the case for virtual reality
good things take time
akin to passionate 'band kids' and 'theatre kids,' ask any vr enthusiast the first time they experience vr and they will instantly light up.
the first time i tried on a vr headset was in the fall of 2017. my friend carolyn and i attended a free high school stanford camp called splash and a very kind student named khoi let us try his vr games.
that day, we dodged robots in space pirate trainer and drew lines in thin air in google tiltbrush. it was magical. i never stopped imagining the possibilities after that.
going home that day, i convinced my dad to get me the headset - the htc vive. he wasn’t really too happy about getting an expensive pair of goggles that needed a beefy pc and chunky sensors, but he complied after i whined for a month
i was obsessed. i wrote a business proposal for deca about doing employee training in vr, drew about the future in my doodle4google submission in 2018,
and when the knuckles meme was taking off i took a trip to knuckles island. it was sort of horrifying experiencing different sized knuckles towering above me and tongue clicking without leaving room for jesus but that's an experience i'll never forget
then it all stopped. i entered college and realized real life is just better when you don't live in the suburbs. so there my headset sat. and sat. until covid.
during covid i realized vr was better than staring at a computer screen. it wasn't real life but it was at least closer.
it was then that i decided to do something with vr. something more than just playing games. it was time to make them. february of 2021 i signed up for treehacks online and met a teammate there, mitchell. we instantly clicked on our love for vr and made a game together. we ended up winning the grand prize: a trip to another hackathon in person in the fall (assuming covid would be over then). it was so surreal that we decided to do a couple more to brush up on our skills before then. we ended up winning another grand prize and duplicate trip on our second hackathon at tartanhacks and from then on our egos were through the roof.
the next summer mitchell landed an internship at snapchat on their spectacles team and i landed one at meta reality labs on their ray bans stories team. the day after i accepted my internship offer, facebook changed its name to 'meta.' from then on i clearly felt a shift in the small niche world i once was in. it was no longer a small town anymore. new people had swarmed in. new fruit flies hovering around a sweet fruit.
my internship at meta that summer was disappointing. on the first week my manager told me my project. i felt insulted. was this a joke? i was to design the long press interaction for the photos app. this was a less than one hour endeavor any amateur could do but i was being treated like a king to do it over 12 weeks at my own leisure.
the first two weeks i had one-on-ones with 30 people on the team. two of them were alumni from my school. the first one told me she's been there for five years and she does not know how the time passed or why she is still there. the second told me 'i fucking hate this place' before we migrated her existentialism to facetime from the internal facebook calling tool. she had just come back from a month-long sabbatical. 'if you talk to anyone one on one they will tell you how much they hate this place but in a group they will never admit that.'
she quit the month after. all i saw on her story was her scuba diving the next few months.
the interns i met that summer were the most pretentious people i've ever met. at the start of the internship another intern was like 'they only gave us hotel rooms for corporate housing? i was expecting some kanye type shit.' i almost barfed.
one day i asked my manager if i could borrow a vr headset for my internship, but he told me there weren't enough. i was dumbfounded. i could borrow one at my university but not at the company i'm working for?
one day i was using my headset at my desk and my coworker tapped me on the shoulder. 'oh! that's so cool! i haven't tried it yet' she remarked. i stared at her in disbelief. i looked at her for a bit longer, hoping she was just joking. she wasn't.
on some days i'd sit in the unnecessarily extravagant massage chair on the corner of the office. the $30,000 massage chair had a very fish-tank-like view of a homeless encampment outside. there was an access blocked door to the encampments just meters away from the buffet cafeteria.
when i was not in meetings i poked around. i realized that most of the art department at meta were transplants from game companies and meta had basically hired the sims city team artists to work on avatars.
every day it felt like i was pushing through a field of zombies. every day i lost a bit of my soul walking around the office. where was the magic? where was the spark, the magic that comes with the first time putting a headset on?
i'm still hopeful in vr. i really am. the magic is still there. it is alive. it’s just in the arts, not in tech. greedy investors and businessmen want to make it into a business plan and be in on the gold rush early. it's always been the case. edison with film, hearst with newspapers, steve jobs with pixar.
if it's the potential to capture the human experience more vividly, to share stories that couldn't be shared before, then the medium is inevitable. it just takes artists, experimentation, forgiveness, and time.
insanely enlightening