Drop: 2018 Q1 Update
Throughout the first quarter at Drop, the recurring theme was unequivocally change. We saw change touch every part of our venture from product to culture. The change, as we describe it, was growth through repeated inquiry. 🤔
On the product front, we adjusted our focus to build with empathy around two of our users — Michael S. and Joshua Y — to enhance their experience inside of Drop. For example, Michael is a nomadic software engineer and spends over 20 hours a week in his HTC Vive and Samsung Odyssey. He needs a way to discover what’s happening in the world through the web and maintain his productivity in a world that is no longer two dimensional, but immersive and spatial. He uses Drop for such — an immersive internet searching and browsing experience designed for virtual reality (“Google Chrome for VR.”)
While our work on the consumer end is intriguing, the more compelling and exciting area of our venture is our research around human-computer interaction in spatial environments. Think about how the mouse changed our interaction with desktop computing and how the index finger changed our interaction with the iPhone. We’ve created a new interaction modality called thematic cubes — 3D interactive objects that are customized to a user selections e.g. news, productivity, social. You can take a look below. We used Childish Gambino’s This is America video as an example. We will publish our technical thoughts in a later post. Major shout out to Dustin, one of our exceptional engineers for conceiving this idea. 💯
As we continue to grow, we know that people are just as important as the technology. Fortunately for us, we are able to continue to attract top talent, so with that in mind, we recently welcomed Jonathan to our team 👋🏽. He was a former designer at Microsoft Hololens and Sony Interactive Entertainment R&D team. Jonathan replaced Victor, who recently moved on to a career defining opportunity with Oculus R&D. We wish Victor the best of luck in his new role! 🙌🏽
We are starting to witness the onset of the post-smartphone world. Oculus competing product, Dash, has grown in popularity amongst VR enthusiasts, along with Y Combinator investing in a similar startup as Drop, and Mozilla releasing their open source browser for VR. Apple recently confirmed that they will release their VR/AR headset within the next two years. The market is beginning to understand the importance of the immersive web on VR/AR headsets as communication and information discovery become more blended with augmented interfaces, growing AR/VR content, and the 2D limitations of using an iPhone are ineffective. Drop has the greatest opportunity to be the default browser in a post-smartphone world.
Even in this climate, Drop maintains its position as being one of the most popular VR titles on the HTC Vive and we are growing at about 16% month over month among Oculus Rift and HTC Vive users. We’re still in the process of developing Drop for the new HTC standalone headset — HTC Vive Focus as an early developer and partner. We are looking to release that version before the end of the 2nd quarter.
None of this would be possible without the continued support we receive from each of you and we’re overwhelming grateful. We’re looking forward to sharing some exciting news next quarter.
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