The long quiet here at PSOIH is due to the fact that things changed along the way as we were building VR. Virtual Reality is a huge undertaking, and it turned out, of some interest to others. As the Game Developers Conference (GDC) concluded and April played out, not only was Sony getting into the game with Morpheus, but Facebook grabbed Oculus and gave them enough money to start to do very serious work. Simultaneously, I started a conversation with an old friend, Jeffrey Rassas, who took an immediate liking to what some guy and I were doing, and he also saw what we might accomplish with greater resources. In just a couple of weeks, we were on our way to hiring others and inviting them to join us in our new office.

One thing I learned between January (Steam Dev Days) and March (GDC) was that nearly everyone was having a problem pronouncing PSOIH, so we changed the name to TIMEFIRE. Our new domain is over at www.timefirevr.com – someone who I cannot seem to contact already owns the domain of plain old timefire dot com.

As TimefireVR or simply Timefire, we migrated away from UDK and fully embraced UE4 (Unreal Engine 4 from Epic), and now we have two others helping us explore the possibilities that UE4 has to offer. One of those new people here at Timefire is Ariana Alexander, who created this characterization of Czech musician Jiri Wehle using MakeHuman, Blender, and UE4. We’ve also brought on Brinn Aaron, who is working with Blender, UE4, FMOD, Bitwig, Circle Synth, GlitchMachines tools, and, of course, Allegorithmic’s Substance Designer. Luis Chavez joined us from a video background but has quickly adapted to Blender and UE4. but has shown great strength in mastering SVERCHOK – a Blender Addon that is used primarily as a parametric architectural tool that also has many options to be used as an element for creating art. Also on board are Rainy Heath and Dani L’Heureux, who are working their way through Blender, Substance Painter and Substance Designer, some Illustrator, and MakeHuman.