Today, Caroline is leaving for Germany to visit family. She’s flying solo as I’m too wrapped up with my new business that has curtailed almost anything else I might want to do. She’ll be gone for the next nine days.
Reappearance – TimefireVR
It’s been a long time since I’ve penned anything other than business documents. In the intervening months since last I dropped words, Timefire has gone through some changes like so many start-ups do.
One giant change is that we’ve grown. A year ago, we were six; today, we are nearly twenty full-time creators. We changed our name and changed it back again and that’s after we had already done that before.
Like many other early VR adopters, it appeared to us that Virtual Reality was nearly at our doorstep. In reality, it started to look like a fast-moving target that might find a consumer release in some distant future (fortunately not another decade or two like back in the 1990s). Now it's said we’ll see the first consumer products by the end of this year, go Valve/HTC and Samsung.
While Samsung rolls out the new Note 5 and GearVR for the general public, we are not building for mobile unless you consider the work we’ve been doing with 360 videos. While we all love immersive 360-degree video, and it will find its place in our VR world and our production skills, it is an explorable interactive Virtual Reality that we are looking forward to the most.
And this is where our efforts have been focused.
We had to scale. Our original plan and budget said to stay small and spend slowly, but back then, there was just Oculus, no Facebook, no Magic Leap, no billions of dollars being spent wildly. Then, in a burst toward the latter part of 2014, the VR renaissance kicked into high gear and made the quantum leap. Either we adapted to what was happening or we'd be irrelevant before we saw the light of the display mounted an inch from our face.
A programmer goon or two joined a database guru and started designing the backend that would drive our customer sign-ups and allow us to build all types of interesting new tools and functionality. More artists came on board, including a terrific digital sculptor, a level developer worth his weight in gold, a dedicated texture artist, and other creators who helped round out our growing team.
With this heft of creative skills, we were now able to deploy, it was time to make some big changes to our world. We put our noses down and went dark. We have a lot to do.
HTC Prototype VR Headset
Today we took possession of a new prototype VR headset from HTC, courtesy of the folks at Oculus. It’s a great time to be exploring the emerging world of virtual reality. Ariana is the model demoing the headset for us here at TimefireVR.
New Handmade Socks
Inauguration day for a new pair of handmade socks from the loving needles of Caroline Wise. Handmade socks make for happy feet.
Haircut and a Concert
Meet Sydney, I might have posted a photo of her some years before back when she worked at Starbucks. When we first met her she was studying to be a hairstylist and now she is one. My apologies for not posting very often, I work too much. Sydney is helping out here on relatively short notice because Caroline is heading for Germany shortly and wants to look her best.
While I’m probably working too much to the detriment of our personal life, we still take time to visit the Musical Instrument Museum to see the important acts coming to Phoenix such as tonight’s concert featuring Tinariwen from Mali.
Sunrise Over Phoenix
Sometimes, we’ve just gotta stop and take a photo of yet another one of our spectacular sunrises over Phoenix.