Why I Dropped Everything For VR
My current and highly-malleable VR manifesto
I was a skeptic at first, I’ll admit it. But I was willing to give it a shot. And I’m so glad that I did. What started out as an interest soon turned into a hobby, grew to a side project, and only a few months later, became my sole focus. It’s an obsession of mine that I’m proud to admit because I’m confident in the impact it can make (and I can make)… someday. But today, as my title says above, I’m still exploring, hoping to find my virtual reality Valhalla.
6 months ago, I had zero interest in this VR thing. I thought it was all hype. I was skeptical — and I assumed, like most, that it was just another gaming platform — so I wrote it off. At the time, I was starting my own company. A very sexy startup in the enterprise software-as-a-service space focused on user engagement. Go ahead, shake your head. I get it.
My co-founder’s friend, Nate, would stop by our office every once in a while to hang out. One of those days, he invited us over to his apartment to try out “some VR stuff.” It’s not often that you can pinpoint the exact date and time when your life changed forevermore. For me, it was October 12, 2016 at 4pm…
That’s Nate sitting at his computer while my mind gets absolutely blown by Tilt Brush. Prior to that, Nate showed me a couple games. They were cool, don’t get me wrong! But I’m not the type of guy that hedges his entire career solely on the basis of something being cool. It’s gotta be something more, something with utility, deeper value. When he put me into Tilt Brush, that proverbial light switched on in my head… and it’s only gotten brighter with time.
You see, Tilt Brush isn’t a game. It’s a profound experience, if you open your mind to it. It’s a new art form. It’s a medium to express yourself. Artists are real people, and making art is their real job. They take it just as seriously as we take software as software engineers. Today, artists are taking to Tilt Brush just as they did to computers 30 years ago. It’s their canvas. And Tilt Brush is going to completely reinvent the way we create and experience art in the future. Imagine being inside and watching each brush stroke of Starry Night being painted in real time — just as van Gogh painted it in 1889. That’s the power of Tilt Brush, except also in 3D!
So, why VR? Because if an artist can make real, beautiful, thoughtful masterpieces in VR, then you can make real, beautiful, thoughtful software/music/education/training/rehabilitation/meditation/fill_in_the_blank in VR, too. Take your day-to-day today and project it 10 years into the future. I guarantee you VR/AR/XR will factor into the mix. If we view VR not just as a cool gadget, but as a real tool to improve our lives, that’s exactly what it’ll become!
If we view VR not just as a cool gadget, but as a real tool to improve our lives, that’s exactly what it’ll become!
Back to October 12th… I remember the thoughts and ideas that rushed through my head as I left Nate’s place to bike to a bar and meet with my friend Garth (yes, his name really is Garth). What would biking look like in VR? What about VR for fitness? Wouldn’t that be so much more fun than lifting weights at the gym or running? I really dislike running, btw. I started to constantly ask myself, “what would ______ be like in VR?”
If Tilt Brush was my spark, Twitter was my fuel. Over the next couple months, I fed off tweets from people like Eva Hoerth, Liz Edwards, Helen Situ, Robbie Tilton, Estella Tse, tipatat, and Kent Bye for inspiration. News content from companies like UploadVR, VRFocus, and Road to VR kept me in the know with all the latest and greatest. I’ll also mention OTOY because the stuff they share on Twitter everyday is absolutely mind-blowing! Like this, por ejemplo…
When December 2016 rolled around, I was home in Chicago for the holidays taking some much-needed time to reflect on my past year starting a company — hoping to find inspiration on where to take it next. But all I could think about was VR! The obsession was real, and I wasn’t going to fight it. It was at that moment, sitting on my couch wrapped in a warm blanket not daring to go out into the sub-arctic Chicago winter, that I decided to shut down my startup and make exploring VR my full-time focus.
Fast-forward a couple months to February when I heard about Udacity’s VR Jam, a 3-week competition to create a brand new VR application for a chance to win an HTC Vive. At the time, I wasn’t thinking about building a VR application from the ground-up. I’d spent the first 5 years of my career at Google selling mobile ads at the height of smartphone adoption (hello 200% quotas!), took a year off to learn how to code, and spent the next 3 years as a software engineer at New Relic and the aforementioned startup I cofounded. The reason I left Google to learn how to code was because, while at Google, I figured out that I loved working directly with product teams to build and launch impactful products. I thought the best way to get more exposure to this would be to start from the ground-up and actually help build those products. S0, I learned how to code. My hope was that in a few years, I could transition into being a fully-equipped Technical Product Manager leading a team and building a product that mattered — whether as the CEO of my own company or a PM at a company I loved. The underlying implication being that I’d eventually move away from writing code.
But everyone I met with kept urging me to learn the VR stack. They told me that the VR industry wasn’t ready for entry-level PMs. The only companies hiring PMs were the behemoths like Google, Facebook, HTC, and Unity, and the type of PMs they were looking for were industry experts with lots of years of experience, i.e not me. They said that if I wanted to get into VR today, my best bet was to do it through the command line — roll up my sleeves and write some code. Work for a VR startup, start your own, or take on some contract work.
It took me some time, but I eventually agreed. Plus, it’s not like I hate writing code. On the contrary! I love it. Who doesn’t enjoy solving puzzles all day, erryday? And don’t mind me as I toot my own horn, but I think I’m pretty damn good at it, too! I viewed the 3-week VR Jam as the perfect opportunity to crank down and get serious about learning the VR stack. Having a deadline meant that I’d be forced to learn ALL the things, no excuses.
And learn all the things I did! I’m not sure if it’s the fact that I’d already learned a few programming languages prior to this or the fact that Unity/C# are just straight up intuitive, but whatever it was, I was shocked at how easy it was to learn the VR stack. It’s like a perfect blend of the readability of Ruby and the structure/componentry of React, two things that I’m conveniently familiar with. 3 weeks and over 200 dev hours later, I’ve learned how to work with / hack around the Steam VR (HTC Vive) SDK, utilize 3D immersive sound (Unity has some work to do on this one), rapid prototype in VR to test new concepts, work with Git + Unity, make and edit simple 3D models in Blender, user test for the unique accessibility concerns in VR, and much much more.
Today, I’m proud (and slightly nervous) to announce my very first VR application: soundVRse! It’s an exploration into the future of 3D sound and music. Check out this Medium post for more info on the project, the team, and how to download and play it (if you’ve got an HTC Vive). Here’s a quick gameplay video so you can get the gist of it:
As for what’s next? Who knows? I guess “work for a VR startup, start my own, or take on some contract work,” as a bunch of smart people suggested above. Hit me up at shivpkumar@gmail.com if you wanna chat!
Update: I did it! In July 2017, I accepted a job as a full-time VR developer at a tiny startup here in SF called Moatboat. We’ve taken on a pretty ambitious and exciting mission to make whatever you say happen in virtual and augmented reality. 🙏
