Hypatia Returns

JWise Photo of the Day, TimefireVR

Hypatia from TimefireVR returns

Maybe this is not the greatest of screencaps, but what it represents is important. Hypatia, the VR title my company created, is back online and has been for a few days. I thought it was dead and gone because it had to be shelved by Harry (Turkvolt), who’d taken it upon himself to keep it alive when everyone else abandoned it. From 2014 through 2017, TimefireVR created an explorable, non-violent world where creativity and community were the hallmarks of our effort. Well, VR was a tough marketplace to crack. We spent nearly $5 million trying to realize my dream while Facebook spent $10 billion; we never really had a great chance, nor did they, for that matter. It’s now a decade after my first stumbles and mistakes in paving a path into an unknown world of possibilities. I had tapped a number of people who were able to hone their game development skills, make friendships that exist to this day, and help create a virtual environment that was wholesome but, ultimately, a failure. I miss this world. I miss Robert’s music, Rainy’s contributions to the art, Jay’s amazing 3D work, Jason and the other coder’s incredible efforts to do things on an extraordinarily small budget, let alone the two dozen other people who toiled against the odds to build Hypatia. And then there’s Harry, who brought the broken bits forward, modifying the code where needed, allowing the world of Hypatia to see the light of day again. I have a deep respect for his efforts and dedication, thanks Harry.

The Office Park

JWise Photo of the Day

Skyport office park in Scottsdale, Arizona

This is the location of the offices of TimefireVR LLC. I should be finding myself here most days of the week, but so far that’s been difficult due to a multitude of reasons ranging from my mother’s recent death to the issues surrounding the raising of capital to keep things going forward. Through the troubles of operating an entrepreneurial endeavor to dealing with complexities of personalities that move in and out of our lives, I find myself searching for the passion that was available in abundance prior to the fall of 2016 when things detoured. Back then we went public and embarked on a hiring spree.

Over these last years I’ve been asked dozens of times how I got involved with making games in virtual reality and during those explanations, I realize that others are enchanted with this idea that someone is creating something. I’ve gotten this same impression back when I was making record covers, shooting videos, opening an internet cafe, writing a book, and now this. So while it may be of interest to others, I wish to be inspired by their enthusiasm and always find what I started here with this project to be of great motivation. But reconnecting with that is hard and at the moment it only arrives in fits and spurts. This is a dilemma.

Old Friends New Worlds – TimefireVR

JWise Photo of the Day, TimefireVR

Adriana demoing some updates in Hypatia by TimefireVR LLC

Had some visitors by the offices of TimefireVR today, former staffers Adriana and Kyle. I had recently run into Adriana while I was out shopping and said hello after not seeing her for eight months since we experienced a total layoff of staff back in July. Slowly, the company was restaffed and, for a while, was in other people’s hands, but in January, it found its way back to the original shareholders.

Kyle visiting Hypatia at TimefireVR LLC

Adriana’s other half is Kyle, who also worked for us last year and was one of the casualties. Behind him, also in VR, is Jason, who was kept on through all the chaos, and Stephanie, on the left, recently came back on for some contract art and is staying with us part-time. It was great seeing these two, but at the same time, it’s still rough as the emotional toll of last summer has lingering effects.

Recalcitrance to Change – TimefireVR

JWise TimefireVR

Road Closed Sign During Winter in Yellowstone National Park

Recalcitrance to change and the desire to return to some idyllic time that, in truth, never existed outside of one’s perception is, in my opinion, a recipe for disaster. Fear is likely the driving mechanism behind opposition to change. With change comes the potential to find one’s self on the wrong side of adaptability and yet everyone is changing all the time. After a long stagnation period where the intellectual rigor that should have been applied to one’s life is recognized as having been deeply neglected, the individual empowered by groupthink is likely becoming self-aware at a subconscious level of their disadvantage. Rather than push forward with the intention to do better, they find themselves joining the populist opinion that they are not wrong but instead, find blame in those ready to greet the uncertain future with gusto.

This type of thinking is a waking nightmare encouraging a population to march toward disintegration. History has witnessed previous epochs where the tide was moving to shift a people forward, but those in power were fearing being left behind. So they grab hold of that negative mindset and harness it to bring others into a false knowledge that their way of life is about to be destroyed. Too many join in the fear of those who are stealing their comfort and confidence.

Today, that fear is represented by the very thing that has brought us out of the stone age and is catapulting us out of the industrial age: technological progress. The Enlightenment opened the doors of technological creative processes that enabled humanity to discover and gaze upon the infinitesimally small found in the world of molecules and particles to the phenomenally large as represented by the scope of the universe and breadth of time.

Instead of strong leadership trying to guide those getting lost in fear and continued ignorance, many in those trusted positions are pandering to them, allowing too many to remain passive in a sidelined role. Might this be the more desirable outcome? Could the powers that be understand that there is no hope for those who have already deeply habituated intellectual lethargy where their stasis may as well be a 100-ton iron weight anchoring them to their own ignorance? Is the road ahead truly closed for those who fear the future?

What of those who embrace change but now fear that governments and societies are endangering progress by this acceptance of a status quo? Do these anti-change forces who would like to see a reversal of globalism endanger everyone’s future? Once the image was captured of our blue planet floating in the void and was witnessed by humanity, many realized that all that matters and all those we shall know to share the same little orbiting rock, and we’d better learn to get along. That unspoken acknowledgment of being of the same species in a shared space has delivered global commerce, communication, and awareness of an environment that must support all of us.

The physical environment is only part of the equation that includes our intellectual environment as well. We are in a symbiotic relationship not only with one another but with the sky, land, water, and the rest of life surrounding our existence. We evolved to this point in our journey from that well-balanced symbiosis with nature and our learning how to adapt to changing conditions. Normally, though the conditions required us to primarily employ our instinctual and physical strengths, today, it is largely intellectual. We now need to muster the mental strength to see our way through the cognitive morass of our own making.

The path we’ve taken started accelerating during the past 300 years through the relationship afforded by the cooperation of economic and political systems, enabling science to make strides that have brought us to this point in our technological modernity. At every step, we have encountered hurdles and branches that each generation had to negotiate. At this juncture where we are beginning to evaluate our own role in an automated environment that may free us from manual labor, we must start asking ourselves and our leadership what our continued role might entail when a robot or an A.I. is performing our job.

I, for one, do not see a dystopian future because where politics, economics, and science laid a foundation, I believe we are at the precipice where a safety net called creativity, as defined by our work in the arts, is ripe to harness this foundation and use it as a springboard into the next stage of human activity.

To be creative is to open oneself to embarrassment and failure as defined by those who have gone before us where fame and fortune eluded them. Often, though, this perception of failure was due to the circumstances of the age where a population wasn’t ready to assimilate the creative message being offered. Also in previous times, the tools were considered the domain of those who could afford them and who had the idle time to explore their uses before finding mastery and a benefactor who could support their ambitions.

Today, we have digital tools that offer us infinite canvas space, endless paint supplies, the sound of every instrument ever created, and millions more that are yet to exist. Cameras embedded in our phones, along with the internet, allow anyone to be a broadcaster. We are learning what influencers are all about. Video games are becoming a professional sport, with millions watching the streaming events on a myriad of devices. Our books, too, are delivered electronically, and images are attached to memes that will never let us forget the grumpy cat. A good majority of our commerce is already transacted online; it will be a small step to visit off-world alien malls constructed in virtual reality.

What if all of this is just the tip of the iceberg? How will technologies such as continued miniaturization leading to more power-efficient portable tools, virtual and augmented reality, and the greater reach of communication combined with the convenience of blockchain-enabled services impact our individual ability to attract our own audience and provide us with purpose when the traditional workforce is rapidly changing?

From here we must ask ourselves how will our social contract evolve following this transition from passive consumption and purpose defined by our jobs to active participation and the rewarding of our creative abilities. How do we start this conversation and bootstrap these emerging industries should it, in fact, be a course of travel we recognize as being one of our more viable paths at this crossroads in the human journey?

The TimefireVR Crew

JWise Dreams, TimefireVR

TimefireVR Crew 2017

Diversity, camaraderie, dedication, commitment, loyalty, and an effort beyond anything I could have ever dreamed of. That is what best describes this group photo of the team that I had assembled.

The majority of these amazing people have had to go on to explore other opportunities, but I am forever grateful for what they gave to a dream that had been percolating in my imagination for over 25 years. This summer, just after the 4th of July holiday, I had to do something that was the single most isolating and distressing thing I’ve had to do as the founder of a company; I had to let them all go.

It has taken me more than 90 days to bring myself to look at these faces, and seeing them again simultaneously warms my heart and strikes me in the gut with how much I miss them. I can never fully explain the profound disappointment I felt and continue to feel that on the verge of trying to find our place in the world, we ran out of options and money and were no longer able to keep them employed. While we had all the growing pains one would expect from a startup that was simultaneously trying to invent and innovate, on the whole, we had an awesome team.

There are a few people not in the photo, notably my co-founder Jeffrey and myself. In the days this photo was taken, we were scrambling, looking for options to make payroll. The hoped-for bump in sales or attracting a partner with deep pockets never materialized. This was especially difficult for us, as we were in active conversations with some larger players following our favorable press, comparing us to being the “Virtual Minecraft meets Facebook.”

Doors started opening, but funds to meaningfully engage in those conversations were greatly inhibited. Over the course of the summer, we were able to maintain a skeleton crew that not only kept the platform alive but have revamped many things that have put us in the position to release our title anew, and we are now compatible with not only the HTC Vive but the Oculus Rift from Facebook too.

The old adage “A dollar short and a day late” certainly applies here, though that doesn’t absolve me of the guilt I feel in letting these people down.

I do not know how to repay them or even honor them. Along the way, I have felt a lot of gratitude and a fair share of outright hostility and hatred for how I chose to do things or how things were done due to the compromises that come with spending other people’s money, but life goes on, or at least it should.

My ambition was large, and enthusiasm great as a group of mostly amateurs strove to create something I hoped would be beneficial to society by not diving into the tropes of violence, misogyny, winners, and losers.

Message From The Founder – TimefireVR

JWise TimefireVR

John Wise Founder of TimefireVR

Sometimes, in an effort to create something extraordinary, we take chances on unproven markets and ideas that have no precedence; this is the path to innovation. We are in an age that demands participation from better-educated populations on a global scale. We cannot allow geographic and/or economic isolation to limit our ability to enjoy the benefit of what deep cultural integration and a strong education can bring. We must all be afforded the opportunity to be the right person in the right place at the right time. Our world, now more than ever, requires our innovation and ability to develop workable solutions that do not rely on outdated technology. We cannot survive in isolation and ignorance. We truly are living in the future many of us have dreamed of and must learn to live accordingly.

TimefireVR through Hypatia has been a labor of love that has been toiled on for more than three years. Through a million lessons learned and a host of methods explored on how not to create a VR title, we finally reached the point this summer that we thought we were ready to test the waters. The only problem was that by then, our funding was running thin and we would have to try to find customers without a marketing budget and being limited by being “ready” for just one platform: the HTC Vive.

Stumbling blocks were encountered shortly after our early release, as happens in many small companies still in the startup phase, but with a reduced crew, we have endeavored to correct some of our shortcomings and are close to being able to roll out an update to Hypatia.

First of all, we are making changes to our pricing model for Hypatia, and a BIG surprise is around the corner. In order to help with this change, we have worked over the summer to bring a trade and commerce model to Hypatia that will allow better economic participation in our city.

Next, we have been updating our map for easier navigation, updating the entry into the world, updating the avatars, and have been making a ton of improvements for an all-around better experience while people visit, play, and learn in Hypatia.

Finally, we are just about ready to launch in support of the Oculus Rift.

For those of you who have been our early adopters, we offer you thanks for trying to help us create an early economic model that was hoped to help bring visibility to our efforts. We have something in mind to reward you for your participation and will discuss that in a future blog post. Again, thanks for your contribution.

It has been our dream to offer a better level of cultural and creative participation to our real world via a virtual world where scarcity doesn’t limit anyone’s ability to participate. Through some incredible obstacles, hurdles, and perseverance, we have done our best for the better part of 1,000 days to make that promise a reality.

A new chapter in a new city is about to emerge.