Why did I start TasselVR
A few years ago, me and some family were in Seoul, South Korea trying to figure out a cool place to go on a walking tour. Seems easy enough, just google everything! After all, we live in a digital age where information is at the tips of our fingertips right?
Well, there’s a problem with that. If you dont know what you dont know, how do you know to even start looking for it?
Googling stuff is only as good if you already know it. Thats the kind of meta stuff that only lives in the The Inception
So even though we were in downtown Seoul, only a subway ride away from literally everything, we still were struggling to figure out a good place to do a walking tour. Why?
Simply because we want to make sure that where we are going is a good investment of our time, resources, and actually meets our expectations. So many times that our overly market-tested consumer reality promises us some too good to be true product, service, or experience that ends up actually more than a pipe dream that we have this kind of suspicious tendency when it comes to anything thats being marketed to us.
Consumers are just at the point where marketing fatigue has replaced our enthusiasm for trying out new things and experiences.
Back to my story.
After hours of google research, we eventually decided that we were going to this place called the Bukchon tour. Im gonna go ahead and put my youtube here so you can check it out:
Now we have never taken that tour before, which presented another set of problems:
- Logistics : exactly what option was the best for us to arrive at the destination? Taxi, Uber, bus, or subway?
- Native language speaking (in this case, Hangul) : If we needed to interact with the locals to do even the simplest things, we would be having a hard time.
I thought, there had to be a way to download this kind of experience so we don’t have to go through all this stress? Wouldn’t it be nice if there was an online tool where I could preview the experience? The closest thing was Youtube because of its crowdsourcing aspect.
That was when I had the epiphany.
I wanted a tool that gave me a video game experience for when I wanted to go traveling and sight seeing. I was thinking like an Assassins Creed for a sight seeing tour. And if I thought this was valuable, I wondered if other people would also think the same thing.
I grew up playing adventure video games where the point of view aspect was accompanied by an overview map so you always had a context of where you were compared to other known areas, at a glance. I had this vision in mind when I was designing the system, so this would be the core product offering that TasselVR would bring to the table.
When I looked at the VR market, it turned out there was an opportunity because the market was still waiting for a proven use case. People had assumed that since the hardware was available, the delivery infrastructure and the immersive media content would follow suit. Its already 2018 and actually the state of VR has stagnated. So I thought this was the time and I took the risk. I went all in.
About TasselVR
TasselVR is a decentralized travel marketplace that lets travelers book tourist experiences from locals, instead of full-service tourist companies. TasselVR aims to bring the promise of VR technology to travelers one route at a time.
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