So You Want to Build the Immersive Future?

We fight entropy. And then we lose.
That’s life in a nutshell and probably not how you expected a VR post to start. But today, I’m not here to discuss how large the current addressable market is ($7.5B at best guess in 2017) or whether the latest content is finally good enough for you to spring for a room-scale headset (It is!).
I’d much rather talk about how this is all we’ve got.
When it comes to VR, AR, MR — all the Rs — it’s much easier to quibble about who will “win” than it is to think about how this moment just passed (and this one) and we may not have accomplished all that we could. So today I tackle a question that often hangs in the air as I move from one VR event to another: what do we build, and how do we build it?
I’ve tried to answer this the “regular” way, but at best my answers seem dull and prescriptive, and at worst I inadvertently poke holes in others’ dreams. So instead, a story:
When I was six, I suffered my first and most enduring heartbreak. I had already spent two years “with my nose in a book,” as my grandma put it. I’d been trapped with Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher in the depths of a cave, battled giant squid from atop a mysterious submarine with Captain Nemo, and fled from bloodthirsty banshees with Ronja The Robber’s Daughter. In a book-lined room, I’d made my way through two full shelves. As I saw it, those stories were my life, my many lives, each of them filled with awe and adventure. I would make my way through the secrets they held, and the great puzzle of living would suddenly snap into place. Then — upon picking out a new book from shelf three — it hit me: no matter how diligently I read my way through the words, no matter how craftily I managed to hide the flashlight and sneak in extra hours, I was never going to finish the books that covered every wall. I was never going to read all the stories nor be all the heroes nor live all the lives. I wept then, the kind of tears that soak through pillows and bookend transformations. I cried for all the stories that had ended and all the ones I’d never get to start. And when I finally stopped crying, I dried my face and picked up the book that lay splayed like a bird, inhaled its musty smell, and gave myself over to the pages.
I share this not just to illustrate the eccentricities of my childhood (there were many and have only multiplied with age), but because it’s the first thing I think of when I consider a life’s work.
Big, worthwhile goals are overwhelming. As we set out to create virtual worlds, it’s easy to get mired in hardware issues, economic concerns, and worst of all, self-doubt. The early days of building anything (even a human) are a long slog through the Dead Marshes of adulthood, and every face that stares back is a ghost of failures past.
You will fail. It’s not if, but when.
The hardware issues will suck: your laptop will be inadequate to render the Unity build of your mind; your controllers will, for no reason whatsoever, stop pairing; and you won’t be able to afford all the things that would magically solve every hassle.
The economic concerns will be real: you can size your attainable market in the most conservative, bottom-up approach you can muster, but you’re still likely to overestimate profit. Making rent (or even lunch) will give you a stomachache. Once you have a team, responsibility will quadruple and wake you before dawn. The customers or audience will be fickle and entitled, their jabs will hurt, and none of them will stay forever.
Worst of all will be the self-doubt: you will never know whether your idea’s as good, your mind as sharp, or your perseverance as strong, as you’d like them all to be. On a good day, you’ll be Neo dodging bullets — time will slow, and the world will wait on your exhale. On a bad one, your heart will be cinders; bookmark this page for when you’re there.
There’s a little prince on a small planet with a demanding flower and two volcanoes; one of them’s extinct, but you never know. There’s a ragtag starship crew that traveled to the edges of space and found some truth, then had the courage to bring it back. There’s a blond cheerleader who saves the world on Tuesdays. A gumshoe android who loved. There’s a detective with a mind palace. There’s a winter that’s coming.
My worlds may not be your worlds, but what captures our imagination is at once particular and universal. All of us — the dreamers and makers (and maybe secretly even the beancounters) — hold onto stories because they shelter us, and their heroes become our crew as we venture into the black.
So here’s what you make: you give people connection because that gives them meaning. Whether it be a character made of just enough algorithms that your audience imbues it with intent, or a product so frictionless it seems to read your customer’s minds, what we want from the stories and the tools and our real life interactions is to be seen and understood and maybe even to matter.
To do this, you must build that which you most need to find. Your dreams or your nightmares or the tools you’re convinced must exist — all the things that haunt you are the ones only you can create. We owe it to each other to share our internal realities because none of us will read all the books, but all of us want to be inside them. It doesn’t matter if your product is in entertainment, enterprise, or a mix of both; discovering how you transform those who interact with your work will show you why it’s important that it exist. Technology and the market will never be your allies — not for long. But once you’ve found your why, it will sustain you and bend them to your will.
Whatever you do, don’t stand on the sidelines! We all hesitate, believing we only get one shot on goal. We do. And this is it. Everything you do — relationships, jobs, every line of words or code, each image or human you make — it all strings together to make one long kick into oblivion’s net.
I’m sorry my advice is not more pragmatic. The big directions don’t seem to fit in bullet points. Picasso was correct when he said that the only way to understand what you’ll draw, is to start drawing. So, you know that line we tell each other, how there’s never enough time? It’s a lie. Time’s ALL we’ve got. A lot or a little, this is it.
Start drawing!
Dessy spends her days bringing the future a little bit closer. As the VP and Head of Story at 645Ventures she searches for early stage startups who create remarkable innovation in VR, AR, Machine Learning, or Computer Vision; she then helps them grow through hands-on assistance and/or investment.
