For many months, the Neos Development Team has been engaged in negotiations with Mr. Karel Hulec, attempting to resolve the conflict that has been at the center of the current development freeze. Unfortunately, today we are here to announce that the negotiations have failed to produce an agreement satisfactory to both parties.
Mr. Karel Hulec has recently listed on the Neos Wiki several members of the Development Team as contributors to a new project titled the “Neos Foundation”. None of the listed team members were contacted at any point concerning the listing of their names on the Neos Wikis, nor have any of them agreed to work with Mr. Karel Hulec in the Neos Foundation or any other project.
Following the negotiations, on April 24th, 2023, and due to increasing difficulties in establishing the trust necessary to continue his partnership with Mr. Karel Hulec, Frooxius resigned from his position at Solirax LTD. We no longer see a path to successful reconciliation, so the remaining Development Team, including the leads of the moderation and quality control teams, the content team, and the support team, are now officially resigning from our roles as part of this community.
We understand this has been a period of intense frustration for some members of the community, as the lack of updates and communication from the Development Team led to uncertainty about the future of your projects and Neos as a platform. We apologize for our silence, it was due to legal advice we had received, and our attempt to keep the ongoing conflict resolution as professional as possible. Unfortunately, an understanding could not be found that would allow us to continue to work with the Neos community. The disagreements we had with Mr. Karel Hulec were too far-reaching and too significant to allow for a compromise. His conduct and lack of professionalism soured opportunities to resolve our differences. We hope you will continue to make wonderful projects in the future, wherever those future efforts lie.
We understand you may have many questions for the Development Team, but as we are removing ourselves from our positions within the Neos community, we will be limiting our presence on this Discord server going forward. Any questions for individuals formerly on the team will need to be sent through direct messages or other personal channels.
On October 7th, 2023, Veer posted:
Hey everyone, as there is no longer moderation administration present in this unofficial discord, we’ll be locking down the channels from further communication. This is to prevent the server from becoming unsafe to users, any projects or brands, and other entities due to unmoderated discourse.
I take this to mean that the NeosVR Discord is now officially closed, and indeed, no more messages can be posted in any of the channels. (I hope that this Discord remains, if for no other reason than historical purposes.)
This marks the end of a decade-long era, and the conclusion of a long period of uncertainty as to the future of the project. Many people might not realize that the roots of NeosVR date as far back to 2014, with a project named World of Comenius (you can learn more here, in part one of what was originally intended to be a multi-part series of blogposts about the history of NeosVR, which unfortunately I never got around to completing due to my full-time paying job as an academic librarian).
I wish all involved with NeosVR success in their future endeavours!
I leave you with a 20-minute YouTube video by VR pundit ThrillSeeker, done last year, which goes into some of the details of what went wrong with NeosVR:
A collage of Twitter (sorry, X) statements from smaller game developers announcing they are dropping Unity after the company’s announcement earlier this week (source)
For years, the Unity Engine has earned goodwill from developers large and small for its royalty-free licensing structure, which meant developers incurred no extra costs based on how well a game sold. That goodwill has now been largely thrown out the window due to Unity’s Tuesday announcement of a new fee structure that will start charging developers on a “per-install” basis after certain minimum thresholds are met…
This is a major change from Unity’s previous structure, which allowed developers making less than $100,000 per month to avoid fees altogether on the Personal tier. Larger developers making $200,000 or more per month, meanwhile, paid only per-seat subscription fees for access to the latest, full-featured version of the Unity Editor under the Pro or Enterprise tiers.
“There’s no royalties, no fucking around,” Unity CEO John Riccitiello memorably told GamesIndustry.biz when rolling out the free Personal tier in 2015. “We’re not nickel-and-diming people, and we’re not charging them a royalty. When we say it’s free, it’s free.”
Now that Unity has announced plans to nickel-and-dime successful Unity developers (with a fee that is not technically a royalty), the reaction from those developers has been swift and universally angry, to put it mildly. “I can say, unequivocally, if you’re starting a new game project, do not use Unity,” Necrosoft Games’ Brandon Sheffield—a longtime Unity Engine supporter—said in a post entitled “The Death of Unity.” “Unity is quite simply not a company to be trusted.”
…I can say, unequivocally, if you’re starting a new game project, do not use Unity. If you started a project 4 months ago, it’s worth switching to something else. Unity is quite simply not a company to be trusted.
What has happened? Across the last few years, as John Riccitiello has taken over the company, the engine has made a steady decline into bizarre business models surrounding an engine with unmaintained features and erratic stability.
…
Ultimately, it screws over indies and smaller devs the most. If you can afford to pay for higher tiers, you don’t pay as much of this nickle and dime fee, but indies can’t afford to on the front end, or often it doesn’t make sense in terms of the volume of games you’ll sell, but then you wind up paying more in the long term. It’ll squash innovation and art-oriented games that aren’t designed around profit, especially. It’s a rotten deal that only makes sense if you’re looking at numbers, and assume everyone will keep using your product. Well, I don’t think people will keep using their product unless they’re stuck. I know one such developer who is stuck, who’s estimating this new scheme will cost them $100,000/month on a free to play game, where their revenue isn’t guaranteed.
Unity is desperately digging its own grave in a search for gold. This is all incredibly short-sighted and adds onto a string of rash decisions and poorly thought through schemes from Unity across the last few years.
(Ironically, the social VR platform Sansar deliberately made the decision not to use a third-party game engine, to avoid being blindsided by exactly what happened to Unity developers this week. Not that it helped with uptake of the platform.)
The devs at VRChat say, on Reddit, that nothing will change. We shall see…this guy is staff:
Other comments and responses to the news, from my Discord, are:
Lots of big-name devs are swearing off of Unity, dropping it even for projects already in progress.
For Neos itself I’m actually worried the least. For years they have planned to eventually move away from Unity, so the way the FrooxEngine actually interfaces with Unity is quite minimal. But like, most other VR Social games don’t have the “luxury” of running on two Engines frankensteined together. VRC will probably have to pay for it, the likes of Chillout are likely still far too small for that… But it still sucks that they have that lingering over their head now as the platform continues to grow.
Yeah, I mean, this is exactly why you shouldn’t rely too heavily on a third-party like this, because they can pull the rug out from underneath you…I am quite sure that VRChat is going to be okay. It’s the smaller, more niche metaverse platforms I’m a little worried about.
Sansar’s in-house engine looks pretty good right now, eh?
Okay, so it’s clear to me that this IS gonna have a large impact on any company that uses Unity. Question: how hard is it to move from Unity to, say, Unreal, or Godot? Is it an impossible task?
For an existing game? You’re usually basically re-writing it from scratch at that point.
For an existing project, it’s like remaking it from the ground up. An open engine similar to Unity would be a much better choice probably, for example Stride 3D.
The skinny seems to be that Unity will undo this, but trust will have been broken.
The last commenter makes an excellent point: even if Unity responds to the backlash by retreating from this decision, the damage has already been done, and the trust between Unity and developers has been broken.
Whatever Unity does, they already lost the trust of devs. Even if they retract, it will be “for now”. Fuck them.
and:
Cost per license sold? Sure. That’s fine, you can just bake it into the cost of the game.
Cost per install? Charged to the developer/distributor???? Fuck no. You have no idea how much money each customer will cost you.
Initially, Unity stated the fee would apply every time the game was installed, or reinstalled. Then they backtracked that, but installs on multiple devices will have the fee charged multiple times. Install it on your PC? That’s a fee. Now also on your Steam Deck? That’s another fee. Your laptop? Fee again. Replaced your PC? Have another fee! And god forbid someone remembers that PC cafes are a thing. There’s zero information about how a “device” will be kept track of, so potentially just changing the hardware in a device will cause the fee to reset.
Piracy is a huge unknown. Unity says developers will simply have to trust that Unity’s anti-piracy solution works.
You just don’t do business like that, ESPECIALLY when you make this change retroactively. Companies are going to have to retool their entire profit estimation for something they cannot even account for.
Anyway, it will be interesting to watch as developments unfold over the next few weeks. Unity is a part of so much software development work (it’s even said to be a part of the upcoming Apple Vision Pro VR/AR headset!), so there will definitely be ripple effects. And, of course, the only people guaranteed to make money off this are the lawyers, so expect to see the lawsuits fly! Stock up on popcorn…
I am happy to announce that the long-awaited season 2 of the Metaverse Newscast has begun! For our first episode of the second season, I interviewed Jason Moore and Chris McBride of the MetaMovie project! We talked about their latest immersive theatre production, called Alien Rescue, which I had previously reviewed here (October 2021).
I’d like to thank Carlos Austin, my co-producer and director for this season, along with Victor Posa, who did additional camerawork. Oh, and I do apologize for my avatar in this episode! I used one of the mouth-enabled robots from the avatar setup room in Neos, to use with my Vive Facial Tracker, but I didn’t realize until after we stopped filming that my avatar’s tongue was sticking out a lot of the time! (Oh well, live and learn! I’ll probably switch to a different avatar the next time we record in NeosVR.)
Tomáš Mariančík (left) and Karel Hulec, circa 2016 (image source)
This will be the first of a series of lengthy (very lengthy!), investigative-journalism-type blogposts about the social VR platform NeosVR, by Solirax (more background here). In this first part of the series, I will provide some historical background and context to the the earliest days of the company, and its two co-founders, Karel Hulec and Tomáš Mariančík (the latter is better known by his NeosVR handle, Frooxius). I believe that this background look at both Tomáš and Karel is necessary to understand how the current dispute arose, and where it might lead.
My sources for this part consist of Frooxius’ own words from his blog (which I was able to access via a tip, using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine), as well as a well-placed, knowledgeable source who wishes to remain anonymous. Given that much of what they told me fits in very well with the other information I have read and researched (e.g. Frooxius’ own blog), I have decided to present some of that information here, paraphrasing it to protect their anonymity. (Note that I am deliberately referring to them as they/them/their throughout this post.) Please note that I do not usually make it a habit to present information from an anonymous source, but in this case, I am inclined to trust what they have to say. This is a rare exception to my rule, which I hope you will find acceptable under these unusual circumstances.
My anonymous source told me that initially, it was just Tomáš, working on his own, who was exploring the possibilities of virtual reality as a media and a platform. No one doubts that Tomáš is an exceptionally brilliant individual; Kent Bye of the Voices of VR podcast called him “one of the most innovative and mad genius VR developers that I’ve met.” My anonymous source tells me that he was (and still is) working on the frontier of VR technology, and is a world-class VR developer, easily amongst the top people in the world in his field.
We also have Tomáš’ own description of what happened in those very early days, taken from a his own blog. I am going to quote directly from this at length for two reasons: because it is no longer easily accessible on the internet, and also because it provides a fascinating glimpse into Tomáš’ mind.
My name is Tomáš Mariančík, although you might know me better as Frooxius, creator of SightLine, World of Comenius, Neos: The Universe, Unity VR light fields and bunch of other smaller things…
I’m 24 years old and for past year I have been doing VR for living. You could say (and some actually say that to me) that I’m living the dream, but what few realize are the years of nightmares that have preceded.
I am exaggerating a bit for dramatic effect of course, but the truth is that the path to this dream was lined with a lot of stress, depression, pain and other generally unfavorable feelings that have left quite a mess.
That was the most significant impulse to write this article, both for myself to tidy my own thoughts and for you, so you can better understand what’s going on in the background and in case you are in similar situation, know that you’re not alone and that there is a soft puffy cloud on which you can live your dream if you’ll be persistent to find it through all the storms.
What I want you to realize is that path to success isn’t easy as many imagine (unless you get really lucky) and patience and persistence are probably the most important virtues required to achieve your goals.
People usually only see you once you succeed, so it might seem that the success came so easily that you must be doing something wrong because you can’t replicate it so simply yourself, but I want to show you how difficult the path is and give you a brief overview of my journey on it.
Tomáš describes his beginnings as follows:
My path to VR started perhaps surprisingly with experimental processor architectures. During the last years of high school, I developed a deep interest in the inner function of CPU’s and programming in assembly languages (and the layers of abstraction built on top of those – I always loved imagining how things fit together and how they relate and influence each other, creating hierarchies and layers of abstractions) and began to think if they could work in a significantly different manner, considering that the basic principle dates at least all the way back to Babbage’s analytical engine in the first half of the 19th century.
Long story short, I developed a series of esoteric CPU architectures (with associated softcore implementations on FPGA boards, programming languages for them, compilers for those languages and set of examples and measurements of their properties) and with those, based on the initial impulse of my high school teacher, I competed in the national science fair, which got me to Intel ISEF 2012 in the U.S.
Before all that, I was a very shy, socially anxious kid (and still am, but not nearly to the same extent as before) with low self-esteem. My idea of my future was that I would somehow get through university, get a job somewhere and maybe, in some free time, I’ll work on things I’m really passionate about.
This thought was very depressing, because since young age I loved to create. I have been writing stories, drawing machines, inventing some working ones (like one time I disassembled my electric car toy and made a functional blender from its components and a yoghurt cup, using a duct tape and pieces of cardboard to hold it all together, including the wires and electrical components; didn’t have a soldering iron yet), later I started making my own amateur films, animations, games and software. I just love creating stuff of many kinds across the whole spectrum, from highly technical to artistic.
At any moment my mind is full of ideas for things I would love to do, whether they are stories for games, details of alien worlds or perhaps a unique sound synthesizer algorithm or some new way to create 3D geometry. Now imagine you have all those ideas and your expectation is that nobody will ever support you in working on any them, so you’ll spend the rest of your life ignoring the constant stream of ideas and just focus on doing things others tell you to do.
With that mindset and against all my expectations (I was too afraid to even show the architectures I made to anyone, which is why it took impulse of my former teacher to participate in the science fair) I suddenly found myself in the United States of America, at age of 19 (well not so suddenly, there was a year delay between the national science fair and Intel ISEF) at the biggest pre-college science fair in the world.
The whole experience was grandiose, fascinating and impactful. I was surrounded by thousands of other young people from all over the world, with similar passion for learning and creativity, although I didn’t talk with almost any of them because of my shyness. But that didn’t matter, because the biggest impact was made by the opening speech by David Brian Johnson, Intel’s futurist.
His talk about pursuing our dreams and how technology progressed to the point where we are constrained only by our imagination (more or less) and most importantly that it is us who are building the future, instead of future being something that just happens to us, awoke something in me. I felt as if figurative chains that were tightly wrapped around my whole body suddenly ruptured and I was free. I was no longer afraid (at least not nearly as much as before).
After I returned home, I soon quit university after the first semester (which frustrated me to no end) and decided to start pursuing my own dreams. I returned to game design with work on some mobile phone games based on ideas I had since the first year of high school (and some even before that) that I wanted to implement for years.
Tomáš spent some time muddling around with mobile games, but then the Oculus KickStarter happened in 2012:
Seeing the KickStarter campaign for DK1 made me immensely excited. The promise of a technology that transports you into the virtual world was like a dream come true. As I mentioned before, I am constantly thinking of many diverse worlds in my head (most of which nobody has even heard described yet) and there’s nothing I want more than to share them with others (it’s almost bordering on an obsession).
Writing stories, drawing pictures, creating classic games are all great ways to share those worlds, but virtual reality is simply the ultimate one (although I’d say the current one isn’t the ultimate one yet, since there are some stories it can’t tell, but that’s for another article).
No longer do you have to imperfectly imagine the world from the words (on the other hand it gives you certain freedom for your own imagination). No longer do you have to imagine what’s going on in the paintings and what the world would look like if you started exploring around. No longer do you have to look at flat rectangular projection of the world. You are in the world.
Even before hitting the pledge button (for two Rifts, actually) my head filled with many ideas of more or less bizarre worlds (including what became the SightLine) that I would like to create for the technology. And the impatient wait began.
Meanwhile I continued making classical games in my free time while doing contract software development for money. After some delays and impatient refreshing of the community-made delivery log, my dev-kits finally arrived. Despite the low resolution and other issues, I was completely amazed by the technology and played through the whole Half Life 2 in almost one sitting in the first few days, partly because there was little community content at the time.
Of course it didn’t take me long to start producing my own. I’ve dabbled with several concepts as I explored the technology, none of them receiving particular attention (though I haven’t thought they would in the first place), but I started slowly working on a bigger game based on the painting game concept from the OUYA game jam.
When the VR Jam was announced, I considered participating with the painting game for a while, but eventually decided to use an idea I was personally most excited about and which I thought would stand a better chance – a game based on lacking the object permanence and building a surreal dream-like reality.
The decision proved to be a good one, earning SightLine a third place. The prize money helped things a bit, but wasn’t nearly enough to fund a team to develop the concept into a full game.
However, I got something much better from the VR Jam. Attention from both the Oculus and community. Or so I thought.
I was already happy to be among the twenty finalists, but when the winners were announced and I received personal congratulations from the Oculus team, I thought “This is it, this is the turning point.”
Oculus contacted me directly and claimed that they were impressed by my project and wanted to help me. The community loved it too. I thought that this was the chance to drop the senseless contract projects and devote my time fully to VR. I was excited that I would finally have opportunity to transform the ideas I had into a fully blown project.
But that was a naive viewpoint. I had no idea how wrong I was at the time. I began talking with Oculus, showing them more concepts, development progress (still slow, made in my spare time). When I heard that they funded some other VR Jam projects, I asked about funding also.
The replies I’ve got were always semi-positive, but never quite giving me anything solid, just raising my hopes that they were interested (and that they indeed provided funding to some projects) and answering my questions only partially. Sometimes responses didn’t arrive at all. It was okay I thought, they are just very busy, I just have to keep again later.
So I kept trying and trying. I launched an IndieGogo campaign to attempt to get funding from the community, but unfortunately that has failed for multitude of reasons. Firstly, I had no experience running such campaign. I tried my best, but I don’t really think it was enough.
Secondly, the community was still quite small as this was all the way back in the DK1 days when everyone pretty much knew each other (a bit of an exaggeration, but you get the point). And third, it was IndieGogo.
I was warned about that many times, I got told it’s a graveyard for projects, but I didn’t have a choice. I lived in the wrong country [the Czech Republic]. I desperately searched for ways to launch my campaign on KickStarter, but didn’t succeed in doing so. There were way too many barriers. So I had to do with IndieGogo.
Interestingly, during the IndieGogo campaign, Markiplier made a playthrough video of the demo, getting huge amount of views. I thought this would help the campaign tremendously, but sadly the number of visits to the campaign didn’t even increase noticeably.
Failing the campaign was unpleasant and it certainly didn’t help with motivation, but I kept working on the project, bit by bit and kept talking with Oculus, trying to get some kind of help from them.
And then, in 2014, Facebook bought Oculus…
And then the big event came out of nowhere. Oculus got acquired by Facebook. I was one of the few people (at least it felt that way) who weren’t overly negative about it, even somewhat positive after I heard Palmer Luckey talk about how this is going to help them with a lot of things, especially being able to afford to fund a lot more developers.
“Maybe now I have a chance to get funding from them!” I thought. I waited after everything calmed down and contacted Oculus again. No definitive answers again.
“It’s been a while since the VR Jam, maybe it would help to have something new to impress them with.” I continued thinking. The arrival of DK2 shipping was also coming up soon, so it seemed a ripe opportunity for a new proper demo.
So I devoted two weeks of my free time and chunk of my saved up funds (including the VR Jam prize, which helped a lot) and worked day and night on an idea I have been toying with a while – SightLine with absolutely no user input except the head tracking, because continuing with locomotion didn’t seem like the right path.
So SightLine: The Chair was made. I did my best (under the circumstances) to produce the most mind-blowing and beautiful demo I could with my limited resources, to show off what VR can do and also what I can do myself as a small taste of the ideas and concepts I have in store, hoping it would lead to the funding for the full project.
Here’s a 30-second trailer for SightLine: The Chair, which is pretty amazing for its time (remember, this was back in 2014):
The Sightline: The Chair demo was, for several years, the standard go-to demo to showcase the possibilities of virtual reality to newcomers. Frooxius confirms its popularity:
After anxiously releasing the demo to the public, fearing how it would be perceived, I encountered a problem. But it was one of the nicer problems to have– the demand for the demo overburdened the server, leading to about 2 TB of traffic in just a few hours. Luckily eVRydayVR offered his server to host the demo and everything was good.
SightLine: The Chair became a hit. I was overwhelmed with the positive feedback I got from people. I got tons of replies each time I released an update (and I tried to reply to them all, although some slipped through (sorry!)). Playthrough videos started popping up everywhere, even from quite big YouTubers (including [a] very hilarious one by Markiplier again) and I watched them all, happy that people liked my work so much. I kept releasing updates based on feedback and I was immensely happy and empowered by the community.
But Tomáš encountered problems in communicating with the new Oculus:
Encouraged by all this, I talked with Oculus again, thinking that having such hugely popular demo would be a strong point to finally get some kind of solid support. But nope. To this day, I often feel that almost nobody at Oculus even knows that SightLine: The Chair exists.
I don’t think that’s actually the case of course, since they later gave me a Crescent Bay prototype and free ticket to Oculus Connect 2 (I wasn’t able to be at the first one), both of which made me really happy and excited (despite a certain person from the community telling me the CB is an outdated trash anyway and they actually give out better betas of CV1 to devs), but it still didn’t help with the actual problem – getting resources to develop VR fulltime.
All I got were just another series of unanswered emails, half-baked answers and unfulfilled promises. My hopes were being constantly raised up and slowly shattered by the uncertainty, over and over again.
Being a young developer just starting his career made me almost entirely dependent on the help from others. I had many ideas and passion, but I lacked the time and resources to develop them. I hoped that would be enough for the Oculus, but the help simply wasn’t coming. Sometimes they reached out to me out of the blue first, but either stopped responding half-way through, or nothing useful actually came out of the exchange.
I didn’t know what more to do to get them to somehow recognize me and get some reliable communication channel. Not just for financial support, but for other kinds of help – help with promotion, or even submitting a build to their store, getting access to the latest unreleased SDK so I can prepare my builds (I had to wait for the release of CV1 for example to update my builds from 0.8 and still no progress on getting on Oculus Home, not to mention that I cannot even order CV1, since Oculus doesn’t ship to my country) or getting access to the hardware so I can develop and test.
Making successful VR experiences didn’t work, winning multiple VR awards (including their own 2013 and 2015 VR Jam) didn’t help either, if I tried to complain a bit about the issues some community members lashed out on me for being whiny and bad-mouthing Oculus and sent me into spiral of self-doubt and depression, as I kept wondering if my complaining contributed to the Oculus avoiding helping me in any way.
Oculus slowly changed from a company for whose hardware I was really excited to develop for, to a company whose hardware I only support because of their position on the market.
It’s something that I’m unhappy about, because I feel that they have betrayed their principles and from what I’ve seen and heard, I feel as they let the community of developers and enthusiasts down. People who devoted big chunks of their time and money to make great VR content when few trusted the new medium would deserve a lot more support than they’re getting.
But I still remain hopeful that this is just unfortunate side effect of their rapid growth and some degree of internal chaos and not deliberate work of some people in the background and that they will make me (and others) excited about them again.
Anyway, enough of the chronologically inconsistent ranting and back to the proper timeline.
It was clear that the help from them was unlikely, so I asked elsewhere for advice. A few people suggested to me that SightLine: The Chair isn’t simply enough. It’s just a demo after all, I need to develop a proper game to get support from them. Somehow they didn’t realize that the reason I needed help in the first place was the lack of resources to develop a proper game in the first place.
Others have told me to “just get your ass on a plane and visit them in person, nobody trusts dealing over emails”, also not realizing that the plane ticket alone costs easily $2000 (there and back) from where I live. And since I earned about $600 per month, I could hardly afford a plane ticket it on a promise of them maybe helping me. Once again, I lived in the wrong country.
They weren’t particularly insightful comments for my situation, but they were infuriating nonetheless. People kept suggesting things that I was simply unable to do because of my situation (which fueled the feelings of hopelessness and despair, that no matter how hard I try, I just won’t succeed) or they were way outside of my skillset (running a business/studio, finding investors and so on).
And so I continued my day to day contract development job and doing VR for living remained just a dream.
It was at this point that Karel Hulec met Tomáš Mariančík. Tomáš writes on his blog:
Working with VR in all of my free time wasn’t entirely without its merit in the end (and I didn’t make just SightLine of course, I did a bunch of other VR demos and experiments as well and made a few VR events/lectures in my country, but I don’t want to bug you with those). Because someone from my own country noticed my work and got in touch with me.
Karel Hulec started his own VR project—the RiftUP upgrade kit—and had run a few successful businesses before that as well. He had great interest in VR as well and has been following me for a while.
RiftUP was a full high-definition screen upgrade kit for the Oculus DK1 VR headset, which was described in this IndieGogo page for the project (scroll down the page for details). Unfortunately, my anonymous source tells me that Oculus was opposed to the project, going as far as to issue a cease-and-desist. There were other problems; the fledgling project could not produce enough RiftUP kits to meet demand.
Tomáš a.k.a Frooxius continues talking about meeting Karel on his 2016 blogpost:
We eventually met and discussed great deal of things, not just VR, but science, technology and fiction and we ticked off immediately. I finally found someone who understands the same concepts as I do and who has similar motivations and goals.
While he didn’t have the same deep level of understanding of more technical or creative topics as I did, he had a great knack for communication with people and running a business – something which I almost completely lack.
Great thing was that he actually understood the ideas and concepts I presented to him as well and we could have a proper discussion about them. We complemented each other greatly.
It was no surprise that we started cooperating on a VR projects. One of the most common and personal topics for both of us was education, so we decided to start a project together and we called it World of Comenius. A VR system designed to change the way we learn.
We recently covered a (at that point unnamed) VR project by developer Tomáš “Frooxius” Mariančík, the mind behind the stunning ‘Sightline’ VR series of demos. The project fused Leap Motion skeletal hand tracking with Oculus Rift DK2 positional tracking to produce an impressively intuitive VR interface. Now, a new video of the interface shows impressive progress. We catch up with Tomáš to find out some more about this mysterious VR project…
World of Comenius aims to draw on the legacy of a 17th Century Czech teacher (the titular John Amos Comenius), to demonstrate how future educational applications might present and allow users to interact with teaching materials. It’s the name of a new project Mariančík is working on. As we featured recently, it uses the innovative motion controller Leap Motion mounted on the face of a DK2 to detect the user’s hands and fingers, interpreting the gestures as input to control the virtual environment.
We now return to Frooxius’ 2016 blogpost, where he discusses the struggles he had working on this project:
I started development of various demos, while Karel organized visits to festivals, competitions and other events. We demoed VR and our stuff like crazy, but kept hitting one problem over and over again: we spent most of the time pitching VR itself rather than our work, because most people were unfamiliar with the technology.
That also lead to another problem – money. The project had no customers at the moment, so we leapt from one contract project to another, developing demos and pitching VR to various companies around who have taken interest in the technology and exploring ways to incorporate it with their existing business.
This lead to another problem on itself. We didn’t have time to focus on World of Comenius. It was the same issue all over again, but at least now most of the work was VR related. Despite the distractions, we managed to run the first class in Czech Republic using VR and win a prize (third place again) in the Leap Motion 3D Jam.
But the situation wasn’t good for us. Almost nobody around knew VR and of those who did, not much came out from our talks and demos in the end. Companies, investors and accelerators were very distrustful of the new technology, let alone our ambitious ideas. We simply lived in the wrong country [the Czech Republic].
One night, after we’ve returned home after an extra busy day, we’ve received a very peculiar Skype call. It was from Tipatat Chennavasin representing Rothenberg Ventures. He invited us to River VR, the first accelerator for VR startups.
It was a bit of a last minute invitation, since the program was announced for a while and the submissions were closing in just a few days, and he had to reach us through Leap Motion developer relation. Naturally we were a bit distrustful, we had no idea what this program was and what would it entail.
But on the other hand, suddenly there was someone who didn’t care where we lived, only about what we could do. They have seen SightLine and World of Comenius and decided they wanted us on the program.
We had only few days to decide and coupled with very erratic and busy schedule, the deciding wasn’t easy at all, not knowing what we were getting into, but in the end we have decided to go for it.
For me, the decision was very difficult. The prospect of spending a few months in foreign country, doing who knows what was very scary. For several days in a row, I couldn’t even sleep. So many unknowns only gave my imagination greater freedom, so I spend the sleepless nights anxiously imagining one terrible scenario after another. I’m simply a natural worrier.
But all that has disappeared when we first arrived. We were greeted by Tipatat, who showed us around, introduced us to others and generally made us feel more at ease and welcomed.
Later that day he drove us to our hotel an in the car, he said something that I’ll probably never forget. He told us that the reason they invested in the VR companies is because they really believe that virtual reality is the future and that’s why they put the money into it, while everyone else just talks about it, but doesn’t actually invest and instead waits.
The reason I won’t forget that is because of how empowering it felt and how illustrative it was of a completely different mindset, one that we weren’t used to at all. After struggling to get some kind of investment back home, or some kind of substantial help from Oculus, suddenly there was someone willing to support us based on the merits of our work alone.
I often kept wondering why it’s so difficult to get help even from Oculus, since they seemed excited about my work. Were they just feigning excitement, hoping I’ll keep making VR demos, without actually having to spend any resources to help me? Or was it because I’m too young and inexperienced for them? Or it is because where I live? Or maybe because I don’t already have enough money to run my own studio, but instead I’m cobbling things together from my bedroom.
It was frustrating, because I didn’t know which (if any) of those reasons it was and they were often reasons I had no control over. Many nights I have worried about those and wondered if I could do anything about them. The uncertainty simply gives too much room for the imagination.
People at Rothenberg Ventures didn’t mind any of that (in fact, I think that they actually liked some of these aspects). They trusted us enough to give us some of their resources and that alone felt very motivating.
During the following weeks, we spend almost every waking hour of every day at the Rothenberg offices working and connecting with other VR startups and other relevant companies that they have brought in. We went to various events to showcase our work and got to meet influential people from the area.
The entire experience was exhilarating. We no longer had to pitch VR to everyone we met. We were surrounded by VR enthusiasts (including the Rothenberg Ventures staff), people who understood the technology and its potential, we could focus on our work.
It was a very refreshing environment to be in, one that gave us great strength and a room for our vision to breathe. We met with a lot of smart people from the industry (not just VR, but related to VR) and exchanged our ideas, which was very rare before, as people we met back home were either mostly too ignorant (not in the pejorative sense) of our field to hold a sensible conversation about it, or simply unwilling to accept it because of their conservative values.
And World of Comenius slowly turned into NeosVR:
In the meanwhile, we continued our work. I’ve continued researching and developing light fields in which I have initially taken interest at December of 2014 as a side project, while World of Comenius slowly transformed into Neos: a much bigger and more grandiose project.
We released Neos: The Universe for the second Oculus VR Jam and soon won a third place (what is it with me and third places?). When demoing it to other people, we tried to convey how it is just part of our main vision for Neos itself, but that was mostly left with misunderstanding, because it wasn’t clear from the experience itself.
That sort of became a new problem and source of worries, at least for me. Because of the big plans and visions I have for Neos, there’s a lot of underlying work that isn’t immediately visible.
I spent a lot of time designing and building architectural foundations and other parts of Neos that could support the big visions and offer something that nobody else does. Building such system requires a lot of patience and focus.
Meanwhile others have been churning out quickly made demos and showing off their work, while it seemed that we did very little. I wanted to avoid doing the same, because such quickly made demos usually lack depth to them – they’re great showcases of concepts and ideas, but we wanted to focus on something a lot more substantial, something that will last for years, if not decades.
I also vehemently avoided another approach to development, where you start with quickly made demo and then keep piling on features. While this would allow to release eye candy updates at rapid rate from the beginning, the development speed would start dwindling as the project would go on, because it would become bigger and bigger hairball of messy design and code.
Instead, I have opted for the opposite approach, which has slow (visible) development speed at the beginning, but starts ramping up and accelerating as the project goes on, as everything benefits from a strong and stable framework. However, such versatile and well-designed software architecture requires a lot of effort and attention right in the first phase of the development, during which there’s seemingly little progress, because there’s nothing that’s actually built on the system, since it lacks the critical mass so function independently.
The most difficult part about building system as complex and intricate as Neos isn’t actually the technical part though. I’ve always found the technical part rather easy. It’s very rare that I would get an idea and have absolutely no clue how to implement it. I always know where to start and eventually work my way to a full implementation.
Light Fields? Easy. Volumetric rendering of MRI scans? Done in two days. In the spare time when charging the battery of a quadcopter when visiting my dad actually. I’m not even kidding.
The trouble is that Neos is a very complex and expansive idea and requires a lot of time to work through all the aspects of it and thorough consideration to make sure everything fits neatly together, because I needed to find a set of basic elements which are both very simple and elegant, but interact in so many ways that they provide extremely flexible, but also consistent system.
I always know what to do from moment to moment, but there’s just a lot of things to do. So I keep working for months, piecing the system and working through it all. But before the system comes together, there isn’t much to show for it.
What I found most difficult is watching as everyone else is showing off their VR projects with quickly made solutions, but with a fraction of functionality, gaining attention, winning awards, participating at events, demoing in public, getting invited to VR shows and podcasts, while I’m piecing together my big vision in the shadows.
Coping with that wasn’t easy though. I often feel guilty and anxious both towards people at Rothenberg, worrying that taking so long might worry them and make them question their support. I worry about not showing progress to the community as well and that I’ll be simply forgotten and lose their support whenever I release something new – something that I value highly.
Funnily these worries sometimes actually help. Whenever I feel like I’ve lost motivation to continue working on the project, I keep going because of my fear of disappointing others, by not delivering what I have promised. It’s not the ideal motivator, but it keeps me going through those times.
However, the distractions of having to work on various side projects (like updates to SightLine) took Tomáš out of the proper mindset to focus on NeosVR. So he and Karel came up with a solution:
To work on the full Neos, I need to get into the right mindset where I have the project architecture in my head and I can immediately think through a lot of options and consequences of each design choice.
Switching focus to another project and then coming back produces certain overhead – a period of time where I need to get back into the right mindset, after being “distracted”.
Sometimes the distractions come from other sources too – travelling, running errands or even publishing new update of SightLine (sorry guys!), trying to deal with Oculus or some big event that I missed (and usually getting infuriated or depressed as a result). Sometimes they even come so often that I lose my focus on Neos just after I have gained it back again, further contributing to my worries about not progressing fast enough.
For those reasons my colleague and I have decided to get rid of all (or most) of those distractions, so I can focus fully on Neos for several months straight and push it from the mild part of the (apparent) development speed curve towards the steep exponential bit.
We stay at our rented house most of the time, rarely go anywhere (except getting food and other necessary errands) or meet with anyone. Even online, I don’t follow most of the news and community developments, because whenever I spend time not working on Neos, I get anxious about its progress.
So this is my life now. I wake up, move a few meters to my computer, continue working until I’m sleepy again. There’s some food and hygiene between, but mostly just focused work. Day after day, night after night, month after month.
When I dream, I dream of my project. Sometimes I dream of solving technical problems, data structures, consistency checks. Other times I dream of architectural solutions and ideas and then I wake up already in the middle of conscious thought about Neos. This isn’t a metaphor or euphemism, this has actually happened to me and it’s been one of the strangest feelings I’ve ever had.
During the day, I daydream about Neos in its full blown state and all the awesome things I would be able to build with it, I think how many cool things I can add into it and how will I finally be able to share it with everyone else, hoping that they’ll find it as brilliant and elegant as I want it to be.
And then, some days, I fear that they will not. I fear that it’ll fail and go unnoticed, I fear that I’ll disappoint everyone who trusted me and has given me this opportunity.
I fear that someone else will suddenly release something much better and all my work will go to waste. I watch as others rapidly release their VR projects, some of them fully focused on what will be just a small subset of what Neos could do (or something you could fully implement in a few hours with it), worrying that each such release will make Neos seem less awesome and interesting to others when it’s ready.
But I keep pushing hard and working nonstop, happy or sad, depressed or full of enthusiasm, slowly building towards the big milestone, when everything will come together. Most of the time, only my own motivation to make this project work and excitement about its possibilities is enough to get me through the day. Other times it’s the fear of disappointing others.
I often even wonder if I’m doing the right thing and making the right decisions. I question if I should be doing this at all, if I’m not overdoing it, if I’m not trying to get more than I can chew, if it’s the right way to do things or if I’m the right person to do it.
The important thing is, I keep pushing on and it’s paying off, because I can already feel the moment approaching. Just as I kept pushing and devoting my time and energy to VR when there was nobody to help me and support me, I keep pushing now.
At this point, the partition of duties between Karel Hulec and Tomáš Mariančík had already begun: Karel was the people person who handled the business side of things, and Tomáš, who had earlier described himself in his 2016 blogpost as “shy,” and “socially anxious”, got to do what he does best: focus intensely (and frankly, brilliantly) on solving coding problems. Of Karel, Tomáš writes in his 2016 blogpost:
The cofounder of Solirax found me out of the blue, because he stumbled on my work online and without him I wouldn’t be able to create and run a startup (and technically I still don’t, he does, I just keep creating).
My anonymous source tells me that Tomáš wanted his own space to just be able to work on his ideas, placing his full trust in Karel handling the business and money side of things. As part of the project development, house instead of office space was rented on company expenses, that also served as a shared living space with clear division of responsibilities.
Well, that’s enough for today. Stay tuned for Part 2 of the NeosVR Investigation!
