The Office Park

JWise Photo of the Day

Skyport office park in Scottsdale, Arizona

This is the location of the offices of TimefireVR LLC. I should be finding myself here most days of the week, but so far that’s been difficult due to a multitude of reasons ranging from my mother’s recent death to the issues surrounding the raising of capital to keep things going forward. Through the troubles of operating an entrepreneurial endeavor to dealing with complexities of personalities that move in and out of our lives, I find myself searching for the passion that was available in abundance prior to the fall of 2016 when things detoured. Back then we went public and embarked on a hiring spree.

Over these last years I’ve been asked dozens of times how I got involved with making games in virtual reality and during those explanations, I realize that others are enchanted with this idea that someone is creating something. I’ve gotten this same impression back when I was making record covers, shooting videos, opening an internet cafe, writing a book, and now this. So while it may be of interest to others, I wish to be inspired by their enthusiasm and always find what I started here with this project to be of great motivation. But reconnecting with that is hard and at the moment it only arrives in fits and spurts. This is a dilemma.

Old Friends New Worlds – TimefireVR

JWise Photo of the Day, TimefireVR

Adriana demoing some updates in Hypatia by TimefireVR LLC

Had some visitors by the offices of TimefireVR today, former staffers Adriana and Kyle. I had recently run into Adriana while I was out shopping and said hello after not seeing her for eight months since we experienced a total layoff of staff back in July. Slowly, the company was restaffed and, for a while, was in other people’s hands, but in January, it found its way back to the original shareholders.

Kyle visiting Hypatia at TimefireVR LLC

Adriana’s other half is Kyle, who also worked for us last year and was one of the casualties. Behind him, also in VR, is Jason, who was kept on through all the chaos, and Stephanie, on the left, recently came back on for some contract art and is staying with us part-time. It was great seeing these two, but at the same time, it’s still rough as the emotional toll of last summer has lingering effects.

Recalcitrance to Change – TimefireVR

JWise TimefireVR

Road Closed Sign During Winter in Yellowstone National Park

Recalcitrance to change and the desire to return to some idyllic time that, in truth, never existed outside of one’s perception is, in my opinion, a recipe for disaster. Fear is likely the driving mechanism behind opposition to change. With change comes the potential to find one’s self on the wrong side of adaptability and yet everyone is changing all the time. After a long stagnation period where the intellectual rigor that should have been applied to one’s life is recognized as having been deeply neglected, the individual empowered by groupthink is likely becoming self-aware at a subconscious level of their disadvantage. Rather than push forward with the intention to do better, they find themselves joining the populist opinion that they are not wrong but instead, find blame in those ready to greet the uncertain future with gusto.

This type of thinking is a waking nightmare encouraging a population to march toward disintegration. History has witnessed previous epochs where the tide was moving to shift a people forward, but those in power were fearing being left behind. So they grab hold of that negative mindset and harness it to bring others into a false knowledge that their way of life is about to be destroyed. Too many join in the fear of those who are stealing their comfort and confidence.

Today, that fear is represented by the very thing that has brought us out of the stone age and is catapulting us out of the industrial age: technological progress. The Enlightenment opened the doors of technological creative processes that enabled humanity to discover and gaze upon the infinitesimally small found in the world of molecules and particles to the phenomenally large as represented by the scope of the universe and breadth of time.

Instead of strong leadership trying to guide those getting lost in fear and continued ignorance, many in those trusted positions are pandering to them, allowing too many to remain passive in a sidelined role. Might this be the more desirable outcome? Could the powers that be understand that there is no hope for those who have already deeply habituated intellectual lethargy where their stasis may as well be a 100-ton iron weight anchoring them to their own ignorance? Is the road ahead truly closed for those who fear the future?

What of those who embrace change but now fear that governments and societies are endangering progress by this acceptance of a status quo? Do these anti-change forces who would like to see a reversal of globalism endanger everyone’s future? Once the image was captured of our blue planet floating in the void and was witnessed by humanity, many realized that all that matters and all those we shall know to share the same little orbiting rock, and we’d better learn to get along. That unspoken acknowledgment of being of the same species in a shared space has delivered global commerce, communication, and awareness of an environment that must support all of us.

The physical environment is only part of the equation that includes our intellectual environment as well. We are in a symbiotic relationship not only with one another but with the sky, land, water, and the rest of life surrounding our existence. We evolved to this point in our journey from that well-balanced symbiosis with nature and our learning how to adapt to changing conditions. Normally, though the conditions required us to primarily employ our instinctual and physical strengths, today, it is largely intellectual. We now need to muster the mental strength to see our way through the cognitive morass of our own making.

The path we’ve taken started accelerating during the past 300 years through the relationship afforded by the cooperation of economic and political systems, enabling science to make strides that have brought us to this point in our technological modernity. At every step, we have encountered hurdles and branches that each generation had to negotiate. At this juncture where we are beginning to evaluate our own role in an automated environment that may free us from manual labor, we must start asking ourselves and our leadership what our continued role might entail when a robot or an A.I. is performing our job.

I, for one, do not see a dystopian future because where politics, economics, and science laid a foundation, I believe we are at the precipice where a safety net called creativity, as defined by our work in the arts, is ripe to harness this foundation and use it as a springboard into the next stage of human activity.

To be creative is to open oneself to embarrassment and failure as defined by those who have gone before us where fame and fortune eluded them. Often, though, this perception of failure was due to the circumstances of the age where a population wasn’t ready to assimilate the creative message being offered. Also in previous times, the tools were considered the domain of those who could afford them and who had the idle time to explore their uses before finding mastery and a benefactor who could support their ambitions.

Today, we have digital tools that offer us infinite canvas space, endless paint supplies, the sound of every instrument ever created, and millions more that are yet to exist. Cameras embedded in our phones, along with the internet, allow anyone to be a broadcaster. We are learning what influencers are all about. Video games are becoming a professional sport, with millions watching the streaming events on a myriad of devices. Our books, too, are delivered electronically, and images are attached to memes that will never let us forget the grumpy cat. A good majority of our commerce is already transacted online; it will be a small step to visit off-world alien malls constructed in virtual reality.

What if all of this is just the tip of the iceberg? How will technologies such as continued miniaturization leading to more power-efficient portable tools, virtual and augmented reality, and the greater reach of communication combined with the convenience of blockchain-enabled services impact our individual ability to attract our own audience and provide us with purpose when the traditional workforce is rapidly changing?

From here we must ask ourselves how will our social contract evolve following this transition from passive consumption and purpose defined by our jobs to active participation and the rewarding of our creative abilities. How do we start this conversation and bootstrap these emerging industries should it, in fact, be a course of travel we recognize as being one of our more viable paths at this crossroads in the human journey?

The TimefireVR Crew

JWise Dreams, TimefireVR

TimefireVR Crew 2017

Diversity, camaraderie, dedication, commitment, loyalty, and an effort beyond anything I could have ever dreamed of. That is what best describes this group photo of the team that I had assembled.

The majority of these amazing people have had to go on to explore other opportunities, but I am forever grateful for what they gave to a dream that had been percolating in my imagination for over 25 years. This summer, just after the 4th of July holiday, I had to do something that was the single most isolating and distressing thing I’ve had to do as the founder of a company; I had to let them all go.

It has taken me more than 90 days to bring myself to look at these faces, and seeing them again simultaneously warms my heart and strikes me in the gut with how much I miss them. I can never fully explain the profound disappointment I felt and continue to feel that on the verge of trying to find our place in the world, we ran out of options and money and were no longer able to keep them employed. While we had all the growing pains one would expect from a startup that was simultaneously trying to invent and innovate, on the whole, we had an awesome team.

There are a few people not in the photo, notably my co-founder Jeffrey and myself. In the days this photo was taken, we were scrambling, looking for options to make payroll. The hoped-for bump in sales or attracting a partner with deep pockets never materialized. This was especially difficult for us, as we were in active conversations with some larger players following our favorable press, comparing us to being the “Virtual Minecraft meets Facebook.”

Doors started opening, but funds to meaningfully engage in those conversations were greatly inhibited. Over the course of the summer, we were able to maintain a skeleton crew that not only kept the platform alive but have revamped many things that have put us in the position to release our title anew, and we are now compatible with not only the HTC Vive but the Oculus Rift from Facebook too.

The old adage “A dollar short and a day late” certainly applies here, though that doesn’t absolve me of the guilt I feel in letting these people down.

I do not know how to repay them or even honor them. Along the way, I have felt a lot of gratitude and a fair share of outright hostility and hatred for how I chose to do things or how things were done due to the compromises that come with spending other people’s money, but life goes on, or at least it should.

My ambition was large, and enthusiasm great as a group of mostly amateurs strove to create something I hoped would be beneficial to society by not diving into the tropes of violence, misogyny, winners, and losers.

Message From The Founder – TimefireVR

JWise TimefireVR

John Wise Founder of TimefireVR

Sometimes, in an effort to create something extraordinary, we take chances on unproven markets and ideas that have no precedence; this is the path to innovation. We are in an age that demands participation from better-educated populations on a global scale. We cannot allow geographic and/or economic isolation to limit our ability to enjoy the benefit of what deep cultural integration and a strong education can bring. We must all be afforded the opportunity to be the right person in the right place at the right time. Our world, now more than ever, requires our innovation and ability to develop workable solutions that do not rely on outdated technology. We cannot survive in isolation and ignorance. We truly are living in the future many of us have dreamed of and must learn to live accordingly.

TimefireVR through Hypatia has been a labor of love that has been toiled on for more than three years. Through a million lessons learned and a host of methods explored on how not to create a VR title, we finally reached the point this summer that we thought we were ready to test the waters. The only problem was that by then, our funding was running thin and we would have to try to find customers without a marketing budget and being limited by being “ready” for just one platform: the HTC Vive.

Stumbling blocks were encountered shortly after our early release, as happens in many small companies still in the startup phase, but with a reduced crew, we have endeavored to correct some of our shortcomings and are close to being able to roll out an update to Hypatia.

First of all, we are making changes to our pricing model for Hypatia, and a BIG surprise is around the corner. In order to help with this change, we have worked over the summer to bring a trade and commerce model to Hypatia that will allow better economic participation in our city.

Next, we have been updating our map for easier navigation, updating the entry into the world, updating the avatars, and have been making a ton of improvements for an all-around better experience while people visit, play, and learn in Hypatia.

Finally, we are just about ready to launch in support of the Oculus Rift.

For those of you who have been our early adopters, we offer you thanks for trying to help us create an early economic model that was hoped to help bring visibility to our efforts. We have something in mind to reward you for your participation and will discuss that in a future blog post. Again, thanks for your contribution.

It has been our dream to offer a better level of cultural and creative participation to our real world via a virtual world where scarcity doesn’t limit anyone’s ability to participate. Through some incredible obstacles, hurdles, and perseverance, we have done our best for the better part of 1,000 days to make that promise a reality.

A new chapter in a new city is about to emerge.

Labor of Love – Hypatia

JWise Dreams, TimefireVR

A Glimpse At Some Of Hypatia From TimefireVR

Sometimes, in an effort to create something extraordinary, we take chances on unproven markets and ideas that have no precedence; this is the path to innovation. We are in an age that demands participation from better-educated populations on a global scale. We cannot allow geographic and/or economic isolation to limit our ability to enjoy the benefit of what deep cultural integration and a strong education can bring. We must all be afforded the opportunity to be the right person in the right place at the right time. Our world, now more than ever, requires our innovation and ability to develop workable solutions that do not rely on outdated technology. We cannot survive in isolation and ignorance. We truly are living in the future many of us have dreamed of and must learn to live accordingly.

TimefireVR through Hypatia has been a labor of love that has been toiled on for more than three years. Through a million lessons learned and a host of methods explored on how not to create a VR title, we finally reached the point this summer that we thought we were ready to test the waters. The only problem was that by then, our funding was running thin, and we would have to try to find customers without a marketing budget and being limited by being “ready” for just one platform; the HTC Vive.

Stumbling blocks were encountered shortly after our early release, as happens in many small companies still in the startup phase, but with a reduced crew, we have endeavored to correct some of our shortcomings and are close to being able to roll out an update to Hypatia.

First of all, we are making changes to our pricing model for Hypatia, and a BIG surprise is around the corner. In order to help with this change, we have worked over the summer to bring a trade and commerce model to Hypatia that will allow better economic participation in our city.

Next, we have been updating our map for easier navigation, updating the entry into the world, updating the avatars, and making a ton of improvements for an all-around better experience while people visit, play, and learn in Hypatia.

Finally, we are just about ready to launch in support of the Oculus Rift.

For those of you who have been our early adopters, we offer you thanks for trying to help us create an early economic model that was hoped to help bring visibility to our efforts. We have something in mind to reward you for your participation and will discuss that in a future blog post. Again, thanks for your contribution.

[Edit: I posted this as a blog entry on my other website: http://www.timefirevr.com/ as an update to what has happened to our company over the summer]

Hypatia Launched Today – TimefireVR

JWise TimefireVR

Virtual Reality world Hypatia

Three years ago my friend Jeffrey Rassás put together my first working capital, and we founded TimefireVR: a bunch of intrepid artists and developers starting on an endeavor to build a multi-player massive online social virtual reality application. We have now finally arrived at the day that it is being made available to the world. At midnight, our team launched the VR city of Hypatia. Over the years, many people have worked on this, and many are still striving to make it even better and will hopefully continue to do so for years into the future.

My ambition was to create a non-violent explorer who would go the extra mile to break down the geographic and economic barriers afflicting a large swath of all populations around our globe. It has been my belief that when we humans have the opportunity to play, explore, and extend our curiosity with others, we become better citizens of Earth, and more importantly, we become better persons to ourselves.

The original idea was born in 1994 while I was living in Frankfurt, Germany, with the working title “Zones.” Back then, many of us thought VR was about to be the next big thing, turned out that the next big thing would be the internet. Zones were to be an environment influenced by Berlin and Frankfurt where transmogrifying insectoids would morph in and out of reality as they explored a world of art that would deliver them into the surreal. Today, our VR city is named Hypatia in honor of the first known female intellectual. The avatars are scaled back for now and are known as “Hoverbots.” The environment initially borrows architectural influences from Amsterdam, while being immersed in an alternative universe should certainly qualify as being surreal. So maybe I’ve achieved a few of those objectives from all those years ago.

It took 23 years until the performance of computers, the speed of the internet, and the capability of headsets began to deliver the quality necessary to make VR viable, though, to me, it feels like it took nearly a lifetime. Now that it’s here, I’m amazed that I’ve had the incredible opportunity to participate in this groundbreaking paradigm shift in how we view reality and the virtual one we are creating.

What has been created here in Hypatia is not a simple game, not by a long shot. It is the culmination of an acquisition of knowledge that started with ideas of invention and exploration I had as a small child, leading me to discover the evolution of the mind of humanity as seen through the philosophical filter of Aristotle and Friedrich Nietzsche to the sociology of Jean Baudrillard and Jürgen Habermas. Growing up in Los Angeles, living in Europe, and learning about the proto-city of Çatalhöyük played their parts in how my perception would lay the foundation of a virtual city meant to be a cultural and educational epicenter of the future. I’ve stood in the living room of the James Ensor House in Ostend, Belgium, and listened to Mozart’s music on the streets of Salzburg in Austria. I’ve visited Eisenach, Germany, where Bach was born, and I walked through the Wartburg, where Martin Luther translated the bible. From World War II Japanese internment camps in the California desert to the Yellowstone Caldera over to the streets of Manhattan, I’ve studied who and what we are and how we have moved through history and shaped our cultures.

Whether rafting the Colorado River like John Wesley Powell or launching a rocket to deliver the first humans to the moon, there is an imperative for people to go out in search of the extraordinary. Unfortunately, not all of us can be so lucky. Virtual Reality can change that and afford humanity the opportunity to have a surrogate experience that allows us to touch the impossible. Hypatia is but a first step in helping teach the language of this new art and reality. Reduced to its very basics, the reality is nothing more than a configuration of energetic particles that form the basis and material that drive the perception of the universe around us. In VR we are on the verge of harnessing the placement of light and illusion of matter in a setting that soon will be indistinguishable from what we know to be reality. So, in a sense, we are creating a new universe that we can explore, where our real universe is too large for us to venture beyond our solar system.

All of this is important to me as I find that the discovery of novelty and a healthy relationship to learning intrinsically complex things essentially make up a fountain of youth. We are children once because we do not yet have a broad foundation of knowledge regarding the world around us. Our best moments of learning are found in play. We learn language with the help of family and friends who dote on us as infants, encourage our unintelligible sounds, and reward us with love and amazement. We extend our developing skills by the exploration of what is immediately around us, such as when parents fill the crib with toys, stuffed animals, a mobile, and musical devices. Then, it’s off to find the house before wandering into the backyard and then the park. Every step of the way, we are playing and venturing further out, and no one asks that we do more than that. We are not graded to talk, we do not receive marks for achieving an efficiency of play with our teddy bear. We do not pay children to go to make sandcastles or fire them when they do not win at hide-n-seek.

This age of innocence and exponential learning comes crashing to a halt as soon as we find out that our teachers are allowed to be disappointed with us and worse. They embarrass us and tell our parents that we are failures in their eyes; even our peers are allowed to wreak havoc on our developing sense of self by ridiculing us for not being as fast, as pretty, as smart, as tough, or as rich. After all of this social conditioning, we want well-balanced adults who are prepared to enter the workforce and not be burdened by mental illness, alcoholism, violent tendencies, or laziness. Our system is broken, yet while it’s wearing the Emperor’s New Clothes, many think it’s better than the alternative of the Emperor not wearing any clothes at all.

Someone has to step up and offer something different. While no one person or group is likely to have a universal answer that will solve the predicament that we as a society and global population are in, it is obvious we are in need of greater imagination and the ability to adapt to complexity. We must strive to discover alternatives to an education process that is not inspiring the generations to dream of going to the figurative moon.

If we cannot dream without fear of failure or laugh at the absurd that makes us challenge our perception of what is possible then I feel that we are heading into a cultural dark age. A large problem I have with that is that I cannot believe the opportunity that all of us have right before us here and now. We have greater access to knowledge than at any other time in human history, including even the recent history of just 20 years ago. We have access to tools that allow people with limited skills to develop a vocation by simply seeing it out and applying themselves. Music from across history is available immediately, as are billions of minutes of on-demand video that can share nearly any information or teach almost every topic known to us. Unless we are able to embrace what is difficult as we get older, stagnation can only harm our self-respect and the economic opportunity that we might have otherwise carved out for ourselves.

But who wants to try something difficult if it means we can get bad marks, be embarrassed by our peers, or find ourselves destitute because we were fired for not achieving the goals others have set for us? Play is just as important for the two-year-old as it is for the 12 and 72-year-old. Hypatia is a place where play takes center stage. Developing the city of Hypatia and inviting people in, we have witnessed over and over again people of all ages fall into amazement, followed by fits of joyous laughter and disbelief that they are exploring a magical place where it appears that all things are possible.

Over the years, investors asked me who our target market was, and they wanted specific answers, but they rarely asked for or wanted a truthful answer: our target market is not solely 12-17-year-olds. Our market is humanity from all walks of life, all religions, all colors, genders, orientations, or levels of intellectual and economic success. I understand this is too broad for most people to wrap their heads around; after all, they stopped dreaming big once they were pulled from the sandbox and dropped in front of a book about equations and rules of grammar.

Just as anyone reading this can see, I voluntarily conformed to the rules of spelling and was able to use common words to convey my thoughts in order for me to remain in the social fabric of cohesion. If left to my playful self, I can learn anything and enjoy staying within the shared rules that govern our ideas for civility that allow us to interact with one another. Hypatia is my attempt to create a playground where the sandbox of potential is forever within our grasp, allowing us to dip out of our competitive reality and re-energize our playful selves. One in which we are able to climb any monkey bars, go down the longest slide ever, swing until we spin around the bar, or build sandcastles of such epic proportions they would certainly lead us into magical underworld dimensions or stretch into the sky so far we might be able to touch Jupiter. We must dream of play and play to offer ourselves dreams worthy of inspiring our waking selves, so this life need not be of drudgery and fear of failure, anger, or violence.

It’s time for us to evolve. It’s time to take a step into the unknown and reclaim the pioneering spirit of our species that was never afraid to cross a desert, climb a mountain, travel an ocean, or risk everything to visit the bottom of the sea or the surface of the moon. Virtual reality may be the place where we all start to understand it is our place in this universe to explore, document, and share our discoveries so we might once again have stories of amazing adventures to tell each other around the campfire. Hypatia is my contribution to the story of the people of our Earth.