Session 6: "I don't think about you at all."
10 October, 2016
After working during the day in military simulation, my evening always turned to JanusVR. This would be true if I was working from home or on the road during a training event or simulator installation. Whatever travel-ready VR headset at the moment always came with me. Before I knew it, I wasn’t just playing around, world building, I was actively testing new builds, reporting bugs, writing up feature requests, and answering questions from new developers. I had long stopped playing Planetside 2, where I came to feel like a cash cow--egged on by microtransactions and social prompts to pay for boosters for my team’s performance. My avatar had been freed, quite literally, actually--my presence in the Metaverse was a heavy infantry soldier from the game. I was no longer constrained by the game, I was taking a part in building it now! I begged to be a consultant. I wasn’t interested in the money--what little there was offered by a handful of investors and incubators was dedicated to keeping key people on, to differing levels of results. I wanted to be a formal part of the creation of this Metaverse engine. Also, I wanted to branch out--the thought of doing military simulation for decades more felt suffocating. The founders reluctantly agreed to take me on contract. Not much changed except for a few extra formal meetings and being more responsive on Discord than usual.
When I wasn’t traveling, I was working my day job from my home, but I would keep Discord open and take a few moments here or there to answer questions. In the evening I would hit the test builds again, develop examples of new features that had been implemented on the latest release build, or create videos. From my command center, by day I developed the souls of aircraft and tanks, by night I was writing hand interaction scripts. JanusVR didn’t really have a travel budget. Oculus Connect was coming up, and as much as I wanted to go, the investment really wasn’t worth it to fly in. A good portion of the team was nearby, within a few hours drive. The exception was our antipodal colleague that flew in from Australia. So, I did what I could, I watched all the talks being live streamed and maintained contact with the team via Discord as they went about their days. Other than being within earshot of Carmack’s infamous hallway talks, doing it this way was just as good.
Example of the work I was doing at the time from my command center.
So the team walked the convention center proudly wearing their JanusVR shirts, having candid conversations here and there. The reports were always optimistic about who they talked to. The question I had on my mind, but really wasn’t expressed too much: how are we going to make money? Considering most were there on their own dime and sharing floors at AirBnB’s, it was something that needed to be sorted sooner than later. One hope floated was some type of collaboration with Oculus directly that could fund our development as a free extensible language offered to the world. That was naive, but a hope.
The team was in a main hall for the keynote. I was chatting to them on Discord, color commentary. We were all becoming seasoned. We were no longer succumbing to the hype machine. All of us had a better sense of the reality of things, pun intended.
Then a punch in the gut. Oculus was going to have its own go at WebVR using the library of JavaScript they maintained: React. They showed their compelling examples of how to utilize this technology. Of course, they were use cases very similar to the pitch deck of the founders of JanusVR, albeit with more polish. The one thing that didn’t match was the amount of time they said their demo took to create. A JanusVR example of similar capability could be created in one fifth the time, at least with the features they showed. Later, I would find that creating a webspace was not as intuitive or as cheap, labor-wise, as they let on.
Among the heads at the bottom are those of the JanusVR team. Source: YouTube.
I think I lost track of the “wtf’s” I typed into the event chat as the talk continued. The team was a bit at a loss at what they were seeing. They were in the third row in the center, just behind the two rows of reserved Facebook seating.
In that short speech I saw the vines grow on a walled garden of a Metaverse just a bit more. All of us enthusiasts held to a naive hope that Facebook would keep their culture away from the hallowed halls of Oculus. This was obviously an encroachment. It dovetailed into their forays into Social VR, controlling the conversations for all their “customers”. Fortunately, ReactVR has made even less strides than WebVR since it’s announcement. They were right about the versatility and sharing of the immersive web, but the ease of creation did not deliver. I did, however, get some mileage out of their VR optimized browser, called “Carmel”. For a while, many of my webspaces were optimized for viewing on a Samsung GearVR using it.
Not much longer after that morale inspiring day, my time as a JanusVR consultant would come to a close, and I went back to being a loyal enthusiast, finding every opportunity to use JanusVR in my daily work, from modeling a simulator, to showing my CV. My evenings were spent exercising more and being with my wife, not toiling in code. The Metaverse felt a little further away. The big corporations were looking into cashing into the attention economy and guiding its growth along their machinations. The Metaverse wasn’t going to be what we imagined in our late night musings on the Discord chat. It did mature into something a bit more reasonable. The Discord was a low resolution place to discuss. If there was something of interest, a JanusWeb link was dropped into the chat. Everyone would explore it then hop right back out. The Metaverse, for us, wasn’t a place you stayed in all day, but a land where you made short forays.