Part 2:

That was right about when Google Cardboard hit. That was 2014? I saw it during a Google I/O livestream and just so happened to have a few lenses left over from some still-photography experiments involving lasers and... never mind, another thing that went nowhere, I just had some lenses around. I quit watching the Google I/O stream and immediately hacked together a new cardboard box viewer with the lenses.

Saw Versailles, which I have never been to, but I have been to Linderhof Palace in Bavaria, which is modelled after Versailles. Saw the Galapagos, where my wife and I had just spent our honeymoon about a year or so before. I immediately saw the experience was closer on the spectrum to really being somewhere than it was to seeing it on TV.

So I'm sitting there, this cardboard box in my hand, this powerful smartphone in my hand, thinking to myself "I have to do this, I have to make these things". But all I knew was C# and JavaScript. Unity was garbage at the time. It's still garbage, but also back then. I had tried my hand at native app development and just didn't have the patience for Xcode or Android Studio. So I started hacking with Three.js and JavaScript. I ended up making the first JavaScript API for VR, releasing the first version about a month before the first announcements of WebVR.

Then I saw RiftSketch (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=db-7J5OaSag). It blew my mind. Started chatting with people. Brian Pieris talked about wishing he could get syntax highlighting into the app, and complained about how he had to use CSS 3D transforms to position the box on top of his WebGL view. At the time, I recognized how early everything was and how primitive the tools were. So I thought, if I could make developer-oriented tools that made making VR easier, I could make something out of that. I thought Brian could be my first user. So I made a RiftSketch clone, added it into my WebVR framework, and that became what was eventually called Primrose.

I got a small amount of internet fame out of Primrose. People started recognizing me at conferences. A "startup" hired me to be their head of VR. That turned out to be a different kind of hell. It crashed and burned after about a year. We had a kid and another one due any day, and we were completely out of money. I thought he VR dream was finally over. Started applying to jobs back in web and DB work.

In the mean time, I had just started working in Unity at the startup, I had all this time on my hands, and Unity was offering full-access to their learning materials for the first month for new customers. It was clearly designed to go through in 3 months, but I churned through all of it in a month. Then one of the folks that I had hired on at the startup to work on VR stuff made a connection for me at a gigantic, multinational consultancy, for their Unity dev team. He thought I was pretty good even before I learned Unity properly, so I breezed through the interview. It was also the most money I'd ever been paid. Seemed like a huge win!

Then the reality of giganto-consultingware companies set in. You've not seen office politics until you've worked in an organization that runs under a partnership model. It wasn't exactly the worst job experience I've ever had, but it definitely ranks up there. But it basically got me a ton of Unity development experience. They mismanaged the hell out of the team and eventually had to layoff half of everyone. I also ended up meeting a few folks along the way who got me an interview at my current place.

I'm now the head of VR at a foreign language instruction company. Our main client is the military's foreign language school, the very same place where my parents met and then shortly thereafter had me. Things are going well. The company is stable. It's on its second owner, who brought it back from bankruptcy in the early 2000s. I report directly to the president of the company. He thinks the world of me and lets me do whatever I think is best. We have weekly meetings where we geek out about video games and VR. I just got to hire my first employee to work on the project with me. On a weekly, sometimes even daily basis, the company does something that proves "our employees are our biggest asset" isn't just a platitude for them. It's amazing. I've never worked anywhere this nice before.