The Immersive Wire - 12 December 2021 (Sunday edition)

By Tom FfiskeVR/AR and metaverse analysis every Wednesday and Sunday 

// 12 December 2021

London is too cold and busy to hold much holiday cheer, but hopefully the capital will perk up as the day draws closer. My tea advent calendar is a great way to count down the days.

Invest to own a part of the future of exercise in the Metaverse

MAIN STORYDisentangling the metaverse from NFTs

Let me be transparent: I do not think NFTs have much bearing on the metaverse, and I am perplexed that the two words are often jumbled together in the same box. I understand why companies want to bring them together (see: money), but the practice is misleading at best and fraudulent at worst. My distaste stems from the definition of the metaverse; an interoperable place where users can converse, trade, and transfer themselves and goods across multiple locations. Today, we do not have many projects that fit the definition. Perhaps VRChat or Roblox, where avatars can transition from world to world - but most companies are effectively hosting their own virtual servers. If a skin in World of Warcraft can transfer to Fortnite, then we have a macro-metaverse. Otherwise, it's high walls and a

micro-metaverse.

 By the definition that some companies are using today,

Second Life

is a metaverse (it isn't). 

Yet on paper, NFTs could work with a metaverse; and they are already making waves in fashion. Shoppers can buy a unique item, receive a certificate of ownership, then wear them proudly in places like VRChat. The item can be one of only a few hundred copies, and it is unique to the wearer across a server. That scarcity and perceived value help to give it legitimacy in a virtual location.

Bloomberg wrote a great piece about this

, which I recommend everyone to read. But in practice, it means nothing. The certificate is simply an entry on the blockchain, while the actual item could be used by anyone. It's like owning the receipt that proved you bought a watermelon, but then seeing thousands of people eating them while chilling on the beach. The fundamental technology doesn't stop anyone from using the item themselves; it's more of a stamp of ownership which many won't care about. And worse, it doesn't work across multiple locations, as a metaverse should; oftentimes it works in very niche titles like VRChat, and nothing wider. Fundamentally, brands are marketing a metaverse when it doesn't exist yet. The real metaverse will come in many years' time, and will look nothing like we are seeing today. Buying virtual items is just that - items locked in a small area of cyberspace. It is telling that

metaversenews.com

only talks about NFTs, rather than, you know, the metaverse. My hope is that the field will develop enough to step away from NFTs and focus on a more constructive and substantial view of the future. 

VirZOOM shipped the first commercial VR Exercise solution in 2016. Today, thousands of VZfit members cycle through 10 million miles of roads mapped by Google Streetview, pedal tanks in multiplayer tank battles, fly helicopters in a firefight, fly a winged horse to soar 100s of feet high through a canyon, among many games that get you fit while you explore and play!Invest to join in for as little as $500.

Q&ARunning an immersive exercise company

Eric Janszen, Co-Founder & CEO, VirZOOM, Inc.

Disclosure: This is a Q&A with the sponsor of the Immersive Wire this month. The piece has been edited to help give readers some great insights, and both you and the sponsor are reading it for the first time. Additionally, we will try a long-read to see if people like it. If you do or do not, reply to this email and happy to receive feedback! What is your background?  Starting at the beginning, my father Arthur Janszen was the Harvard-educated inventor of the Janszen electrostatic loudspeaker. I grew up helping him with speaker designs, building prototypes and reviewing patents by the age of 12. I hold an audio technology patent myself that was granted in 2016.  My professional career spans decades in the high-tech industry as a system software engineer, product manager and sales executive for a number of companies, two of which went public. I raised over 50 million dollars in CEO roles for three VC-backed companies. While managing director of Osborn Capital I oversaw 21 investments resulting in nine exits, including to EMC, Nortel, Microsoft, and two to Cisco. The fund IRR of 89% included a 220 times return on one investment. In economics and finance circles I'm known for precisely forecasting the Internet bubble collapse in the spring of 2000. The main purpose of the forecast was to time the exit of our fund positions. We exited all positions between April and June that year.Six years later I forecast the 2008 financial crisis.  My analysis was published in the Harvard Business Review, a cover article of Harper’s Magazine, and a book published by Portfolio-Penguin, and is cited in 45 google scholar listed publications.An avid cyclist, I developed the idea for VirZOOM while at Stratus Computer in the 1980s. In 2011 I described it to the investor group on my finance and economics website iTulip.com. In 2015 that group and I together invested the first 1.8 million in funding to launch VirZOOM. I'm the largest single investor in the company at $1.5 million. These days I get up every morning to thank the stars for the incredible team behind VirZOOM. What are you working on, and what’s a key learning that you’ve had from it?Peloton Interactive's once high-flying stock has come back down to earth as investors grow increasingly skeptical that the profitability challenges that Peloton has faced are temporary. The longs and shorts battle it out in PTON stock forums, arguing for and against PTON's long-term prospects. The shorts compare Peloton to exercise and sports fads like GoPro and Fitbit. The longs say Peloton has invented a new category.One of the questions that's come up in this debate is the risk that VR solutions like VirZOOM pose to connected fitness companies generally and Peloton in particular. We made a deck about this, which can be found here. For background, VirZOOM started shipping VR exercise apps for use with fitness equipment like stationary and spin bikes in 2016. We patented the unique way that our apps let you move yourself continuously through virtual worlds with six degrees of freedom (6DoF) under your own power and control with minimal locomotion discomfort. The faster you pedal in the real world the faster your avatar moves in the virtual world. You steer by leaning. Your body and the bike together become a controller for a vast range of activities in VR, from cycling 10 million miles of roads mapped by Google Streetview to multiplayer tank battles. A direct comparison between VR exercise solutions like VirZOOM to flat-screen connected fitness solutions like Peloton isn't possible. They both address the same basic customer problem, motivating regular exercise, but the underlying content and content platforms are completely different. It's like comparing texting on clamshell phones to social media apps on smartphones 20 years ago. The clamshell phone is a mobile phone that also runs a limited number of apps. The smartphone that replaced it is a mobile computing platform that can run thousands of apps and can also be used as a phone. VR exercise apps make you an active player in virtual worlds rather than a 3rd person observer watching the action through a window on a tablet computer. It’s a lot like exercising outdoors in the real world but without the hassles and dangers, and you can do things in VR that you can’t do in the real world. I don't know of a single person who's tried VR exercise who did not quickly conclude that VR is the future of connected fitness. The critics who say "No one will want to work out while wearing a headset" are the same people who said of smartphones "No one is going to want to type on a screen." An estimated half a million VR users are already exercising in VR, around 5% of the total VR installed base. That said, a reporter for a major women’s health magazine who is also a Peloton fanatic told me after trying VirZOOM, “No doubt in my mind you guys will bury Peloton someday. But the headset isn’t there yet. Needs one more generation, to be more attractive and lighter before my readers will use it.” I expect that next-generation VR will come from Apple and in the not too distant future. VR is a superior medium for exercise motivation compared to flat screens. Period. Out with the old, in with the new. It's a matter of which VR exercise content players will dominate and how long it will take for the VR market to develop. It won't surprise readers to hear that I think VirZOOM will continue to dominate the 6DoF VR exercise market. As for timing, that depends on which VR market forecasts you believe.If you go back to 2016 the year after VirZOOM was founded and read the VR forecasts for 2021 at the top of the hype cycle they are universally over-optimistic. Analysts then didn't take into account the roughly six years it takes for a new computing platform to mature. Today the forecasts are too pessimistic; analysts are not taking into account the degree of platform maturing that's happened. Once Apple gets into the game, maybe as soon as next year, we'll see a kind of replay of smartphone adoption starting around 2012. That was seven years after the first smartphones appeared. Products kept getting more refined and the range of apps available for them exploded. Applications like social media drove smartphone adoption and exercise will be one of several major app categories driving VR adoption.Peloton's offering is extremely sophisticated, the best that can be done with 10-year-old tablet computing tech to motivate exercise consumers to exercise at home. However, as the presentation shows, it is roughly ten times more expensive to create exercise content for flat screens that's as motivating as exercise content for VR. These costs not only include expensive celebrity actors and studio production for on-demand training sessions, as compared to the zero cost of AI and multiplayer participants in VR, but also a physical branded retail presence and an astonishing level of promotional spending for community building and to drive sales.  This doesn't mean Peloton is in imminent danger of being overtaken by VR. Investors in VR exercise companies will need to be patient. I expect it will be another five years before there is enough VR out there for VR exercise to start to put a serious dent in the flat screen connected fitness market. But once established there will be no turning back. If you had to give one piece of advice, what would you give?When my co-founder Eric Malafeew and I first showed our apps on a bike at a VR demo event at MIT in 2015, one of the show visitors was John Riccitiello, CEO of Unity. We got him on the bike and after only maybe 30 seconds he took off the headset and proclaimed, “Oh, wow. You’ve solved the problem of moving through big virtual worlds!” We thought, shit. This is gonna be easy! We first started shipping as a product a year later in 2016. We distributed our apps on Steam for the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive as free-to-play and sold a VR Bike we had made for it for $400. That was to minimize friction to get the apps out there. If you had a Rift or Vive all you had to do was buy this cheap bike off Amazon and download VZ Arcade from Steam. Product and press reviews were fantastic. Then the VR industry went into reverse with respect to supporting 3rd party hardware. When we launched on Sony PSVR Playstation they didn’t let us promote our amazing, well-reviewed 6DoF VR exercise games as apps that required a bike. We had to make the apps work with handheld game controllers for PSVR users to try. When PSVR users tried them this way, naturally they were confused and most reviews were of the WFT? variety. Sony did approve our VR Bike, an expensive and herculean effort made possible by VirZOOM friend John Ma. To this day our VR Bike is the only Sony-approved 3rd party peripheral for PSVR. Needless to say, it was a hard sell off the VR section of the Playstation store, although the few hundred PSVR users that did manage to discover our bike on our website loved the product. The Oculus Quest store has even more problematic policies for our 6DoF VR exercise magic. Like the Playstation store, promotion of 3rd party hardware is not allowed. All apps have to work with the Oculus Quest headset and hand controllers alone. Unlike the Playstation store, not only can’t we promote our 6DoF use case that requires a bike, we had to create a standing mode version of our 6DoF apps to qualify to get listed on the store at all. Back when we sold our VZfit and VZ Play VR exercise apps directly off our website our reviews. More WTF? 1-Star reviews, just like on the Playstation store, except for those who discovered the bike use case. Among them reviews average 4.8 out of 5. Big surprise.  An artifact of this store listing requirement that all apps have to work with the Oculus Quest headset and hand controllers alone is the current state of the art of VR Fitness apps. You stand inside the Quest guardian area and react to things coming at you by moving your arms. One CNET reporter after reviewing VZfit for Oculus Quest noted that VZfit was a welcomed change from the “bumbling around in your living room” fitness apps that he’s previously reviewed. SuperNatural elevated this highly limited exercise paradigm into an art form, but it’s reached its limitations. There simply aren’t that many things you can do that are legitimate exercise while trapped standing inside the VR safe area. To get to the next level, sooner or later Oculus and others will have to embrace 3rd party controllers, as my cofounder so eloquently explained here.So here’s my one piece of advice.  If you are taking on something as big as solving The Big Problem in an industry, in our case moving through big virtual worlds with 6DoF to create the best VR exercise user experience possible, you should expect that the economic logic of early platform store policies to work against you, and be prepared for a long slog. It’s a game of inches. Keep at it. Don’t give up. 

To find out more about Eric, check him out here. 

Jobs boardSDK TECHNICAL ENGINEER, Pico Interactive Europe. As SDK Technical Engineer you will be responsible for investigating/troubleshooting issues reported, and collecting/consolidating customer requirements back to the Beijing DevSupport team. Through this role you will be the technical liaison between Pico Interactive Europe customers and Pico product teams to ensure Europe region's commercial success. In Europe, Pico is one of the premier enterprise hardware companies in the rapidly growing VR market. Click here for more.TECHNICAL PROJECT MANAGER, Pico Interactive Europe. As Technical Project Manager you will be responsible for evaluating improvements to the devices, services, logistics, and operations to continue the high growth business of Pico Interactive Europe. In Europe, Pico is one of the premier enterprise hardware companies in the rapidly growing VR market. The Pico Europe business is responsible for all business opportunities in Europe, Israel, Russian Federation and India. Click here for more. DIGITAL MARKETING MANAGER. ArborXR is device management for AR & VR devices. We power some of the largest headset deployments in the world with Fortune 500, ISVs and companies around the world. Looking for someone with experience in the B2B SAAS marketing space who would enjoy working with a fully remote team based in the US, Canada and Europe. Would join a quickly growing marketing team with a hot product that is selling rapidly. Click here for more. WEB-AR DEVELOPER wanted to work with veteran AR agency. Experience in JavaScript, Three.js, A-Frame, and 8th Wall preferred. Ideal candidate thrives working remotely. Includes competitive salary and full benefits. To apply, send resume to [email protected].INTERNSHIP, US. The intern will be primarily focused on developing proficiency in the use and application of tools designed for experiences in VR/AR headsets. GRIP-IE interns will assist the Get Real management team and clients in the design, development, and implementation of features within both internal and partner platforms. Interns will follow industry best practices including continuous improvement through code reviews of existing and new code. GRIP-IE interns will also be responsible for managing communication with software vendors on a variety of topics including bug identification, feature requests, troubleshooting, and documentation materials. Click here for more. BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT MANAGER, UK. Here at CIRCUS (an award-winning creative agency, specialists of Virtual Brand Experiences) we're on the lookout for an enthusiastic B2B Business Development Manager on a part-time, remote basis. If this sounds of interest and you love all things virtual, we'd love to tell you more. Click here for more. SENIOR WEBXR ENGINEER, US. Build a human-centric metaverse with a stellar team at www.urnowhere.com. Full-Time Position, Fully Remote Team, Core hours (10AM-5PM EST). NOWHERE aims to revolutionize gathering with patent-pending video presence technology that allows serendipitous social mingling between conversations with friends or colleagues at conferences, meetings, or parties all within dynamic web environments. Nowhere combines expertise from veteran founders, experience experts, engineers, game designers, theatre-makers, VFX artists from Windmill Factory to build a healthier digital future. Please share with anyone you think might be interested. JOIN NOWHERE.Display your vacancy in front of thousands of talented VR/AR professionals in just a few clicks. Click here for more info.

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