Ian wrote:Good luck Bart:) you have an exceptional skill set I'm sure you'll do well with whatever you set your mind to. It's crazy how our work overlaps. I've been working in vr for a while mostly for industry. You said something about expensive tracking systems in your video. The valve lighthouse tracking is exceptionally cheap and you don't need a headset to make it work. We use it sometimes for cave vr where previously they would use a 10k or more tracking system.
I was speaking with someone today over the phone who has been using Lighthouse tracking and contributing to some open source project to allow them to scale better. They could definitely work, although I think there is an advantage to off-the-shelf cameras being easier to set up. Coupled with HMD inside-out tracking, and object detection, and I think we are getting close to be able to do things like laser tag or
The Void very cheaply.
Realistically I could earn double or maybe triple what I make now. But life is a balance, no point in spending the majority of your life working on something you have no passion for.
This is very true. Time is the most valuable thing we have anyway. What good is 2x-3x more money when you're losing precious time.
The big money around here is in defense companies. Writing software to drop bombs on people doesn't really interest me. The company I work for is very small. I went through periods of time where I didn't get paid for 6 months in developing our current project. It's like chicken and egg, in order to make money you need a product, but products cost time and money to make. Those times were very hard. But we are now eating up our competition which is a much larger company that literally had maybe an 8 year headstart on us and roughly 10x the developers. We got lucky but it could have easily gone the other way where we did all that work and weren't successful. In the end of the day you have to make enough to live. The business world is hard, the competition never sleeps.
That's awesome to hear
I'm glad you guys are kicking butt over there! With a small team like that, you get to really see the fruits of labor and have a meaningful impact. XR is a great space to be in now and I think it will only get more exciting in the next 12-24 months. Are you guys still primarily doing CAVE setups or looking into ordinary VR, too?
Not sure I have advice, only past experiences.
Well, it's hard to give someone advice when they themselves aren't quite sure what they are aiming for
I'm going to go with the flow and just work on silly small projects. I will probably first try to port my HoloLens helicopter game (which was actually quite fun) to Snapchat, given that their platform has a lot of eyeballs on it and has become impressively capable. I also want to get better at playing piano and might do some sort of experience with that and Oculus Quest 2 passthrough mode. And I'm talking to a game studio of ex-Magic Leap folks in California about maybe doing some part-time work for them porting a full-length game from WebXR to Snapchat's Lens platform. I think my experience with AR will help and they also have some budget for gameplay prototyping on the Next Gen Spectacles AR glasses, which is right up my alley, too.
