Nine months ago, I experienced the future. It was magical and I’ll risk everything so others can feel that too.
Remixing Reality started in 2022 with a big idea (AR Theme Parks), but the tech wasn’t ready and neither was my target audience. So after a year of progress, we paused development. What we had was cool, but didn’t blow our minds and no one really got what we were trying to do. Fast forward to the last 2 weeks of 2023, I was ready to see if the time had come.
I made a promise to myself that if I could make something cool, something that moved me emotionally, then I would give up my consulting business and dedicate my life to launching my first product business. It was 2 days before Christmas and I gave myself a deadline of New Years. Now that I had a plan, I just needed an idea.
With my first attempt, after the theme park was built, I was going to sprinkle in some fun, simple games like a real theme park. This time around, I pivoted and asked, “What if I start with a fun, simple game first and then slowly built up to the digital theme park?” What would be a fun AR game? Growing up, I loved playing toys with my cousin. If I could replicate that in AR, that would be something special. I could then add Hollywood style sound and visual effects that 7 year old me would drool over.
Just past midnight on what was then December 30th, I finished my first working prototype. After a minute to deploy the build, the app launched. My boring room then became the setting for an epic space battle. Okay, so it was more like flying medicine capsules that got hit with gravity and turned red, but my childhood imagination took over and filled in the details. I jumped up and down, since little me had taken over my mind. “I shot down down a spaceship as it flew around my bedroom!” Sure, it was ugly, but it was undeniably magical. I knew in that moment, that the world had changed. The spaceships knew they were in my room. They weren’t flying randomly, I had positioned them like a director. They flew along the path I wanted. I knew I was the first adult to relive their youth thanks to AR and I knew I was the only person to know everything had changed.
Nine months have passed since that day. I worked through New Year’s Eve; I worked through New Year’s Day. I’ve work 6 days a week, 10+ hours a day, slowly adding feature upon feature. To say I am consumed is an understatement. I go to bed dreaming of new features and wake up eager to build them. A few times a month, I finish a new feature. I experience it for the first time and I’m magically whisked backed to my childhood. The little kid in me can’t believe what I’m playing, despite the adult in me planning and coding it. Many friends and family help me test and get to experience this magic.
There’s a reason I took this big chance at the start of the year. AR glasses have been promised for a long time. I want AR to win and know AR glasses will be key to that. I want to play with my friends and my kids in an AR filled world. I wanted to let others be spectators of the AR fun going on around them. So, I headed off, on my journey of creating not only content for the inevitable future, but for a way to allow others to create AR content as well. We’d have to start on mobile phones, because everyone has those. There are not and never will be enough AR/MR developers to create enough content to make AR feel like a must have. Thus, I wanted to build a way for people, average people to enjoy and create AR experiences using just their phones. Knowing full well that if I timed it right, my system would go live on mobile phones just ahead of AR glasses. I’d have a few years of enabling users to generate their own AR content. When the consumer glasses arrive, all that content people made in our system would be ready to be enjoyed on the consumer glasses and help AR really take off. Users on phones could build content for early adopters of AR glasses.
Two weeks ago, I had a sad moment hit at a time I should have been uncontrollably excited. I was days away from launching a beta for my AR system. Yet after 9 hard months, developing alone in my bedroom, dealing with impostor syndrome, I had a moment of doubt. “Did I just waste all this time for a product that no one is going to care about? Will group AR experiences even be a thing?” I went to bed, doubting my decision to risk everything for this idea. Maybe I hadn’t seen the future after all, but I still couldn’t deny the magic I felt.
The next day, I spent the morning away from the computer, doing lots of chores and running around NYC. I wanted to step away and clear my mind. While I was out, Snap launched their newest version of Spectacles. More importantly, their entire partner summit seemed focused on one message: The future was sharing experiences in the real world with your friends, sprinkled with AR magic. I came home to learn I wasn’t alone in my journey. Snap was there, quietly behind locked lab doors, building for the exact same future. I hoped they were, that’s why I built the UI for the iOS version (and Android) with native iOS/Android UI controls. I knew AR glasses would come and I would need to swap out the phone UI for one better suited for glasses.
A week after that, Meta announced Orion. Another big company reinforcing that AR glasses were the future.
Niantic, whose AR product I use as a core component of my system, presented AR content at both events. Niantic has been a huge influence on me and my vision of the future. They just “get it” in so many ways.
What excited me most about these big announcements was the timeline for consumer glasses. You could see that future would be arriving in a few years. That would give me time to finish building out my system and time for my users to generate AR content. I could build a company that would help drive adoption of this new tech, especially since I had a year head start over any competitor.
The team and I just applied for the Speedrun Accelerator a few days ago. In a previous Speedrun, Marc Andreessen was interviewed by Andrew Chen. Watch this clip. He’s 100% right. Now is the time that gaming companies are starting to be good investments. Now is the time for an AR company to perfect its always online system that will let people play and build together for decades to come. I see a future where everyone builds in AR, using my system, and not just games but everyday AR experiences. (I’ll write more details of that in an upcoming post.) I hope we get accepted into Speedrun, because, with their help, we will be able to help everyone in the world feel that same magic I did 9 months ago. We can help them make their own magical moments in AR.