Day: August 24, 2019

Teemew: A Brief Introduction

Teemew is yet another remote teams virtual reality app (YARTVRA), which was mentioned as a social VR platform in the 2019 infographic published by the San Francisco-based venture capital firm The Venture Reality Fund (which is available here):

There’s precious little information about the product on their website. They say their VR meeting software has the following features:

– Fast and easy meeting creation
– Advanced meeting management controls
– A complete set of collaborative tools
– Share and work efficiently
– Full avatar and room customization

According to their website, Teemew supports the following hardware:

But all I can find on their website is this page, which is in French and only seems to talk about their mobile app. If it works with Gear, Oculus, PlayStation and HTC Vive, where are the details? I can’t find Teemew on the Oculus Store or on Steam.

Teemew is a subsidiary of the French company Manzalab:

Manzalab is French SME specialized in the creation of innovative Serious Games for education and training, based on the most recent findings of neuroscientists studying the human brain learning processes. Manzalab partners and team have developed strong expertise in:
– Knowledge of human brain learning processes
– Pedagogy and professional training
– Game design
– Video game production
– Creative graphic design
– Virtual Reality

Here’s their website. And here’s a brief 2017 promotional video from Manzalab on Vimeo:

A well produced video, but it doesn’t really tell you much. Frankly, I am getting tired (and rather suspicious) of companies who issue slickly-produced promotional videos, with little to no actual technical details of their product. Watching people dance around in VR headsets does not tell me anything about the product!

I can’t find diddlysquat about their VR meeting product anywhere, except for the images I used here. There’s lots of fancy handwaving about “4.0 technologies”, but little actual substance:

So I give up. If there’s an actual YARTVRA product here, I can’t find it. I’m adding it to my list of social VR/virtual worlds, but until I see proof of a VR app, I’m not going to bother adding an asterisk to it to indicate it supports virtual reality. I smell vapourware.

UPDATED! A Look at the 2019 VR Industry Landscape: Are All These Companies Actually Generating Revenue?

Peter Graham, a senior staff writer for the popular VR news website VRFocus, reports on an infographic published annually by the San Francisco-based venture capital firm The Venture Reality Fund, in an article titled The Venture Reality Fund’s 2019 VR Landscape Highlights 550+ Companies Generating Revenue:

Image from VRFocus (full-size version available here)

He writes:

Every year San Francisco-based venture capital firm The Venture Reality Fund (The VR Fund) releases a report on the industry as a whole, detailing the major or most influential players across a range of categories. The new 2019 VR Landscape has just been released, this time based on those who have revenue only, with over 550 companies making the cut.

So, of course, I used my handy image editor to zoom in to take a closer look at the companies listed in the Social box on this graphic (see image on the right). I do see that all of the usual suspects are represented 😉 (for example, Against Gravity is the maker of Rec Room). But I must agree with a commenter on Peter Graham’s article, who said:

Glad to see the updated version of this graphic, but many of the companies in this list are no longer active or totally defunct.

For example, underneath Orbus is the steampunk-themed logo for Surreal, a social VR platform I blogged about before. A company that has revenue? I doubt Surreal has earned a dime in profit for this busted product. Surreal (still) completely fails to work with my Oculus Touch hand controllers, despite reporting on their Steam page that version 3.0 of the software has Oculus Touch support. The fact that Surreal is even listed here on this infographic makes me seriously doubt how thoroughly all these listed companies were vetted.

By the way, according to their Wikipedia page, Against Gravity is now known as Rec Room Inc., and is now using the orange Rec Room logo instead of that stylized A. Also, that VRChat logo looks very dated to me. All of this information could have been easily checked before publishing this infographic by doing a few Google searches.

Another thing that sticks out like a sore thumb to me is the Decentraland logo (to the right of the Salin logo near the bottom of the box). That’s also an outdated logo, and even worse, Decentraland does not even support VR, and it is unlikely to do so anytime in the near future! Another mistake that makes me question the validity of the rest of the information presented in this graphic. Somebody did a really sloppy job in checking this infographic for accuracy.

I see High Fidelity listed in this box, too. They are relying on the US$72.9 million they raised in venture capital, and I’m quite sure they are feeling some pressure from their financial backers to turn a profit, but I rather doubt that they have generated any actual revenue from customers. As someone once memorably said on the RyanSchultz.com Discord server (and I am sorry, but can’t find the exact quote, so this is a paraphrase), “You can’t make it difficult to give the company money.” And High Fidelity’s over-complicated Marketplace submission process, with their originally ambitious plan to screen every single submission for quality, and to ensure it was not someone else’s intellectual property, was a classic textbook example of making it very hard to give them money.

UPDATE Aug. 29th: I now remember who first voiced the idea that High Fidelity was making it difficult to give them money—it was Dale Glass! If you’re interested, Dale has written a guest editorial on what he thinks is wrong with High Fidelity.

There are also a few companies listed here I have never heard of before: Cluster, Salin, Teemew, and Normal. Which of course means I get to do more exploring! Yay! 🙂 I’ll keep you posted as to what I find.