I feel like recounting my story, just because I've been in such an incredibly good mood lately and this is all I have been able to think about for the past several weeks. To begin with, I have been a prodigious programmer since 8 years old when my father introduced me to Q-Basic on my Epison 8088. From that day forward, I knew in the bottom of my heart I wanted to make video games professionally, and set my entirely life honing and crafting my skill. I've picked up a number of odd, low-level talents throughout the years which has made me perfectly suited for VR development.
Similarly, I have had a fascination with VR since about 1993, when I began saving money to buy the Sega VR headset, and later, the Atari Jaguar VR headset. I remember driving across the city with my dad to try Dactyl Nightmare, one of the first VR arcade games. Primitive as it was, I knew this would one day be the future.
But it wasn't. VR disappeared for 2 decades and only recently reemerged with a bang when Palmer Luckey turned Oculus into a tech-household name. Now, my family has always been very bleeding edge - we got Compuserve in 88, as an example. I saw the internet grow into the business it is today, but was too young to do anything about it. I saw smartphones rise while I was in college but, again, I was too inactive to do anything about it. So when I saw VR starting to take off 2 years ago, I determined myself to not let the opportunity slip by. A little under 2 years later, I am now the CEO of a multi-million dollar corporation. My entire life has turned around and I owe everything to Virtual Reality.
My story begins almost 2 years ago when I stumbled upon this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAC5SeNH8jw
That 90 year old grandma's reaction was so intense that it instantly sold me on a dev kit. I ordered a DK1 and dove into development, quickly endearing myself to the VR community by absorbing any and all information I could. I played with the tech constantly, participated in all discussions I possibly could. Eventually I came to knew others in the online dev community and started watching for emerging technologies.
Thats when Sixense and Virtuix started kickstarting their platforms. I backed both just looking for hardware to support, and learned afterwards that Virtuix was actually headquarted in Houston, where I lived, and that their board contained board members from Sixense. Virtuix, days after their kickstarter ended, invited anybody in Texas to a backer event where we could meet their CEO, check out their hardware, and mingle with like minded individuals. I went to their event solely to network and hit a grand slam. One of the first people I spoke to was an old midway developer who took a quick shine to me and began bringing people around to meet me as we discussed retro gaming development. Throughout the night, I slowly met everyone in the entire room, including the CEO of virtuix and their developer of director relations. I was so enthusiastic at the event, they actually filmed me for a testimonial for their website, haha.
Not that long after the event ended, Valve announced their by-invitation only Steam Dev Days event, with the big not-so-secret being that half of the conference was devoted to experimental VR development. I called up Virtuix' director of developer relations and managed to have him get me in the ear of Valve's directors, who swung me a pair of tickets to Dev Days. Dev Days themselves were a no-press event, so, prior to the show, I announced on several websites that I would be live blogging from the event, and set up a blog to do just so. Within 8 hours of dev days starting, my blog had been visited 70k times. At the event, I met with some capcom developers who spilled the beans about Sony's Morpheus headset weeeellllll before sony had announced it. I posted many details on my blog and sort of went viral.
Not long after that, I was invited onto a podcast hosted by VR evangelist Reverend Kyle. Within the emerging field, Kyle had gained prominence and having an entire show dedicated to interviewing me gained me exposure to other developers. With my popularity among VR devs pretty high, I hit up the group behind Half Life 2 VR to offer my services. Half Life 2 VR was, and still is, one of the highest profile VR mods, and one of the first to attempt full body tracking. Using Sixense hardware, they tracked the upper body. I offered help their tracking, as well as handle lower body tracking, and they accepted. I became the third member of HL2VR in early 2014. For several months, we put our heads down and dove into the hardware, figuring out how it works on an intimate level. Unlike most devs, rather than rely on engine support (unity, UE4, etc) - we relied entirely on the OVR API, as we were retrofitting it into source. This gave us a deeper understanding of how VR and specifically the rift worked.
It was around this time I founded a VR developers group in Houston out of a makerspace called TxRx labs. The intent of this group was to bring like-minded individuals together to network and establish themselves in the growing VR community.
A few months passed by and Oculus eventually released their Dev Kit 2 in August. Being ready, we released an updated version of HL2VR that included positional tracking to work with DK2. Within our first week of launching, we gained coverage from Eurogamer, Kotaku, IGN, Edge, Gamespot, among many others. Our newfound attention garnered us job offers from Crytek, whom we turned down, and opened lines of communication between us and valve's own VR team lead by Joe Ludwig. For several months, we talked about either joining their team in an official capacity, or selling our mod as a sanctioned Half Life Update, to even becoming Vive developers ourselves. Things were getting pretty crazy.
That's when my life basically changed. In the midst of all this, I was still running my VR Dev group meetings out of houston. We would advertise them on meetup.org, encouraging all who were interested in VR to come check us out. One day, out of the blue, a woman stopped by. She had never heard of VR, but said it sounded interesting. We showed her some demos and blew her away.
Well, this lady actually sat on the board for Memorial Hermann and MD Anderson Cancer Research here in Houston. The next week, she flew out to Brussels for a medical conference, and VR was on everybody's lips. By the time she came back to Houston, she was convinced VR was going to be this huge deal and pitched to her fellow board members that they needed to check us out. The next meeting, MD Anderson set out their largest investors along with their cancer research team and sat in the back and watched and listened. After our meeting, they approached us and invited us to MD Anderson to give a private pitch about the potential medical benefits of VR.
Now, at this time, officially, I was just one person. But I had a fraternity brother who had made a small fortune by selling his analytics company to google. Part of the acquisition meant he had to be employed by google for 6 months, and his employment period just happened to end juuuuust as my pitch was going down. We met up, partnered, and he became my COO in principle.
That was about 6 months ago. We have slowly progressed since then, but today was the culmination of a very long journey. We have just filed our S-Corp, and have received enough backing to prop up our entire corporation with MD Anderson's hand. They have set us up as a wholly independent, entirely autonomous VR development corporation, which they can contract out development from going forward. Part of our setup is a multiple team structure - we have one team working on MD Anderson's research for them, while we are using another team at the exact same time to develop our first commercial VR game. We have also found unrelated software development work in the advertising field, unrelated to VR, and are prepping to add a fourth project to our corporation.
Even if VR is a bubble, even if I doesn't catch on, it has completely transformed my life. In under 2 years, I went from living paycheck to paycheck, with massive student load debt, to now being debt free and pretty damn well off. I am a CEO, I own my own company, and it's not rinky-dink.
Absolutely life changing. Just a small story to let any aspiring devs know that dreams do come true if you reach hard enough.
One final note: when I was a kid, like 10 years old, I cockily told my mother and god mother that I would one day become a big programmer and make a lot of money and that I would take them on a trip to japan when I did. They never let me forget it, and would periodically bring it up at points in my life (i.e. highschool and college graduations, "so when are you going to become rich and take us to japan?").
I booked a tour yesterday
