I agree with quite a bit of this. But I'd gently push back on the notion that developers have a choice between leading or building for the current market. Intentionality does not have a strong track record of steering the VR market, and leadership is frequently unintentional.
I started VR development in 2013 and feel privileged to have done it for over a decade. But I'm a game developer, not a technologist. One of the biggest lessons that we learned at Turbo Button early on was that most people working in VR focus on innovation at the cost of execution. And nobody pays attention to innovation if the execution isn't there. Accessibility and execution often go hand in hand with this medium, too. We tried to find things the hardware was good at, and leaned hard into that instead of bending and exposing the hardware's shortcomings in pursuit of wish fulfillment. The things we made that resonated the most were things that weren't trying to be innovative or groundbreaking, they were just trying to be the best versions of themselves.
That is still different from choosing what to build based on market trends or analytics. I'm with you there, and not suggesting that either. On this we agree: build for yourself, then find out if you're building for others too. Iterate until you're building something that people understand and can't look away from. If you do that, then you won't have to prove the medium's worth at all because others will champion the value of what you're doing with it.
I really appreciate the thoughtful response, Holden. My original thoughts were to say that “We don’t have a choice, if we aren’t trying to move this industry forward then we’ve resigned to only service a fraction of an already small market”, and essentially saying “We have no choice but to take up the responsibility of disrupting this space.” But I’m cognizant that hobbyists do exist and are loving being in this space without regard to market expansion, so I didn’t want to dismiss them.
I love what you said about the R&D efforts and experimentation to find what works. We absolutely need that at the top of the funnel. A decade in, there are so many strong learnings and awesome tech we have to play with, and to disregard all of that in favor of just AI, 0-dof glasses, and giant home theater would be such a huge mistake that we can’t stop the big platforms from making. Those are arguable great products to be sure, but doesn’t fulfill any of the vision we had for what this tech could achieve, so we’re mostly on our own now.
Mostly: we have more responsibility than we ever planned to, and it’s time to rise up and realize that, for those who haven’t (and want to).
I agree with quite a bit of this. But I'd gently push back on the notion that developers have a choice between leading or building for the current market. Intentionality does not have a strong track record of steering the VR market, and leadership is frequently unintentional.
I started VR development in 2013 and feel privileged to have done it for over a decade. But I'm a game developer, not a technologist. One of the biggest lessons that we learned at Turbo Button early on was that most people working in VR focus on innovation at the cost of execution. And nobody pays attention to innovation if the execution isn't there. Accessibility and execution often go hand in hand with this medium, too. We tried to find things the hardware was good at, and leaned hard into that instead of bending and exposing the hardware's shortcomings in pursuit of wish fulfillment. The things we made that resonated the most were things that weren't trying to be innovative or groundbreaking, they were just trying to be the best versions of themselves.
That is still different from choosing what to build based on market trends or analytics. I'm with you there, and not suggesting that either. On this we agree: build for yourself, then find out if you're building for others too. Iterate until you're building something that people understand and can't look away from. If you do that, then you won't have to prove the medium's worth at all because others will champion the value of what you're doing with it.
I really appreciate the thoughtful response, Holden. My original thoughts were to say that “We don’t have a choice, if we aren’t trying to move this industry forward then we’ve resigned to only service a fraction of an already small market”, and essentially saying “We have no choice but to take up the responsibility of disrupting this space.” But I’m cognizant that hobbyists do exist and are loving being in this space without regard to market expansion, so I didn’t want to dismiss them.
I love what you said about the R&D efforts and experimentation to find what works. We absolutely need that at the top of the funnel. A decade in, there are so many strong learnings and awesome tech we have to play with, and to disregard all of that in favor of just AI, 0-dof glasses, and giant home theater would be such a huge mistake that we can’t stop the big platforms from making. Those are arguable great products to be sure, but doesn’t fulfill any of the vision we had for what this tech could achieve, so we’re mostly on our own now.
Mostly: we have more responsibility than we ever planned to, and it’s time to rise up and realize that, for those who haven’t (and want to).