Drop: 2018 Q2 Update
If you know any of us on the team personally, you know that while we may be technologists, engineers, and designers, we tend to look at our work at Drop through an artist’s lens — constantly thinking about form, time, space, place, object, function, materials, etc. and AR/VR is our medium of choice. Because of that, we moved aggressively to figure out a few things over the past quarter:
- What informs our work given the noise and echo chamber around AR/VR?
- How do we humanize the discourse around AR/VR and share our work in an authentic manner?
We found that our work at Drop has to be informed by values that we live by as technologists in our individual lives and communicate through our product design. Given the climate around user privacy and an impending wave of “technoconservatism”, our mission of radically rethinking the immersive web in the post-smartphone world. — to architect a new reality for the immersive web — has to be value driven.
This past quarter we sat down as a team and similarly as we “white board and Post it” new product features, we used the same methodologies to codify our behavior and extrapolate our own set of values to humanize our body of work. Often overheard in our office is “we’re always in a state of becoming” and because of that we felt our initial values should be based on our collective behavior.
- Be Curious: Always be Questioning (“ABQ”)
- Be Understanding: We are in the People business.
- Be Creative: Embrace your inner artist. We all have a medium of choice.
For many of us, Drop is the place where we found acceptance — acceptance for our radical ideas about the post-smartphone world, and as Geoff always says,
“Drop gave me the opportunity to build the things I read about in sci-fi comic books growing up.”
Geoff recently accepted an opportunity to join a global investment bank’s technology team where he will be focused on venture investments and partnerships with late stage startups. During his 2 years here, Geoff’s contribution to our success at Drop has never gone unnoticed. He was instrumental in designing our day to day operations, enterprise relationship building, and even product management. While his physical presence is gone, his impression on this startup will remain.
Through seeking an answer to that question, we realized that our culture can be a sustainable competitive advantage as we continue to cement our position as the leading browser for VR/AR.
In pursuit of rethinking the immersive web in the post-smartphone world, we believe that is our responsibility to humanize the discourse around AR/VR. Our space is plagued with “cool” videos and proof-of-concepts, but very little is being explained to people outside of the AR/VR “echo chamber” about how this emerging tech has already began to impact their everyday lives.
We spent time this past quarter discussing our work publicly at the Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara, California and at the Stanford University Virtual Human Interaction Lab in Palo Alto, California. (Thank you to Pearly Chen at HTC for the opportunities 😁)
Even as we continue to cement our position as the go to browser for HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and Windows Mixed Reality users, Jonathan and Dustin, engineers at Drop, designed two new features to enhance our users’ immersive web experience. They worked diligently to provide our users with the ability to enjoy 360 video playback. A recurring feedback that we found was that our users wanted the freedom of mobility in the virtual environment so we created teleportation. You can access the latest version of Drop on Viveport and Steam.
Most of work sits at the intersection of frontier technology and human-computer interaction so in May we accepted an invitation from Samsung NEXT to join their community for a few months. The team at Samsung NEXT “develops products, invests in startups and acquires businesses ready for scale.” (Thank you to John Rodkin and Siggi Hindrichs for the opportunity)
As we begin to turn the computing page, frontier technologists have an overwhelming responsibility not to repeat the behaviors and customs of our predecessors. One of investors, Corey Ford, reminds us that we can still do good as technologists and deliver an attractive return to our investors.
Be sure to follow our journey on Medium, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
PS Check out an interview we did with our investor — HTC. We’re still in the development process of bringing our browser to the new standalone headset — HTC Vive Focus.
