Immerse Creator Brainstorming: Should We Focus on Architecture, or Go Bigger?

Topic:

Immerse Creator — should we focus on architecture, or go bigger? What do you think?

Please note: This is a foundational draft. I’m using incomplete scraps like this to openly brainstorm notes and gather input for a more complete story I’ll eventually be posting on this topic. I’m keeping these drafts purposely incomplete, and welcome any input and feedback on it while it evolves. Stay tuned for a final draft at some point in the future!

What is Immerse?

Immerse Framework is our underlying platform that we built on the Unity engine that serves as the foundation of every application we build at Arch Virtual. We don’t distribute or sell Immerse Framework (yet), but we use it internally as the building blocks and core functionality we need to build architectural visualizations, medical simulations, safety training applications and more.

Immerse Creator is just one of the many applications we’ve built on top of our Immerse Framework. It’s available on Steam in Early Access, and we have an ambitious roadmap for making Immerse a powerful productivity software that enables advanced collaborative creativity in VR and eventually AR.

Joe McMillan might say, “Immerse Creator isn’t the thing. Immerse Framework is the thing. Immerse Creator is just one of the things we build with the thing.”

What’s this post for?

• Gather input to help us make a decision on whether we should focus on a single industry with Immerse Creator, or keep it open to wider use cases.
• Track our own thinking to keep a record of it as the app evolves
• Post to Steam community hub

Main idea: Should we focus on AEC industry as our target market for Immerse Creator?

• Immerse Creator initially started as an architectural sketching tool. We called it “Project Basswood” while it was in skunk-works, and it gradually evolved to include a wider range of tools and functionality.
• My original goal was to be able to sketch basic architectural forms while inside VR. I think there’s a powerful opportunity to ‘feel’ a design within VR as you’re making changes in real-time.
• [note: new post dedicated to the genesis story and original intention of Immerse Creator?]
• We haven’t yet done any active promotion or marketing, since the application is still very early beta — so it’s difficult to discern from the current community of users whether there are any emergent use cases.
• We haven’t yet built sample scenes or tutorials. We’ve spent a lot of time focusing on the ‘what’ of the application — the features. But now it’s time to return to the ‘why’ of it.. why we built it in the first place, and start demonstrating the use cases we envision for it to help inspire its use.
• Until now, I’ve opted to keep it open to a diverse range of possibilities rather than getting cornered into a niche market. Could this lack of industry focus could make Immerse confusing, where people don’t really know what it is or who it’s for? If we don’t know who our specific target market is, it becomes much more difficult to promote and advertise in the long run. But maybe it’s simply artists, creatives and designers who own a Rift or a Vive? That’s already fairly focused / niche market..
• Investors and advisers certainly recommend focus. Investors aren’t always comfortable supporting something unless they have a clear sense of the market size. Even if we did focus on a single industry, can we reliably predict this market size in an effective way that isn’t just pure guesswork?
• Maybe there’s some wisdom of insecurity in avoiding specificity this early in the emergent market of VR?
• We can always start with a specific market focus first — while keeping it open to other uses, then expand to other markets later. However, the risk here is the toolset will almost certainly start to bend more toward the requirements of this niche market instead of remaining broadly applicable. If we pursue the specific features architects and interior designers need, it will likely narrow the utility of Immerse toward this market and we could get cornered in a niche.
• Targeting AEC will also chew up financial runway quickly. We could spend a lot of cash going down a rabbit hole at the exclusion of a much larger opportunity.
• I’m also concerned the AEC market isn’t big enough to support a dedicated VR app like this (yet), and there are already well funded competitors at work in the space — not with the same set of features, but with some overlap and adjacency.
• If Immerse Creator vectors toward becoming an enterprise AEC app, the price point would necessarily change to a much higher enterprise price and would no longer be as accessible as I had hoped it could remain. Would we then need an ‘Immerse Lite?’ Maybe, but I’m not liking that vibe..
• Maybe the market is simply people who own a Rift, Vive or Windows MR headset and are interested in creating?
• How does our target market compare to something like Tilt Brush? Was their target market simply artists / creatives?
• Maybe it’s still too early to decide? We have runway to pursue our UI/UX overhaul. The core functionality of this redesign can be largely agnostic in terms of industry-specific functionality. Of course, it might be useful for the design concepts to be guided by a specific market, but then we’d already be getting cornered if we design the interface around a specific use case. I think this next UX overhaul has to be agnostic to use case.

What do you think?