My ten years in immersive realities

Se mi guardo nello specchio con il tempo che è passato
Sono solo un po’ più ricco, più cattivo e più invecchiato
(If I look at myself in the mirror with the time that has passed
I’m just a little richer, meaner, and older) [M.Masini]

April, 25th 2014. This is the day I usually say that I’ve officially started my career in AR/VR. Actually, my efforts in the field started even before, and I discovered the term “augmented reality” when I was reading tons of articles for my thesis in computer vision and I’ve found some interesting applications of the SIFT features. It’s hard so to establish an exact moment when it started. Still, I always consider April, 25th the real day because it’s when I began collaborating in a more structured way with a previous classmate of mine, Gianni Rosa Gallina, in trying to create a startup about AR/VR (which later would be called ImmotionAR). At that moment I was working with him mostly in AR experimentations, and our dream was to use Google Glass. I would have tried the first VR headset a few months later, around September, when we realized that Google Glass sucked completely.

10 years is a lot of time, not as long as the period that the true pioneers have been in the field (we have some celebrities that have been working in XR for 30 years), but still, it’s quite a long time span. I realized how much time has passed by when a few days ago, during the podcast I started speaking about my first experiences in the field and I realized how XR was different back then. I so thought it could be interesting to do a bit of self-reflection with you and do an analysis of what happened in our space these years and also what happened to my life in the same period. Maybe someone of you may be interested in this rant.

The cycles of VR

In my career, I have experienced mostly four cycles of Virtual Reality. Let me tell you the story of VR from my point of view (You can skip this part if you don’t feel the need to read a summary of the last years in VR).

The devkits and the good old days (2014-2016)

I entered VR when there was the Oculus Rift DK2. VR was just a thing for nerds, there was the Oculus Rift DK2 and then someone else tried entering the field, like Razer with its OSVR. There were no controllers, no avatars, no good positional tracking… and no money. People developing applications were sharing them on the Oculus Share, mostly for free. When Facebook acquired Oculus, there was a lot of hype in the ecosystem, because VR seemed to be “the next big tech” and everyone was just waiting for the first commercial units to see VR becoming mainstream.

That was also the period when Cardboard was released, bringing with it the hope for cheap VR that everyone could use. And Samsung Gear VR made us try wireless high-quality VR for the first time.

I have great memories of those days: the VR ecosystem was about creativity, community, experimentation, and hope. Palmer Luckey was like a rockstar for us and we all loved him, Brendan Iribe, and the whole Oculus gang. John Carmack was like a god admired by the whole community. I remember watching some videos of the Oculus Connect and it seemed just a friendly meeting of a startup with its community.

The hype and fall of the commercial units (2016-2019)

After many weeks of teasing the mythical Oculus Rift CV1, the device launched, but the price was much higher than we hoped: $600 + VAT. To run it also needed a powerful PC: I remember that to be a VR developer, I had to invest something like €3000 out of my own pocket to buy a VR-ready PC + Rift + Oculus Touch controllers. I remember the many memes published at that time because that price shattered the dream of having mainstream adoption of VR anytime soon.

At that time, Valve also entered the field with HTC, releasing the HTC Vive, with the innovation of room-scale tracking and motion controllers. Oculus was caught unprepared and needed to fix the situation by releasing the Touch controllers with the very cumbersome Constellation system (let’s be honest, it sucked to install 3-4 sensors in the room to have 360° VR). Sony released the PSVR and counting on a good user base of PS 4, started to sell fairly well, even if it was probably the least powerful headset among the three.

HTC and Valve won the battle on the PC side: the HTC Vive was so successful that it still today has a decent percentage of users on Steam. It brought motion controllers, very reliable tracking, an open ecosystem… and then it was made by Lord GabeN. But if HTC won the battle, the war was lost by everyone. At a certain point, the numbers of the headset sales were leaked, and they were depressing. HTC was outselling Oculus by a factor of 3, but all the PC VR headsets together barely arrived at 1M units. To make things worse, Cardboards and GearVRs were taking dust on the shelves because people outside of our community didn’t know what to do with them: 360 videos were fun for 1 day at maximum.

This was when VR died for the first time: all journalists had fun destroying our field saying that VR had no use case, people did not need it, and it was just making people sick. Many companies abandoned the field, and many startups died. I remember how finding companies interested in collaborating on VR projects was complicated: it was easier to look for projects involving Unity but on the 2D/3D side. Or even operate in other fields, like making websites. It was very hard to operate in VR… we were all in survival mode.

This was the period when Facebook started to take control of the situation: with the “Summer of Rift” it started doing a big promotion on the Rift CV1 bundle, selling it at a much lower cost than the Vive: its sales started increasing a lot. I guess this is the moment when the team at Facebook realized that reducing the price of the headsets would have been the right strategy to sell more headsets and outsmart the competition.

At the end of this period, Facebook released the Oculus Go, which was like a better Gear VR. There were many hopes for this device, and while it didn’t become mainstream, it paved the way for the device that changed everything: the mythical Oculus Santa Cruz, which will be known at launch as “Oculus Quest”.

Oculus Quest and VR entering the mainstream (2019-2023)

Oculus Quest launched in 2019 for $399. Finally, there was a virtual reality headset that was affordable, easy to use, and had a library of good content. Together with the Quest, other headsets entered the market, like the Vive Focus (later Vive Focus Plus) and Lenovo Mirage Solo. But the Quest, thanks to its low price, the investments Facebook made for its content, and the continuous runtime updates, totally crushed the competition on the consumer side. Most of the competitors so moved to the enterprise stage. Only Pico, later in the cycle, managed to have also some recognition in the consumer space.

In the 4 years of this cycle, Quest 1 and Quest 2 have totally dominated the market. They sold more than 20 million devices, and managed to create awareness about VR: everyone now at least knows what a virtual reality headset is.

It’s also the moment of the first success stories of VR game studios: Beat Saber, Gorilla Tag, Population One, Pistol Whip… many games became successful in the Quest store and various studios managed to make a living out of VR. On the consumer side, VR was a technology for gaming. And in enterprise settings, many companies adopted VR in their production processes.

PC VR was abandoned by Meta and became a field for prosumers, and even the (quite disappointing) launch of PSVR 2 didn’t help in resurrecting the space. But we started seeing very compact PC VR headsets like BigScreen Beyond and that has been cool.

This good moment of VR culminated with Facebook rebranding to Meta and launching its vision of the Metaverse: it was a shockwave in the whole ecosystem. I remember everyone wanting to do something in the metaverse, even if they had no idea about what it meant, so we all XR experts had lots of requests.

These have been good years of growth: not many of us have become rich, but let’s say all of us had decent opportunities to earn money and do projects. Investments in the field were growing too, and finally, there was again optimism in XR.

I thought the time had come for all of us in the field to harvest what we had sowed for years. But I was wrong: around half of 2022, things started to be negative again. The Quest 2 was at the end of its cycle and its sales started to be less enthusiastic. Everyone abandoned the “metaverse”, being disappointed that a whole new foundational technology couldn’t be built in 2 weeks. AI became the new big trend everyone should follow, and many people lost interest in the metaverse hype to jump on the next hype.

Standalone VR did a lot, but it seemed like we needed another big change, a new shock of the space.

Apple Vision Pro and the mixed reality headsets (2023 – ongoing)

The shockwave arrived with Apple entering the field in 2023, with its Apple Vision Pro. Apple’s entrance validated the XR market and brought back the interest of people. But it’s not only Apple: Google and Samsung announced a partnership for a new XR headset, and Meta released the Meta Quest 3. And it seems that Meta is also planning to sell a very cheap device.

All these new headsets feature not only VR but also Mixed Reality. They all can work with just the hands, so people can have natural interactions. They can do games, but the attention to gaming is not the only priority anymore: while Quest is mostly for games, Vision Pro is about productivity and media consumption. XR is putting the basis to become the next-generation technology, and it is doing it together with AI.

And here we are, with this new cycle starting, and probably going on until 2028 or something like that. While some people have already started saying (again) that VR is dead because the Vision Pro is not selling like hotcakes (quite hard with a $3500 price point), there is new optimism in the field, and hope again, because the big names are betting on it. I personally think this is the cycle that will lay out the foundations for the next one, which will feature cheaper and more lightweight devices and an even stronger AR/MR proposition, starting the process of mainstream adoption. This is coherent with Zuck’s statement that Meta’s investments in the field will pay off in the 2030s.

The cycles of AR

I have already spent enough words talking about VR headsets, so I don’t want to bother you with another long story of AR, but I still want to pinpoint a few important moments of this technology since when I entered the field:

• 2014: when I started, AR was mostly about marker-based AR applications you could use with your phone. They were either used in enterprise settings or for some marketing applications. We all used Metaio or Vuforia to develop this kind of systems. Meta (the original one) started shipping its glasses, making people dream about AR glasses

• 2016: Microsoft announced HoloLens, entering the field with a revolutionary product that was ahead of its times. We all started wondering about the applications of AR glasses
• 2017: Apple announced ARKit, freeing mobile AR from the markers. Google and Meta soon followed suit releasing their software related to mobile AR. Snap was already in the field, and TikTok would have come to it only recently. This was a watershed moment for XR: front-facing mobile AR (especially filters) are at moment the only truly mainstream XR technology out there, and the sector accelerated after ARKit’s announcement
• 2018 – 2019: The end of hopes for glasses. In 2018, Magic Leap One was made available in the US. It had a good launch, but then it flopped. In 2019, Microsoft launched HoloLens 2, but got less success than they hoped for. In that period there were the realization that AR glasses were not ready for prime time: they were too expensive and limited in functionalities.

• 2021: Meta opens Quest’s passthrough to developers, enabling the creation of mixed-reality applications. People understand that probably passthrough AR is the right form factor for AR in this technological moment. In the same year, Meta released Ray-Ban Stories smartglasses, which got a bit of success. This proved that the fashionable smartglasses form factor was a good one to get the attention of consumers.
• 2023: With the launch of Quest 3 and Apple Vision Pro, it is clear that AR has been merged with VR in only one device. Passthrough mixed reality starts becoming relevant, and consumer AR glasses are postponed by companies to 2027 and beyond.

What I see here is that while mobile AR got adopted pretty quickly thanks to its use on social media (so in an already existing market), for the rest AR got a very slow and complicated adoption. Currently, AR glasses are far behind VR headsets. The road is very long, even if we had some devices which are already interesting (like XREAL glasses).

The evolution of the technology

AR and VR have always evolved slower than we hoped for: as I’ve told you, we all dreamed about consumer-ready VR already in 2016. But if we look back, a lot has changed in these 10 years, and I can tell you this from my three points of view: user, developer, and entrepreneur.

As a user, XR today is day and night if compared with 10 years ago. In 2016, I had to invest €3000 in VR to have a cumbersome setup and decent VR with controllers. Today, I can spend €600 to get a Quest 3 and just turn it on to make it work. I can find on it a lot of good content, and I can find other people to play in multiplayer games (even if there are too many kids). And Quest 3 does not do only VR, but also MR, and I can use it on my bed without controllers, so I have my hands free to… ehm, try “bed-related VR experiences”. All of this is quite cool.

As a developer, I can now develop an application in Unity and make it work on all headsets with minor modifications to my code. This is thanks to the wonders of standardization offered by OpenXR, together with the cross-platform plugins offered by the game engines. Unity, for instance, offers the XR Interaction Toolkit through which I can develop interactions that work on all devices. That’s amazing. When I started, in 2014, I had to use a Japanese plugin called OVRAgent to use the Rift with Unity, because VR was available only for Unity Pro users (and I didn’t have the money for that). And every update of Unity or the Oculus Runtime was breaking something. When we developed HitMotion: Reloaded, around 2019, we had to put the plugins of all the headsets in the project, and we had some special scripts to switch between one headset and the others because the OpenVR plugin was conflicting with the build for standalone Android. It was a mess. Furthermore, now, when I need to know something, I can look on Google and find a decent amount of tutorials about any topic (thanks to amazing people like Dilmer Valecillos or Valem VR). Developing for VR now is much simpler, and more stable.

As an entrepreneur, I see XR now as a viable market to do a successful business. It is still a very complex market and many startups are dying, but now there are also some success stories. As I’ve said, in 2017, it was almost impossible to make money with VR, and Beat Saber seemed the only title making money. But now we have many well-known studios in VR. Talking out of personal experience, I myself every month hear about possible collaborations I could have. Let’s say that when I started, making good money in VR required a miracle, now it’s very difficult but possible. And talking about AR, there are many creators that are making good money making filters for Instagram, or Snap, let’s not forget about it.

So, while we are still here wondering if VR is dead or bullshit like this, if we look back we see that we have done a lot of steps forward. As I’ve said, we are walking slower than we hoped for, and we are not going in a straight line, but we have gone through a long road already. And a long path is still in front of us, but if we look at the road back, we realize we are also able to do the one in front of us.

Is it the right moment to be in XR?

Yesterday I was reading a member of Andreessen Horowitz (one of the biggest VC funds in the US) tweeting that now is the right moment to start an AR-VR company.

I mostly agree, because usually you have to invest in a company in a field around 3 years before this field becomes successful, and probably XR is around 3 to 5 years from getting more interesting traction. But at the same time, we are currently in a harsh moment where it’s hard to get investments in XR and it’s hard to make revenues in XR, so if you establish an AR/VR company today, probably you have to eat ramen for a few months before you can see your success. In any case, it’s good that after people started doubting about XR again in 2022, we see the field getting some new interest from investors, especially thanks to Meta and Apple. I start to see some positivity again, even if I think that we’re still in harsh times and we all need to be careful.

When I was answering the questions of a podcast a few days ago, I was asked if maybe I didn’t start “too early”. The fact is: no one tells you when it’s too early. In these 10 years, lots of times people said that “next year is the year of VR”… but we are in 2024, and I still think no year has been the year of VR, yet. Timing is very important for a business, but no one knows when is the right time. Plus the right time also comes because some pioneers helped in establishing a field: no technology can be successful overnight, and it needs a lot of effort trying, failing, and creating the foundations for the ones that are to come. The problem with being a pioneer is that maybe after all your effort, you don’t even take the biggest of the rewards. The old saying goes “Pioneers take the arrows, settlers take the land”.

What I think is that it is important for everyone to keep an objective way of analyzing reality: I’ve been through many “VR is dead” articles and “This is the iPhone moment of VR” social posts and I start to get tired of this bullshit. The field is evolving and doesn’t need this constant hype followed by disappointment, even if I start to think that’s the normal human way of handling innovation (something that Gartner summarized very well in its hype cycle).

And objectively speaking, in my opinion, now XR has very solid foundations: it has good sales numbers (Quest outpaced Xbox on the sales side), it has the most important tech companies working on it (Meta, Apple, Google, Samsung, etc…), it has some business going. In 2014 the hype was unjustified because there was very little of this. But now things are real, they are not just a wet dream of us nerds. But we’re not there yet: the devices of this cycle are still too expensive and AR glasses are projected to be three years from now. But we have solid foundations on top of which we can truly build the next-gen technology. It will probably take another 10 years, and we are still in the “early days” of the tech, but I feel the wind has started to change. I don’t know if the exact moment to start a VR business is today, or in 2025, or 2026, but I think we are getting in the right window to invest in the field. And while AI may seem a competitive technology, I believe it will empower mixed reality a lot, and I think the convergence of all these technologies will bring us to the future we all dreamed about.

My career in XR

After having described the technology in general, I want to take a moment also to reflect on myself and my career, hoping that may inspire some of you.

I had a few important phases of my work life, which more or less resemble the cycles of VR:

ImmotionAR (2014-2017)

Gianni Rosa Gallina, a previous classmate at university, is the hero of this story: he proposed to collaborate with him on some projects of his own, and then he asked me in 2014 to join him on a venture about new technologies. Supporting us in this startup we had the small local company Beps Engineering (and his boss Beppe).

We were very intrigued by Google Glass and were determined to explore augmented reality: that’s why we chose the name ImmotionAR. After having initially explored mobile AR, and Google Glass, in September 2014 we tried the Oculus Rift DK2 and we fell in love with the technology. We thought that VR was super cool, but it was too rough and it was strange there was no avatar. So we decided to solve the problem ourselves, creating a system of Kinects that communicating with the VR headsets was able to give the user full body avateering, natural interactions with the hands, and the ability to naturally walk in place to walk in VR… all of this without wearing anything. At the beginning of 2015, we basically had a prototype of something that was 10 years ahead of its time. I’m still amazed at how we, two Italian guys, randomly decided to try to solve 2-3 big problems of VR together, all of this without money. And we even managed to develop a good prototype for that!

These were the years when Gianni also pushed me to be more active on social media and so I became “Skarredghost” and I started to connect with the community. In 2016, during the EIA Academy, I got the suggestion to increase the promotion of our startup, so I launched this blog. I did all of this believing no one would have cared about what I had to say.

What ImmotionAR taught me is that you can be a strong team on the technical side, you can do a wonderful prototype, but if you don’t know how to do business, you are not going anywhere. You have to do marketing, you have to write business plans, you have to focus on the “product-market fit”. Building a prototype is a thing, creating a startup about a product is another one. If you are very strong on the technical side, partner with someone with business knowledge if you want to succeed.

New Technology Walkers (2017)

After Immotionar ended, I started a new adventure with Massimiliano Ariani (initially also with our friend Davide P.). As I’ve said, those years were the years of the winter of VR, and we were fully in survival mode, doing whatever we could to survive and pay the bills, while also doing some experiments in VR. Things got better when in 2019 we created a plugin to do mixed reality on the Vive Focus. We got the attention of HTC and by partnering with them we shipped the fitness HitMotion: Reloaded, launching it at the Vive Ecosystem Conference in Shenzhen, China. It was one of the 20 launch titles of the device, the only one in mixed reality. We were pioneers again: Meta would have made mixed reality truly relevant only 2-3 years later.

The years of NTW have been complicated because of the difficulties of being in XR in that period. They helped me in becoming more resilient as an entrepreneur, trying to get whatever opportunity I could to survive. I learned that even if you want to do XR, you may do other kinds of applications to survive, and do XR in your free time. I learned also how to do better outreach: even the partnership with HTC seemed impossible before it happened, but we did them a very good proposal and they were kind in wanting to support us (thanks Alvin for believing in us). Again, two crazy Italian guys launching a game with innovative technology in China. These years also were interesting because for the first time I had an employee (a developer) I had to work with. I think I’ve made a lot of mistakes in project management, and I understood that managing people is more complex than I thought.

VRROOM (2019 – 2024)

At the end of 2019, I started a collaboration with Louis Cacciuttolo about experimenting with concerts, festivals, and liveshows in XR. A bit later, Lapo Germasi, Victor Pukhov, and Maud Clavier joined us and we started working together on concerts in VRChat. We won many awards and had fantastic collaborations: at the end of 2020 we had one of our most successful productions, Welcome To The Other Side, a concerts in VRChat starring Jean-Michel Jarre that was broadcasted even on French TV. Across all media we had 75M views.

Around 2022, we also started building our own platform, called VRROOM, with the purpose of creating a social XR world dedicated to concerts and cultural productions. We launched successfully an alpha and a beta of that. It’s been another crazy venture: a small startup in France tried to compete with big metaverse social platforms… and we delivered our work pretty well.

These years have been the ones where I’ve grown the most as a developer, entrepreneur, and manager. Being the CTO of VRROOM has been very challenging, because I had a group of developers working with me on an enormous and complex project. Luckily I read many books that helped me in coping with the difficulties of my role. Especially the books on software architectures and people management made me do a decent job. I truly suggest you to read books if you want to grow as a professional.

I’ve understood that challenging projects are what make you grow the most: you have to push yourself to the limit to succeed in them, and you develop capabilities you didn’t even think you could get. And I’ve seen how the destiny of a tech lead is mostly about making calls more than writing code… but speaking with a lot of people, you also get a lot of wisdom from them. I’ve written already a very long article about how it is building a metaverse platform, and if you are interested in learning more about the topic, you can find it here. The years in VRROOM showed me how it is possible to do business in VR, but it is still very hard, because there is not mainstream adoption yet. In fact, all the most successful social XR platforms are also available on traditional devices (e.g. RecRoom is very popular on mobile, too).

During these years I also had a fantastic collaboration with Marco Arena and his Beyond The Gate, through which I learned about the potentialities of 5G. And I launched an application with just a cube which went viral (The Unity Cube).

??? (2024 – ???)

VRROOM is currently on hold, so I’m open to opportunities. I’m experimenting with the interactions between real and virtual worlds in mixed reality and I’m also getting some expertise in AI. I truly believe that the mix between MR and AI can be explosive. Let’s see which will be my next big adventure that will follow this cycle of XR…

The importance of the journey

I feel my career has been a bit like XR: I made steps forward, but I’ve not skyrocketed yet. If I have to look at my past with an objective eye, I see that I’ve worked only on innovative projects that failed, for one reason or the other. So probably journalists may comment on my life saying that “Skarredghost is dead”, together with VR.

But if I look back 10 years, I see that a lot has changed in me. I’ve learned how to write better code; I can do the technical design and lay down the technical strategy of a product; I know something about how to do business; I can manage people; I can speak in public with no issues; I have a lot of good connections in the XR space. Actually, I’ve achieved a lot. Let’s say I’ve been very successful in failing.

Maybe I’ve been naive and I started too early, but I regret nothing: it has been a fun ride. I experimented with lots of cool technologies and I met other amazing innovators. I had opportunities I would have never had in a mature field like website building: I mean, launching a game on a stage during a product launch in China was… crazy. Seeing a work I collaborated with broadcasted on TV was cool. Plus I won some awards here and there and I’ve been mentioned by some important magazines here and there, which is good. I had lots of difficult moments, but at the end of the day, it was an amazing journey. And if for real we are entering the right moment to start a VR venture, well, I can do that with a lot of experience on my shoulders.

What I want to leave to you is that there are many different ways to define “success”. What is important, in my opinion, is to grow, improve, and do your best every day. Try to be ambitious, try to work on innovative projects, try to do projects that are bigger than you… you will have fun and learn a lot. And be disciplined, because even if it seems that every day nothing changes, if you work hard every day, after many years you will notice that a lot has changed in your situation. XR is still a hard field to be in, but it’s also a very cool ride, and if you have the passion for it, you will enjoy your journey, as I’m doing. One day, that journey will take us to a wonderful destination, but we will have to sweat a lot to get there.

Thank you

I want to say a big thank you to everyone who supported me in this journey, everyone who believed in me, and also to you who arrived at the end of this long rant without falling asleep. If I look back, I think that I’m here because a lot of people helped me… some of them without even knowing.

I’m ready for the next ten years, and I truly hope we can be there together.

(In the header image you can see me and Gianni meeting to celebrate our 10 years working in immersive technologies. I also wore the T-shirt he gifted me after the first project we worked on together)