast Conversations With Kent Bye's Voices Of VR
The philosopher, oral historian, & experiential journalist Kent Bye cornered me several times over the years for my thoughts.
I don’t listen to Kent’s podcasts often. It’s just not my preferred way of digesting information while I also spend my days trying to directly contact some of the same people he speaks with. I respect the effort and focus in his work, though, and not many people ask journalists their thoughts because we tend to guard them as part of the job. But when Kent asks me to speak with him I tend to say yes and unload on him with a fair bit of pent up emotion sitting underneath the surface of my work.
I also produced a weekly show in front of a live YouTube audience with my former colleagues at UploadVR called the VR Download. The conversations we had were driven partially by what the hosts brought to the table but just as important there were the live comments we saw rolling in from the audience as we were talking. As long as people were respectful, it was easy to respond to their ideas, go off on silly or strange tangents, or respond to questions from new people who had just discovered the long path VR continues to be on after decades in research labs.
I’ve heard from several people missing my voice on the VR Download and wanted to reassure people that I will soon be broadcasting again. Until I can put the episodes together, though, you can listen to four conversations between myself and Kent Bye that can provide some deep insight into my last seven years covering the VR market.
I’ve listed the conversations below chronologically with notable comments from each discussion:
2019: The Reveal Of Valve Index During Facebook’s VR Event
I'm sitting there at the Starbucks, then an email comes in and it says the embargo has changed from May 1st to April 30th at 10 a.m. Now, that was two hours ago, so that was the very start of the F8 keynote. It's hard to describe my reaction as a journalist to all these things, because I try to be objective. I try to be balanced. I try to be fair. But there's still emotional reactions to major news breaking. And so just knowing that Valve was going to time their announcement to the exact start of Facebook's announcements. I get giddy as a journalist. I don't know. I can't wait to see what the Internet does. It's going to be bloody. I hate saying both of those things. I know there's going to be so much debate and talk and I know that everything that these two companies are about to announce is going to drive the conversation for the next nine months, years. And it's just, I've worked so hard to try to be on the front lines of all this and not misrepresent what anyone's doing. And at the same time, you know, you're wondering, does Facebook know what I know? Like, I mean, Valve clearly knows that stuff is coming from Facebook, but does Facebook know? And it's an exciting time for me personally. And I feel weird sharing that, but you bring it out of me, Kent. Because I have this demeanor of trying to be neutral all the time. And something of this magnitude, it's hard. And there's a lot of things to balance. I don't care about this technology relative to people, right? I care about people. I think the people who are making this technology are doing something from their hearts.
2023: Apple Vision Pro’s Announcement And First Public Demo
“I had messaged every person I knew that had gone and gotten sucked up by the Apple mothership prior to that. So I was in all their LinkedIn messages, their DM chat, trying to say, ‘Hey, if you can get me on the list, please do so.' I would love to be there when Apple announces its thing,’ knowing that none of them can reply to me or even give me a hint of anything. I don't know how I got on the list. But yeah, I was in my mom's house in Bentonville, Arkansas, like my son's last day of school. He was just getting ready for his summer vacation. And I'm walking around preparing for my own personal travel that I've got coming up. And I looked down at my phone and the email is there that you've been invited to Apple's. My son was born the day I accepted the job to work at Upload. And he saw me jump through the ceiling, almost, in a way that he's never seen me jump. Like you say, he's almost eight years old, and he saw a moment of joy. in me that he has never seen in his life and he flat out said I've never seen you act like that but it's it was meaningful and I explained it to him that I've been I've been more or less working towards this moment his entire life and it feels weird to frame it that way but it is essentially true.
2024: Meta’s Unshippable Orion Glasses
Star Trek was my childhood TV show in the holodeck. Transporters, going to strange new worlds was always my model in my mind of the future I wanted to see for everyone. They had Geordi LaForge, the blind man on the ship, as the engineer and can see better than everyone. And it made a lot of sense to me as the future we should all work for. And so when I saw the Rift DK2 and those guys outlined for me the wide field of view and the tracking and all of it being within arm's reach, I was going back to my editors saying, I need to write more. And they were all rolling their eyes at me for a little while. And the satisfaction I felt when... The satisfaction and the pit in my stomach was a very strange feeling to feel when 2014 rolled around and Facebook bought them because it's like... an instantaneous realization that the future you've imagined and went out on a limb for is actually going to happen and here we are a decade later on from that and I haven't been proven wrong yet.
And:
I'm so excited for the future of this technology and the things it will bring people. At the same time, I'm trying to put labels and ideas and concepts in people's minds that help them realize all the bad things are coming with the good things. VRChat is not a safe place for children. Rec Room is not a safe place for children. You go on there with voice chat, you're not safe as a child. And I'm saying that as a journalist who doesn't say that in a lot of places. Like, I haven't said that. I have to be balanced and objective. But like, we took the playgrounds away from children And then we gave them digital playgrounds with adults role-playing as children. And that's not okay. And how do I balance that with the excitement for the new game that's coming out, right? Drones are killing people from head-mounted displays in certain parts of the world right now. That's upsetting. To know that the same fundamental technology that is bringing all this joy to so many people is also killing people. And you can argue that FPV Viewer is not a VR headset, but I mean, I saw a lot of people driving drones in their quests over the last three weeks as soon as they added HDMI Link in.
2026: Concerns About AI Authorship In News And Going Independent
It's always about the quality of the content, the words that you're putting on the page. But that's what they need. They need to fill the site. They need to keep those regular viewers coming back. And I mean, that's my 10-year struggle here at UploadVR, to go from this freelancer to the editor-in-chief who's managing content from multiple staffers who are on different continents, different time zones, etc. Yeah, so an exhausting journey when I look back on it of just struggling, struggling, struggling to raise up voices and places inside VR that are going to be around for a while. Like, it's wild to think about in retrospect, things like Echo, right? I'm live inside of virtual reality on Upload VR's YouTube channel when Meta announces they're closing down virtual reality when they announce Echo Arena is being shut down. And so there's live video out there of me reacting to one of the biggest failures, one of the biggest misses, bad decisions that Meta has made over the years to shut down one of the places in virtual reality that people wanted to go in Oculus headsets. Come off of my journey and go back to Meta's journey. I see so many mistakes over the years. But think about that as a journalist watching it. I'm investing time and effort and resources into covering Echo Arena because, holy crap, it's got a community. There's real people loving this thing. So it goes to the top of our list of coverage. Whenever anything happens in Echo Arena, we're going to be on it. And then Meta just comes around one day and says, Echo Arena is an idea of the past. We're done. And so all that investment in trying to become experts in that community, connections in that community, be the site that becomes the place that Echo Arena fans want to come read We couldn't do that. It all dies because of a decision out of our control. And so there's such a small example here of how our coverage decisions were always influenced by the elephant in the room of meta. They closed down a whole area of VR that we were interested and excited to cover. And now we're going to cover what they put in its place.
