I’m so excited to have joined code.org to help with the mission of nurturing global access to computational thinking and computer science education, for every kid, in every school.
I’ll be writing more but wanted to start with gathering some photos from our work in LATAM region, my colleague is in Belize this week conducting teacher training and when she shared some snaps, I was very moved emotionally. I was in Belize in 1993 back-packing after college, and was flooded with happy memories and a strong sense of mission/impact for the work I’m now doing every day.
Having read and consumed a lot of media on psychedelics in the last year I must say I’m struck by how male dominant the space can feel, I’m sure April’s approach will enhance empathy and understanding for women seeking voices of women in this space.
I volunteered to help April improve the online presence for the 80+ episoides she had created from 2020-2023 and spent the last few weeks using a variety of fun tools to port the site, add a ton of rich meta-data, and do some SEO tuning to try to improve traffic and discovery.
I set out to enhance the visual appeal of the podcast series by creating all new episode covers/art to unify the look and feel of the series. I wanted accentuate the woman-first energy of the series and April’s vision for helping women learn and use these entheogens in their personal journeys. Using a combination of Adobe’s Firefly and Midjourney tools (AI image synthesis from text prompts) I iterated through several hundred prompts to generate really fun concept art.
Airtable was a fantastic tool to use as a collaborative space to gather meta-data for the podcast episodes and related art/episodes and URLs for Spotify and Youtube. I had been invited to use airtable dozens of times and always thought “what the heck, another collaboration app”–wow, so impressed–one of my new favorite tools! Will be using a lot in the future to collaborate and gather info and build project consensus with colleagues.
I primed the AI with a lot of variations to try to get more diverse and inclusive images out of the system. Midjourney was particularly problematic in giving me skinny, white, unhealthy looking “model” women that looked like they were straight out of a fashion shoot. To get more average/normal looking women of different ethnic/age/body types was a lot harder than it should be! I used yellow/green for Cannabis articles, purple/orange for Ketamine, and pink/red/blue for Shrooms. This color segmentation gave me groups of images that look great together on the landing pages.
Notice the AI images for Ketamine themed podcast episodes use purple and orange themes. Adding words like “middle-aged”, “curvy” or “plump”, and lots of “in deep thought, reflecting on an important memory, processing therapeutic thoughts in a therapy session” allowed me to get images that felt on brand to The High Guide’s podcast content — women discussing and sharing their experience with Psychedelics in their own mental health and wellness journeys.For the series of articles April has written on different psychedelic mushroom strains I generated variations on a illustrative theme that suggest mushrooms. This gave the group of articles a similar look/feel that works in the gallery control that groups these articles together. For each individual article the photography and more accurate depictions of each strain is important–which is within the body text on the page.Adobe’s Firefly AI tool was a great creative playground to generate on brand images for the podcast of women in “therapeutic introspection” or “reflecting on important thoughts”. Midjourney was another tool I used to create Podcast cover images for The High Guide podcast website. Midjourney’s UI was still chatbot based inside of Discord in Jan 2024 when I made the first batch of images–this is a HORRIBLE interface, i believe they are working on putting a proper UX/UI on the front end, more akin to Adobe’s already shipping Firefly. I think Adobe is super well positioned to get this right and to be the leading tool for creatives.
I had a lot of fun porting the website from Squarespace over to a Elementor hosted WordPress installation. We used Airtable to organize the meta-data for the 80+ episodes, a WordPress plug-in called AirWPSync to sync fields from Airtable into ACF custom fields in WordPress, and Elementor’s data-binding to connect template blocks to the fields. The result is the site is now database rendered and we can add podcast episodes and manage all episode pages, from a single template. Yay.
This is the new podcast episode template, which uses new fields for SEO optimized titles and excerpt blocks (which i batch generated with ChatGPT), and AI generated images for featured graphics which i used midjourney and firefly (adobe) ai image generation.
I’ll now keep an eye on how Google crawls the new content to see if we can improve organic discovery to this rich content. Super enjoyed this project and excited to update this post as I have more results to share.
Voodle was a tech startup that built a short-video messaging app that launched in 2020 and shuttered in 2022. The initial idea was for a mobile-first “async short video” app that would be “tiktok for work” for sales and marketing teams to talk to each other. First versions launched in summer of 2020 during COVID pandemic conditions, and while 10k+ users tested the app with their teams, the rise and dominance of team messaging activities within Microsoft Teams, Slack, and Google Meet platforms proved too high of a friction for any meaningful adoption of 3rd party apps in this era of the industry. Meaningful integration of Voodle within other apps proved difficult, as the APIs for rich video playback was minimal or not available to 3rd parties.
Voodle evolved to focus on 1-to-many “me-casting” workflows–such as a sales outreach, coaching group, or other special interest space for asymmetrical chat (eg: not everyone participating making videos, rather, most users watching the videos of a main/principal maker). Email notification workflows, analytics for views/engagement, and other more traditional sales/CRM features were added.
The last phase of exploration in summer and fall of 2022 included Web3 token-gated spaces for creators to build audiences around a mixture of NFT, video, text, graphic posts.
Here’s a quick demo from fall 2021, and some screenshots of key UX and features.
Pixvana was a VR Video tech startup from 2016-2019 that built a cloud virtual reality video processing, streaming, and editing software suite SPIN Studio. The company was based in Seattle WA and had traction with large media companies that used its platform to build consumer facing media streaming apps. As the 2015-2018 VR market cycle crashed (Microsoft and Google canceled their consumer headset plans, Meta/Oculus adoption faltered) and consumer VR adoption failed to breakthrough to meaningful usage, Pixvana built enterprise training tools. Ultimately the VR market proved “too-early” and development of Pixvana was shuttered in late 2019.
Pixvana SPIN Studio had comprehensive features to process raw VR video camera files and prepare them for very high quality streaming to headsets at 8k+ resolutions. The app was capable of massive parallel rendering with cloud GPU instances, so that a task that might require 10hrs to render on a single workstation class PC, could be distributed to 100+ nodes and rendered in just minutes.
Some of the core features are shown below, for posterity.
SPIN Play was the headset playback app available in the many VR app stores (Windows, Oculus, Google, iOS, etc.) that could be programmed/skinned with playlists of videos and interactive programs developed using SPIN Studio. The app could be synced over-the-wire and then run in offline mode, which allowed for very efficient management of fleets of headsets. If you had 50 headsets that you wanted to prepare for an event or trade-show, for example, you could prepare content and deploy/update on the fleet, using SPIN Studio and SPIN Play.Pixvana SPIN Studio included both 180 degree and 360 degree camera “stitching”, wherein multiple video files from camera-rigs could be uploaded and “solved” to formats ready for streaming to VR headsets.Parallel processing in the cloud was achieved by “sharding” jobs to multiple rendering nodes. Here dozens of clips are being rendered on 100s of individual GPU and CPU nodes in AWS cloud. Rendering this same set of clips on a high-end workstation would take 100x time. This sort of “cloud-first” approach to manipulating large media files was novel for its time, and remains a yet-to-come technology for video processing in 2023.Getting VR video onto headsets was a complex mess and many startups built video-players with varying approaches to “theater-mode” — a way to organize, deliver, and control playback on VR headsets to controlled groups of viewers (such as for training curriculums). Pixvana SPIN Studio had many features to target individual headsets with specific content and playlists, to gather analytics of how that content was viewed, and to allow for a proctor/guide to set-up group viewing–a requirement for enterprise applications such as training in VR.
Pixvana SPIN Studio’s most innovative and exciting features were it’s in-headset video editing capabilities. Tools for trimming, sequencing, and adding interactive graphics/text to VR video programs were layered on the cloud administration of files and interactive files. Users could put on a headset, edit while in VR viewing the content at high quality, then immediately publish/share to other headsets–since all of the data was in the cloud at all times.
In fall 2015 we made an ”emerging tech” bet on VR and chose a “swing for the fence” scale risk-reward approach. We believed VR would rapidly emerge as a very large-scale industry based on anecdotal buzz and our own profound amazement at early trials of the 6-DOF systems floating about Seattle via Valve’s early-access demonstrations.
I’ve been a founder of several businesses and by my count worked on ~15 v1.0 software products at both startups and large co’s. Pixvana’s SPIN Studio platform far and away exceeded anything else I’ve ever been involved with in terms of system design, technical innovation, and the potential to be of large commercial consequence for decades. Alas, the work also scores as the most catastrophically irrelevant (measured by adoption by end-users we achieved) of my career.
Voodle by comparison was a practical, pragmatic application that required very little technical innovation or real change in users’ expectations, but it did come on the scene at a time of “app saturation” when we were welcomed by a market with quite a bit of app-adoption-friction. We executed well-enough, but failed to find product-market-fit.
Over the last 7 years our approach evolved and ultimately meandered as we shipped a series of interesting tools that scored as not-quite-right for customers. We started with large media companies and followed with makers; pivoted to enterprise learning orgs, to individuals on teams, and ended up in last efforts with “one-to-many” affinity communities. From VR, to mobile selfie video-messaging and of late to web3 and utility for NFTs in community.
All of us that worked on the projects are incredibly disappointed. Hard work, good execution, dogged perseverance – these are table-stakes. Timing and luck are also brutally critical ingredients. We aspired to delight customers. We didn’t. I’m chagrined that we pursued such a wide set of interesting technologies in search of problems to solve—a cardinal sin.
To our shareholders and advisors Thank You for your support of me and the team with your trust, mentorship, and capital. To my colleagues, we did a lot of great work and I know we all take our experience together forward into new chapters to come in our lives.
— Forest Key, Dec 2022
The last 7 years touched the lives of many team members who worked together. For many Pixvana + Voodle were a first job right out of college, and for a few it was their formal job before retirement. From an office in Seattle, we evolved into a remote team in 8 states in our pajamas. We collaborated with passion, and experienced disappointments and achievements.
I spent a few hours answering some great questions for a blog post that i wanted to point to.
the title is: The Future of Communication Technology: Forest Key of Voodle On How Their Technological Innovation Will Shake How We Connect and Communicate With Each Other
We have been working with an awesome talent search firm called Fuel Talent and CEO Shauna Swerland reached out to me re: her podcast series What Fuels You. I have recently been listening to a ton of audio books on Audible, and have been getting into thematic podcasts at bedtime and on drive-time… so i dove in enthusiastically and really enjoyed the chat.
Over holiday break i was reading Cien Años de Soledad by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in all of its native Spanish-language-delight (what a masterpiece), and between chapters placed the book down on the beach while i stood to stretch. Out of the blue and after more than 3 hours in that spot, a *much* larger wave came ashore and submerged all of my stuff, book included which was a sopping mess and “not readable” until a good week of drying out.
Taking in Gabriel Garcia-Marquez’s masterwork in the original Spanish, languidly, while lounging on a beach on the Kona/Hawaii coast… minutes before a sneaker-wave appeared…
I had a few other books already on order a few days out on Amazon’s planes/trucks (If Then by Jill Lepore, Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut)–but up-next for my spouse and at my arms reach on the beach was book one of the series: The Fifth Season. I haven’t read a fantasy fiction book since The Belgariad series when i was 16! I had absolutely zero curiosity or intention to enjoy beyond passing a few moments while i mourned my soaking-wet book-of-intent…. but 1300 pages later i have to say I really, really enjoyed.
Diving into the Fifth Season, the first book in the Broken Earth trilogy from N.K Jemisin. Book two the Obelisk Gate, and book three The Stone Sky, complete the series.
Diverse POVs = Fresh Ideas & Empathy
Just a few chapters into the series I sensed the diverse voice of a non-white-male at the helm, which was instantly exhilarating and “new”, creating an experience completely unique from the “fantasy” tropes of so many other worlds (Tolkien, R.Martin, etc.):
Jemisin is an African-American woman and nearly all of her story’s characters are either female or gender-non-conforming. This emphasis feels as dramatically natural as Tolkien’s entirely male universe–but obviously stands in ironic contrast. I found myself thinking between chapters of what might 2000 years of western canon literature have told via entirely female voice/characters?
She alternates between a 3rd and 1st person narrative voice from multiple characters–including using a 1st person voice that speaks to the reader as “you” (I don’t think i’ve ever read anything like this before, is there precedent in literature? There must be? but it was new to me!) And without giving away anything, there are multiple-folding-twists throughout the series that connect and pivot and transform the reader’s understanding of the narrator–clever shit! Very, clever.
The richness of The Stillness world is elaborate in historical details but always in vital ways that drive the story and characters; i really felt like i was living in the world she created, while 3-4 seasons of hopefully fantastic television-writing-worth of drama was taking place. I was exhausted and relieved after powering through the series… just reading this much creative thinking was exhausting, i can not imagine CREATING this world!
The unique narrative POVs that she brings to her writing created for me a more profound sense of empathy and connection to the characters. Hearing/seeing different types of characters made me feel for them, and identify with them, even in ways in which as a cis-gender-white-male I have never really felt connected to “lords” and “magicians” and “elves”, all of whom were created in the image and spirit of their white-male authors?
Diversity in Software Product Management Teams?
… which had be thinking about my continuing understanding of just how important diversity of POV and experience is in forming high performing teams in all walks-of-life, including in my industry building software.
We started voodle in late 2019, before the worldwide COVID pandemic had accelerated what we already felt was coming–a dramatic disruption in how people work and collaborate using mobile devices and asynchronous short-video. We spent 2020 organizing ourselves as a fully remote team, shipping our mvp app on web/ios/android, and listening to thousands of users and their early-product feedback.
Whenever we open ourselves up to diverse POVs, we are better. Incorporating diverse POVs, leads us to better solutions to problems, to greater relevance with our diverse customers, and ultimately to success in all of our goal metrics.
We are searching for product experience team members that have a passion for our mission and demonstrated excellence in skill areas related to product management and user experience craft. We are assembling our team with a mix of diverse background experiences and prior domain expertise, aiming for a wide-ranging point-of-view. We are not looking narrowly for a specific candidate, rather, we are recruiting a TEAM.
This “matrix” is my revamped idea of the WIDE gamut of talent that might be a good fit for us to build out our Product Management team/capability at Voodle, in Jan 2021. This “aha” moment (where i realized we needed to change the nature of our job search, to get to a more diverse set of candidates for the role(s)) came as a direct result of my reading N.K. Jemisin – THANK YOU N.K!
This led me today monday to spend the day tearing apart a somewhat narrowly crafted JD we have been recruiting against for 6 months, for a proverbial “chief product officer”. I’ve been really unhappy with the lack of diversity in the candidate pool, and the search has yet to yield a hire. I think our search was too narrow. The Broken Earth trilogy directly inspired me to break apart the JD into a new “matrixed” search which more broadly seeks talent across early-to-late career continuum of product managers.
We are recruiting TEAM MEMBERS. If you are drawn to our mission and think you could add value as the CPO, or as a college hire IC — or anything in between!… we’d love to hear from you.
Very excited to kick off life for Voodle for iOS, which launches Monday June 29th 2020. As my son Carlos explains to gen z friends, “Discord and TikTok had a baby and named it Voodle”. To older gen X friends i explain Voodle as a “tiktok for the enterprise” user experience–a short-video a-sync for teams. We started building Voodle before the covid-19 disruptions this spring, so we hadn’t imagined the zoom-fatigue phenomena that is now upon us. As we launch, it really feels like Voodle is a very well timed app that brings lighter-touch, short-form-video, as a compelling alternative to time-sucking synchronous “zoom” meetings that have now started to dominate a lot of professional team interactions.
Voodle for iOS now available from the Apple App Store.
Give Voodle a try with your colleagues at work or other “teams” that you want to share short-video updates with. You can download it now from the apple iOS app store here.
Here’s a screenshot of my Voodle group with colleagues at work: we’ve been using voodles to provide team updates while we are all working remotely. Common voodle themes include project status, meeting summaries, morale updates, working from home checkins… super fun and useful, a great anecdote to #too-many-zoom-meetings.
Dressed in my voodle-f.c. jersey, ready to pounce on social media to update my friends and industry colleagues about the launch of Voodle v 1.0 for iOS.
Nice coverage of Voodle from Venture Beat which says “Voodle’s eponymous software is as efficient in execution as it is in concept.” An app that lets business teams share short video updates, complete with automatically generated captions and transcripts
In January of 2020, after nearly 4 complete years working feverishly and with great passion and focus on the virtual reality market opportunity that seemed so bright and shinny and attainable in 2015… my colleagues and I at Pixvana made the painful, but necessary decision, to shut down our product and cease all of our efforts in the XR market. It was just, not, happening. We built something great, really the best v1 product i have ever been a part of in my 30+ years building software. It was elastic, it was cloud based, it had incredible VR native interfaces to build really interest and compelling immersive content. The Quest headset is pretty darn awesome (if only that had been the v1 experience for most consumers!) and we got *great* looking 360 and 180 stereo video working on it, over the network and offline, with a great end-to-end vr video publishing platform we called SPIN Studio. But in hindsight we were 3, or maybe 10 years ahead of any real inflection point in the VR market. After a blast of interesting products and innovation from the likes of google, msft, fb, and htc/valve… by 2019 our industry found ourselves in a ever smaller and nichier market with only FB/Oculus really pretending that there was any future anytime soon… and at their last developer event it felt like even they were just pretending. Soccer mom’s were featured prominently in their product advertisements while teenagers watched from the living room… really?
A fateful business trip that I took in the fall of 2019 to China and then Germany to attend the AWE event in Munich, provided both the death-blow to Pixvana’s VR dreams, and the inspiration to start something new from the ashes, which is what we now call Voodle. In China i had the chance to talk to some of the manufacturers of VR cameras. At the time we were still actively building support for these cameras in our Pixvana SPIN Studio cloud: we were teaching our system the nomenclature for the file naming conventions, the warp and optic parameters to solve high-quality stitches to 8k+ resolution master files, the LUTs for camera exposure gamuts… but these camera manufacturers one-by-one either did not engage with me (when they had in past visits), or, were blunt and honest with me and shared that they had ceased development and manufacturing, and in some cases had sold -through their inventory. VR Cameras were not going to be a thing… which as one of my colleagues said upon hearing, “well, that’s a signal” (understatement).
Beijing in fall 2019, never looked so beautiful as the city was decked-out for the national holidays. As i took in the beautiful beihai park flowers, i contemplated the collapse of the VR camera manufacturer ecosystem that was a precursor to viability for Pixvana’s video production and publishing software pipeline we had spent 4 years building. Not, good, news, for VR video.
A week later at the AWE conference in Munich, the vast majority of interesting activity at the event was not with headsets but rather, with mobile phone screens. Screens at arms-length, and usually with the SELFIE camera as the primary viewing lens onto the world. As much as Snap and Facebook product managers raved about “over 1bn people are doing AR today with their selfie-cameras”, i couldn’t help but feel that a pivot into phone-based-AR applications using pixvana’s IP and brain-trust would be like signing up for another several years of equal or even greater disappointment.
A representative image from the sessions that caught my attention at AWE Munich 2019; Snap and FB/Instagram crowing about how important selfie-cameras are as ecosystems for mobile AR. The takeaway for me, was not an opportunity with AR… rather, with selfie-cameras. This would directly lead to thinking about Voodle.
This 1-2 combo of punches in my face finally snapped me to the realization that many other entrepreneurs had come to in 2019–AR/VR might just not be relevant right now in the world, in any appreciable business scale way. Why would Pixvana continue to spend time on the XR space? Well, after we huddled back at the office, we all agreed we couldn’t.
However, what did strike me as incredibly interesting… in a way that people of my age/generation sometimes struggle to fully comprehend, is just how much people like looking at their selfie-cameras. To take pictures and video of themselves to communicate with loved ones, all day, every day. Over the course of the next several months i started to pay much more attention to how the selfie camera was being used by my family and friends, and the ways and subjects that we communicated to each other in private networks such as Whatsapp and iMessage groups. That, is what led to the kernel of an idea that grew into Voodle.
Essentially, why is it that among my family and friends, almost all of my communications are image, video, and emoji or meme based:
This is what conversations with (left-to-right) a dinner date plan with my wife, a banter about puzzles with my mother, a group chat with friends about a trip to Japan, and a critical 49ers game-day discussion with my dad, look like on my phone. Emojis, memes, photos, and videos. Very, very little text.
Yet when i’m at work, i’m 99% grounded in text. Long TL;DR text in email applications like gmail, back and forth short messages with an occasional URL or small jpeg thumbnail in Slack or Teams, and sometimes sharing documents such as in Highspot or Onedrive or Google Drive. This schism is plainly evident when looking at my phone screen; if it is text, i’m working, if it is friends and family, it is photos/videos/images. This seems incorrect on many levels?
This is what my daily conversations look like at work: text, more text, more text, some documents, more text, an occasional small jpeg image/thumbnail, and more text…
So what if our work related communications looked a lot more like how i communicate with friends and family? That’s the basic kernel of an idea that led us to create voodle.
Here are my work conversations that previously would have been lots of short text, or worse, TL;DR emails, re-imagined with lots and lots of video.
A “voodle” is a short “video-doodle” that can be posted and shared among work colleagues. These may be insights into customers, competitors, operations, morale and culture insights… we are going to figure out together with our beta-testers. But what we can already feel with our early tests, is that it is *transformational* to communicate with work colleagues in a manner more similar to that we use with friends/family already. 2 billion consumers on their cellphones can’t be wrong!
We are working on voodle! I will write more about voodle soon. I’m excited, as is the team, to share voodle and voodles and voodle pools…
Voodle is a vegetarian noodle, but it is also a great name for a software product? Video-doodles! Voodles are plural, voodle is a noun (“i made a voodle”), and voodle is a verb (“voodle it and it shall be done!). So, voodle, fun word right?
As far as voodle is concerned: Vamos Chile, mierda! as they say in chile…
Well after 4 years at Pixvana chasing after the dream of VR and headset based immersive storytelling, today marked a huge milestone–we shipped our first iOS release of SPIN Play. It turns out that the billion+ users of mobile phones and iPads are a super compelling audience for immersive storytelling, and while it wasn’t our initial target, it is the most exciting milestone in our team’s journey.
Pixvana SPIN Play can play any interactive video content authored by SPIN Studio: flat rectilinear videos, 180 or 360, and soon AR content as well. Our web-player is a embed-able short-url hosted full-player (available at http://www.spinxr.com), and we now have native iOS and Oculus app store versions for phones, ipad/iphone, and VR headsets)
You can get Pixvana SPIN Play for iOS now from the Apple App Store for iOS devices. iPad only release today but iPhone will be out shortly (we did a vertical layout for phones which is more comfortable in your hand given how big phones have gottent).
Here’s a default playlist of immersive stories running in Pixvana SPIN Play for iOS (iPad UI)
Ok so we are adding support to Pixvana SPIN Studio to share URLs more easily of what we call SPINs, playlists of content. Here’s our default SPIN that loads when you download our player app, SPIN Play, from various app stores (iOS App Store, Oculus, etc.):
“XR-vu“, or “VR-vu”…whichever term comes into vogue in the near-future, i want to go on record as saying that it happened to me a few weeks, ago, and I liked it–a lot!
Yes i’m playing on the word “deja-vu“, that oh so fun feeling of experiencing something and having a sense of foreboding or otherworldly prescience, as though you’ve previously dreamed of the moment or even lived the moment, in a different state of consciousness? Well play with me for a moment–take that feeling, and now imagine what that feels like when it arises because you HAVE experienced the moment before… but in Virtual Reality or another form of XR (extended reality)?
Me wearing a VR headset in the middle of the street, illustrating just how wild and crazy VR experiences can feel? Or, posing for a photo-shoot we did at Pixvana so that we had interesting pictures of people in VR headsets, for blog posts like this, illustrating our experiences in VR! Actually, a very good image that conveys my astonishment at feeling XR-vu for the first time.
That’s what i experienced a few weeks ago when I visited Ollantaytambo Peru, a lovely Andean village about 2 hrs outside of Cusco, the former empire capital of the Incas. I had been to the region before, about 30 years ago when i was backpacking for 18 months after college. However, i had never been to Ollantaytambo’s ruins–not in person. But I did visit Ollantaytambo in Virtual Reality, in a detailed, compelling experience that was built by Microsoft as an example of how tourism and travel might be conveyed using VR. It shipped as Microsoft HoloTour, a demonstration app that launched in 2017. This technical document describes what the team did to build the Holotour experience of Ollantaytambo–quite interesting mix of techniques to photographically capture and convey the site.
Unfortunately i couldn’t find any images to illustrate the experience in the headset–suffice to say that in Holotour, i experienced standing in the midst of the Ollataytambo ruins… and when i visited these dame ruins in April of 2019, i had a triple-take moment that flooded my brain with a sense of *very* strong “deja-vu” like cues. Have i been here before? Why does this place seem so familiar? Did I dream it?
Here I am in Ollantaytambo’s Inca ruins, marveling at the beauty of the region, and the astonishing stone-work that pervades Inca sites.This rock formation is what strongly triggered my sense of XR-vu, as it was prominently featured in the Microsoft Holotour visit to the same site.
No, i had never been here. But yes, i was here in Virtual Reality! Wow. WOW. It was all the fun of deja-vu, times at least 5x… or maybe 10x. It really showed me the difference between seeing a picture or a movie, and having been immersed and felt the unique compelling experience of *presence* that is the hallmark of XR/VR, which triggers activity in the human brain that forms actual spatial *memories* that i was then recollecting/remembering, as though they were real. I don’t know if this feeling would always be as strong, say, if i had felt this sensation many times before? But it was incredibly interesting, and i wanted to first at the podium to share it and i look forward to writing about it more and discussing it with others as they have XR-vu of their own!
Anyone else experience XR-vu of VR-vu?
A wider view of the amazing, beautiful Inca site at Ollantaytambo.
Just unboxing a Kandao Obsidian R VR Camera, this is going to become my personal VR blogging / testing camera, i really like the form factory and the quality of shots is excellent.
First observations which are important to others considering buying:
Box includes the camera, and a PPOE power injector. And not much else.
NO included LP6 Canon Batteries (2 required to shoot with battery power)
NO micro SD memory cards. they recommend U3 class, 100mb speed cards. I have ordered a set of 6x64gb to start
The power cable for the PPOE adapter is a european plug standard, useless in the USA. This camera was purchased from Kandao directly and drop-shipped from China… perhaps ordering from other sources will yield the proper power cable.
Not much else in the box. The nice carrying case is kind of overkill, i plan to carry this around with me in a wrapped towel in my luggage so it can go on/off planes with me easily.
Our papa Emilio Casanueva passed away Friday May 25th, 2018, at the Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara CA. He was surrounded with love and affection with family. Emilio was born in Chile in 1939 and immigrated to the USA with his young family and eventually settled on the west coast in Marin County CA. Early in his career he opened Campolindo, an innovative health-food store in San Anselmo in the 1970s, and he maintained a life-long interest in health foods and active living. He was the founder of La Barraca de Zapallar and Zapallar Sustentable, and a designer/builder of dozens of delightful homes in Chile, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Santa Barbara. One of Emilio’s greatest passions in life was ocean swimming. He was a founder of swimming clubs and events including the Santa Barbara Channel Swimming Org, and social swimming groups Patos del Mar / Ocean Ducks. He published a book on innovative cooking recipes using Cochayullo.
Emilio was a loving and active father to his 5 sons: Luis Andres, Santiago, Forest, Joaquin, and Roberto. He was an adoring and fun-loving father-in-law to Laura and Cristina. He was a cool and relaxed grandpa to Emilio Jr (and wife Andrea), William, Camila, Carlos, Caetano, and Ava. He had the joy of meeting his first great-granddaughter Nyla this year. His dearest friend and big-brother Catucho survives him, together with his wife Angelica and their many children and grand-children, who knew Emilio intimately and delighted in his company. His nephews Carlos and Diego Casanueva were very dear to his heart, as were Andrea, Angelica, Mario, Cote, Maria, and their partners “Gordo”, “Caco”, Luz Maria, and “Negro”. Emilio’s former wives and co-parents remember him fondly and with great love and affection: Maria and Jane. In Emilio’s last years of life, he had the incredible fortune of returning to Zapallar where he lived some of his most joyous moments together with Francisca who he absolutely adored.
He was beloved and he loved his many friends in the communities in which he lived. He was particularly fond of his life-long friends in Chile and in the USA that shared his passions for swimming, good company, and positive outlooks.
Our family is planning a memorial for Emilio in Zapallar to be held at a later date. His in memorium facebook page is a place to post photos and memories of him.
These people (including some that aren’t pictured):
Just shipped our first baby, Pixvana SPIN Studio:
Pixvana SPIN Studio is an amazing new tool for storytelling with video for Augmented and Virtual Reality. The suite has a lot of components still to come, but our MVP is something we are super proud and excited by–it provides workflow support for optimizing and publishing high quality VR videos to both our SPIN Play SDK and SPIN Play. Login to Pixvana SPIN Studio here.
Our SPIN Play SDK is in the hands of our partners who are building their own branded players, the first of these to be live is Valve’s Steam 360 VR Video player, in beta now. Many more to come. Learn more about the SPIN Play SDK here.
The video player component of the Studio is called SPIN Play. SPIN Play is available on Steam for download for use with both Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. This is the player for reviewing and sharing VR videos–think of it as a b2b player (it is not a consumer portal for videos!) . Versions for other platforms including Gear VR and Daydream VR, coming soon to Google Play and other Android app stores.
Seattle fine artist Jesse Link completed a commissioned piece for me to adorn the Pixvana office. He completed the piece and dropped by our office last week, and my colleagues and I are totally psyched.
My wife and I came across Jesse’s work in various Seattle cafes and first asked him to paint a piece for our home a few years ago. As a fan of his work, he immediately came to mind when we moved into our new Pixvana office on Stone Way in Fremont/Wallingford, and I looked around at the walls longing for some inspirational art and color to liven things up.
At work we have frequently talked about our journey and Pixvana’s mission/vision as a company focused on building a Virtual and Augmented Reality storytelling technology platform. We often use the 1933 classic film King Kong as a metaphor/framework for our own journey, because the film is (a) an absolute classic of the cinema, and (b) the movie contains a meta-story about film-making and pursuing a journey of discovery.
We named Jesse’s protagonist “Sofia” after Sofia Coppola, an inspiring film director. Our Sofia is seen packed and ready to go with her VR Camera, VR headset, and tools for her adventure into the great adventure that lays ahead.
Thank you Jesse–your art piece will be a constant companion to us on our journey in the years ahead.
Seattle fine artist Jesse Link, pictured with his piece “Sofia the VR Explorer” and team members of VR video software company Pixvana, at Pixvana office in September 2016.
@Pixvana this week we announced our Virtual Reality Video platform, now known as SPIN VR. The word SPIN has obvious connections to the new VR and AR medium, namely, the ability to “spin” or otherwise adjust your point-of-view to perceive the experience from different perspectives and angles.
The photograph image of “spinning” fireworks was a direct inspiration–it captures both the beauty, power, and chaos of the VR industry and VR Video as a medium, in fall of 2016 (at ground-zero!)
The first two components of Pixvana SPIN will be our SPIN Player and SPIN Publisher. SPIN Player is both our own cross-VR-headset (eg: Android, Windows, Web) playback engine which connects to the Pixvana SPIN cloud to playback VR videos, as well as a set of tools for developers to implement support for SPIN’s video capabilities, in their own applications. SPIN includes a plug-in for Unity development, as well as a full-reference player so that media brands can build and distributed their own branded applications for VR Video. The SPIN Publisher is our cloud publishing toolset to load, encode, optimize, and stream vr-videos from Pixvana’s AWS hosted infrastructure. Videos created with SPIN can be hosted on Pixvana’s system, or, published to your own IT/cloud, for integration with your existing video delivery pipeline and resources.
I’ve worked on naming many products in my software career (Microsoft Expression and Silverlight, Puffin Design’s Commotion, Pinnacle Systems’ CineWave, and for better or worse, buuteeq!). With SPIN we went after a inspiring term for our broad platform for virtual, augmented, and mixed reality storytelling. SPIN aims to cover extensions such as SPIN VR, SPIN AR, and SPIN MR (eg: virtual, augmented, and mixed realities). I know it will be a great container brand to graduate all the way up to SPIN XR (as in “x”-reality).
There is a lot more coming from SPIN. We will be releasing technical previews, the full product, and other news about SPIN’s capabilities.
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