To celebrate 9 years of my blog, I interviewed a very special person: Kyle Riesenbeck, who is now Editor-in-Chief and Operations Manager at Upload VR. He is one of the people in the industry I esteem the most, and I was very happy to finally meet him in person at CES this year, and so I asked him if he could make me the gift of an interview, and he happily agreed. We talked for almost an hour about many topics, and the resulting interview contains some special gems, like a fun anecdote involving him and Palmer Luckey from the “good old days”, and some advice about the attitude to have to be featured on Upload VR. Sounds cool, doesn’t it? Then watch the video below for the integral interview, or keep reading for the slightly-edited transcript!
Tony: Today, it’s a very special day for me because for the 9th year of my blog, I’m here with one of my favorite people in VR, a person I esteem a lot: Kyle Riesenbeck, who is now known as chief editor for UploadVR, but I know him from much before UploadVR. He’s been many years in the industry, and he’s one of the great guys in XR. Kyle, thank you for being here for this interview.
Kyle: It’s my pleasure, Antony. I really appreciate that you’ve invited me to this conversation for your fans and I guess for Upload’s and ours.
Tony: Let’s start with my first usual question. I know there are maybe some people who lived in a cave in the last 15 years, and they’ve just woken up, come out to the world, and say, “Who is Kyle Riesenbeck?” Can you tell them your story?
Kyle: Sure. Let’s see. I’m 46. I like long walks on the beach and dancing in the rain… [laughs]
So, I feel like I started in the VR scene, I don’t know, what was it, 2011 or whatever, when the Oculus Kickstarter started. At that point, I was just doing Android hacking, custom bootloaders and ROMs, and all that sort of things. Somebody sent me a message once and said, “Hey, have you seen this new piece of tech?” I’m like, “No, what is it?” “Oculus Rift. Kickstarter”
That got me into the industry and I started doing a podcast, the RevVR podcast, because I was, at one point, I guess I still am in some respect, “Reverend Kyle”. That was my moniker when I first got into the industry and did the whole podcast thing for a while, and then teamed up with Ben Lang over at Road to VR. He and I worked together for a little while, a year or two, where I was part of that team, and that was cool.
Then, after that, I parted ways from being partnered with him. Went solo for a while. I was a developer. I did a lot of VR development for several years out in Seattle, Washington. Worked for several, I would say, more commercial B2B type of stuff. We were building training modules for big box chains, things like that. I’m a Unity developer at heart, I guess, sort of. I always claim I’m the world’s okay-est developer: because I’m not great, I’m not good at all… and I haven’t touched Unity in a little while now.
Eventually, Upload needed somebody to run Upload as an entity. The only thing that’s really left from the original Upload regime is the news outlet. It splintered off on its own, did its own thing. In 2018, I took over that. I’ve just been still in the background, running Upload and interacting with people in the industry since then, wonderful folks like yourself who are covering the industry from all angles. There are so many different niche outlets out there that are covering very specific things. It’s really important to give everybody an opportunity to talk about this amazing burgeoning tech. I’m just playing my part, one pillar of many that hold up this industry right now, and help push it forward.
Tony: That’s a very humble way of saying that. Actually, you are a very important person in our industry, especially on the press side. By the way, I feel your pain about being a Unity developer because I’m a Unity developer myself. I still do it. By the way, Unity 6 is pretty cool for many XR things. Maybe one day we’ll code together, but for now, let’s go on with the interview.
Many people still ask me about the “Skarredghost” thing, and I haven’t given an answer, yet. I’ve always been curious, why were you the “Reverend”? Was it because of how you were used to dressing?
Kyle: Interesting story. A friend of mine got engaged to be married and said, “We want something a little unconventional. We want one of our friends to officiate over our ceremony.” I said, “Oh, being a fan of the TV show Friends, I saw that Joey got ordained on the internet,” so I did. It’s funny, too. Right around the same time that happened at Gmail. Google put out Gmail for the first time, and I had to come up with a Gmail account name, and nobody wants to just be Kyle. I was like, “Oh, I’ll do Reverend Kyle.” That was taken. “I’m like, I’ll do my initials, Reverend KJR,” which, in retrospect, I wish I hadn’t done that, because people think I’m a junior. They see K Jr., instead of KJR, which are my initials. People always think I’m a junior. I am not.
The Reverend Kyle… originally, when I was doing Android stuff, I was “Reverend Kyle, your minister of mobile devices”. If you go back and look at my old YouTube.. .well, it’s still there, my YouTube channel. If you go back and look at old videos where I’m doing tutorials on how to crack a bootloader on an old Motorola phone, you may find a very different tone than what I do now. It’s a little bit more laid back.
Somebody told me once, “If you’re going to be a personality on the internet”… This is a long time ago, before the word “influencer” even existed… somebody said, “If you’re going to make it big, you got to have a name somebody’s going to remember.” I became Reverend Kyle. Actually, that was critical. If I hadn’t done that, there’s a very different multiverse version of me that didn’t continue on with all of this. Who knows where he would be right now?
Tony: It was very cool. I remember it very well, because Reverend Kyle sounds very well. It was cool. Compliments for the choice. Instead, for me, the problem is people say, “Skarredghost goes with how many K? How is it pronounced?” Probably, I should rebrand myself in other ways.
Kyle: Yes. You have a brand. You have to have a name, a moniker, or something that makes you stand out, because without that, people don’t remember you.
Tony: That’s true. Let’s now go talk about your new job. After the podcast, et cetera, you landed at Upload. Now it’s a lot of years that you worked there. Many of us are actually on the other side of Upload: we are the readers, we are the people trying to make you write content about us. I guess many of us are curious: how is it working at Upload?
Kyle: I would imagine that every news outlet is probably experiencing the same thing. There’s too much news, not enough time, not enough resources. That’s the case all the time. There are several different verticals in the “reality industry”… because it’s not alternate reality. It’s not extended reality. There’s so many realities. It’s just reality. It’s the reality industry. There are so many different verticals. There’s the 360 cameras, 180 cameras. There’s B2B. There’s flight sims. There’s out-of-home entertainment. There’s so many different ways that you could cover this industry. You can get real granular, or you could stay high level.
At Upload, we are 100% virtual. There is no Upload office. I continuously get emails from people who are cold-calling me offering rug cleaning for my office, water service, and uniforms. I get a lot of cold calls, emails from people who are just trying to sell the Upload office’s services. One actually said, “We know we used to service your office a few years ago. Would you like us to come back and do it again?” I’m like, “No, you didn’t. You might have a decade ago… I don’t know.”
There’s a lot of value to not having a physical workspace. Everybody is at home working in their respective office. I’m in my office. This is my office. It’s just a room in my house. We spend all of our time talking to each other online or doing video chat just like this. It’s got its pluses and its minuses. There are times when I wish that I could run into the other room and just grab the editorial team and be like, “We need to talk about this,” but I can’t. We’re a global team. We’ve got people scattered all around the globe, and over the years, we’ve had people on several different continents.
This industry feels, sometimes, like we’re putting out fires constantly. We’re just constantly, “Oh no, somebody dropped this,” “Oh, we better get this,” “Oh, there’s an update to that,” “Oh, there’s this.” That’s just the nature of this industry. The nature of this industry is that everything that comes out, every piece of news, is exciting, everybody wants to hear about it.
It’s our job to get it out there in front of people, but to also do it properly, to be objective, to be fair, balanced, not to take sides, not to play favorites, not to let money dictate what we do, because it is about the passion, it’s about the desire to see the industry grow. Because I think a lot of us in the industry right now are doing the same thing: we’re all looking around, going, “What’s next? What’s going to happen next? What is the next big thing that’s going to drop, that’s going to push this a little further ahead? Who’s going to do it? Who’s going to be in charge of it? Who’s going to be responsible for it? How’s the world going to react?”
Numerous times in my life, I have chosen the wrong side of a battle. Back when I was a kid, I remember the modem wars. I remember when it was Kflex versus V/90. Which of the 56K modems is going to come out on top? I’m like, “Oh, it’s going to be V.90.” Then it’s like, “No, Kflex.” Then it’s like, “No, V.90.” I thought Blu-ray versus HD DVD. I chose HD DVD. I was like, “This is definitely going to be the way because Blu-ray, it sounds like a fish. Nobody’s going to want to buy that.” I was wrong. I was very wrong. But that’s cool. You make mistakes, you pick the wrong side of things.
Being in the news world, you need to take everything at its face value and not choose things, not make a decision, and say, “Oh, this is going to be the way to go, so we’ll just push this and get in this camp.” We don’t do that. We’re not trying to help anybody succeed or fail individually. We’re just reporting on the industry. We do a review, it’s not great, of a game. The value of that to the developer isn’t, “Oh, boo-hoo, they didn’t like our game.” It’s, “Oh, well, what level of constructive criticism was given that we can use to better our offering?” That’s the best we can hope for. That is the best we can hope for when we do a review or something like that.
We do our showcases twice a year. We do the summer showcase. We do the winter showcase. Not surprisingly, the winter showcase ends up being the bigger one each year, because it’s the end of the year, and everything’s out. When we do one in late June, early July, things are still cooking. “Coming soon,” is the last thing that I want to put in a showcase, because soon… when is soon? Soon is two weeks, two months, two years. Who the hell knows?
Look at how long we all waited for Duke Nukem Forever. I’m still waiting to play Grand Theft Auto (in VR). I just want to play GTA in my headset officially, properly. I don’t know. It’s crazy to think about all the chaos. It’s controlled chaos. This entire industry is just controlled chaos. It’s going to get worse, and this is what makes my job so exciting at Upload, is that it’s going to get even more chaotic. It’s fun.
You got Google. You got Microsoft or Samsung, or some other random out-of-the-woodwork stealth mode company. You got some old regime come in and go, “Oh, I know I’ve been out of it for a while, but here’s something new.” There’s always excitement. This industry is still very young, and I think Upload is very blessed to have been able to get into it when they did and be here and be present for all this. The big news outlets do a lot of stuff, and they cover XR, but they don’t cover it the way we do, because we get it better than they do, I think. We’re closer to it. I think that’s what it is. It’s personal. [chuckles]
Tony: That was a practical answer. I love what you said about the chaos, which is true about XR… and we love to be in this chaos. Something that intrigues me, also trying to steal some secrets from you, is how in all this chaos and all these pieces of news, you pick some? And how to write a good story, how to write a good article about that?
Kyle: As a member of the media, I am also a fan of the thing that we report on. I know when I flip through news outlets for something other than XR, VR, whatever, things other than our industry. I am a child of the ’80s, and I was a huge fan of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. I’m very excited that they’re doing a live-action movie that does not star Dolph Lundgren. I hope he gets a cameo, though.
Anyway, I want to read news about this movie, and I can tell when somebody has written an article, and I’m like, “This is AI,” or, “This just got burped out from a press release that just got reworded.” I can tell when an article is not valuable to me. When I go and read things in our industry, in XR, I know what I like to read. I know what articles and topics are going to be valuable to me, and so do our writers. Upload’s writers know what is valuable because they are also passionate about this industry.
When we put out an article, if you’re trying to ask, “How do you know this is the right article?” We don’t, but we know what we would read, and we know what we would find valuable. I think that’s critical to have passion for the thing that you are working on, because a lot of people, it’s just like, “All right, here’s the press release. Let me reword a couple of these things, add a sentence here, add some context there.” 200 words, not even that, 150 words later, I realize I could have just read the press release. What did you do? “I just wanted to get the headline on my website for the clicks, for the traffic.”
Great, and that’s all wonderful, but how much value did you add to the industry? How much value did you add to the reader when the reader is done reading your article? My grandfather told me a long time ago, he said, “Never do a piece of work you wouldn’t be willing to put your name on to let everyone know you did it. That’s yours. You’re responsible for this, and you’re proud of it. If you’re not, don’t put it out there in the public.” It’s just a high standard, and that’s how we have had the success that we’ve had, I think.
Tony: This is a very good lesson. Regarding your audience, since you have millions of views every month, et cetera, what is the things people are most interested in reading about? Is it more about games, about hard tech? Do you have some statistics or general impressions you can share?
Kyle: Yes. I can tell you exactly what kind of game to make and what reporting to do to make a million dollars. No, I’m kidding [laughs]. I don’t know. We have just as much fascination with this as everyone else does. On occasion, I’ll get my phone, and I’ll be like, “Oh, my phone’s going crazy. Why?” Okay, well, we have an article on the site on a random Saturday that just happens to be getting huge amounts of hits. Why?
Very specifically, we had a D&D article, an article about a game that was D&D that went free. I’m not going to name any names, I don’t want to play any favorites here or anything, but there was a game that went free, that used to be paid and now it was free, and it’s D&D. Dungeons and Dragons… huge vertical of people that are into that, free. A lot of people like free. You put those two things together, and you put an article out for it… why are people going crazy on this article? This article beat every other article we had for the month, overnight. I’m like, “Why? Is it because it was Dungeons and Dragons, or was it because it was free?”
I started analyzing, “Do people just need free?” Articles that do well on our site are best-ofs and “Top free,” and things like that. As part of the target audience, I don’t want to pay all this money to try all these cool games. I miss demos and shareware things where you get one level. I miss those days. I wish there were more of that still, but I understand that it’s difficult to police that sort of thing nowadays.
I don’t know why the article went crazy. Was it free, or was it D&D? Was it because it just happened to post at the right time, at the right place? Did somebody share it somewhere where it normally doesn’t get shared? We don’t know. We have no idea. We can trace it as far as we want. Can it be duplicated? Don’t know, maybe. A lot of this stuff is the Wild West. You try to analyze it, you try to find numbers and statistics. I’m not a huge fan of statistics. I think 72% of all statistics are wrong, and the other 48% is made up. [laughs]
Tony: I also experimented this myself. Sometimes I write an article, spending a lot of hours, and no one cares. Then I write a thing, just spending one hour, whatever, and bam, it skyrockets. I’m like, “Why?” I don’t know. Maybe the right moment, right topic, right time. Who knows?
Anyway, I’m a blogger, you are working at a big magazine on VR. We are both writing stuff. I think we are a bit in a difficult moment because there are people who are more interested in videos; Google is getting always worse about organic; ChatGPT is stealing some views; or stuff like that. How do you think we writing people can survive in this complicated landscape? I ask this question just because I want to know the answer myself. [laughs]
Kyle: Unfortunately, we have been victims, as so many people are in this industry, of somebody coming to our site, grabbing one of our articles, and republishing it as their own. It’s not theirs, it’s ours. It’s our content. One of our writers wrote it, and it ends up on their site, where they get whatever amount of clickety clicks that they can get from whoever decides to read it versus ours. It’s the nature of the beast. It is just the nature of the way things happen. Plagiarism, theft… It’s what it is, it’s theft.
I find it unfortunate that people would take somebody else’s work, pass it off as their own. What do I do? Nothing. I do nothing. I let them do bad things and hope that the universe sends them their just dues, their karma. It has happened.
I actually have a lot of faith in my audience, in my readership, in Upload’s audience. They know to come to us. They are dedicated to the mission of making this industry succeed, and they know where to go to get their real news. If they want to go somewhere else and read a Walmart, Temu version of it, then so be it. Let them do that. We are going to continue to provide the best quality content with the most amount of heart and passion behind it.
It’s not about the clicks. Clicks are good. Clicks are great. Advertisement, sponsorship, all the things, the money, it makes the world go around. You have to do those things. Ultimately, I just want to put out good content. I am a firm believer that the good guy will win. I just am. I like heroes. I like the hero story. I like the idea that we can be successful without subterfuge, without malevolence, without being mean.
I’ll give you a good example. I was at AWE, as were you, and we hung out. I ran into Ben Lang there. Hadn’t seen the guy in a few years. Walked up, shook his hand, “How are you doing, buddy? This is great. Good to see you. Hey, we’ll talk soon,” and that kind of stuff. We’re not competitors against each other… It’s a healthy competition. I want Ben to succeed. He wants us to succeed. It’s trite now, but people have been saying it throughout the last decade or so in the industry, “a rising tide raises all ships”. The industry’s success translates into our success and Ben’s success and your success.
Everybody else out there who is a content creator or an influencer or a journalist… the success of the industry is what drives us. We could have the best outlet in the world and write the best articles about the best content, but if you remove the industry, if you remove the content, what are you writing about? What are you going to do? We need the industry to succeed. If the industry fails, which it won’t now, but if we had this conversation seven or eight years ago, “If the industry fails, what are we all going to do?” We’re all going to talk about the failure for a little while, the ducks will settle, and we’ll go do something else.
We’re not there. We’re here where things are successful. What do we do? What do we report on? What’s our driving motivation? How do we deal with other people stealing our traffic? I don’t know. We created a subscription system for Upload this past year and 3,000 free people signed up. It’s great. All you get really by the free tier is the ability to have conversations, talk about the articles, leave comments.
We had removed that at one point. Originally, we cut out the ability to do comments on the articles because it got unruly. It’s hard to, I’m going to go ahead and say, babysit some of the content that was being posted. We turned it off and then everybody complained. We brought it back, but we wanted to make sure that you were a subscriber of sorts, that you’re willing to throw an email on, not just anonymous, because anonymous is the easiest way to be the bravest person you can be. Unfortunately, it also makes people foolish. We got the comments back. It was a huge success.
It’s just a free tier. You can sign up. Go do that right now. Everybody who’s reading, just go sign up. Get on Upload, and be able to make comments. Then there’s a $4 option that gives you an ad-free experience. It’s great. There are no programmatic ads anywhere on the site when you pay $4 a month. It’s great. Then we have a $30-a-month tier for people who want to be a patron. This is a person who is genuinely subscribing for the purpose of the continued success of our site. These people get thanked. They get mentioned all the time. They’re on our About Us page on the site. It’s a wonderful thing.
We’re going to be making some tweaks to that down the road. We’ve had a few people who are developers who wanted to support us with some other perks. We’re developing it currently, and our plan right now is to have a developer patron status. We’re trying to put together a very comprehensive package for what that type of patron would get. Our success is having that many people that we know come to us and know that they want to read us. Now they might also be reading other places. Getting in multiple sources of news is very important. If you’re only getting your news from one place, that’s very bottlenecked, and it can be one-sided, so you really want to make sure that you’re seeing multiple versions of the same article.
I appreciate when you take an article from Upload, put your own little spin, post, comment, opinion, and you post it, and I read them because I’m always curious to hear what other people’s take is. I love that also that you do Upload, you do Road to VR. It’s nice to know that there are people out there who are, I don’t know, agnostic about who or where they get their news from. They get it from everywhere and then they decide what’s valuable to share with their audience. It’s important for us to make sure that we’re providing good content for folks like you, who are “regurgitating” it and making it your own.
It’s wonderful because… I started doing that in the industry much, much sooner than I started doing actual journalism. There’s some value to having that kind of transition. I think there are a lot of people out there doing a lot of different things in the industry, in the news area. I don’t love the term “influencer”. “Content creator” is very generic. I mean, “Content creator”… if I make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, I’m a “content creator”. I don’t get a YouTube plaque for having made my 100,000th peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I don’t know… content creator…”Influencer”, I like to think that I influence my children to make good choices. I influence my subordinate employees to make good content. Sure, I guess in some way, we’re all influencers, we’re all content creators. It’s just a matter of whether or not you want to make that your whole personality. That’s up to you. [laughs]
Tony: Talking about, let’s say again, my side this time, and, let’s say, the developers in the industry, many friends of mine sometimes contact me and say, “I made an app for the Quest. How do I get published on Upload?” My answer is, “Write to [email protected] and you can get the chance.” How do you think people can maximize the probability of being mentioned? Because many people want to be featured in your magazine, but no one knows how to, let’s say, pique your interest.
Kyle: There, I feel, I have genuine sympathy for developers who are that. They are developers. They are able to create amazing content. They’re able to make clever mechanisms and game mechanics. I’m constantly amused at the things, and I go, “Why didn’t I think of that? That’s so fun. That’s so clever. Why didn’t I think of that?” Oh man. Well, what do you do? You’ve made a great game. Now what?
You could probably make an entire YouTube series, “You’ve made a great thing. Now what do you do?” You have to get in front of your audience. “How do you do that?” Well, you get on Upload. “How do you get on Upload?” All right, a few things that you can do. Number one, get yourself a marketing or a publicity person. “Well, I can’t afford that.” Okay, be your own marketing and publicity person. “How do I do that?” All right, [email protected]. It’s an email address.
Every email goes into our internal chat, and we all look at it and read it and make comments most of the time. It gets in front of somebody’s eyes if you write, “[email protected],” in your “To” box in your email.
What do you put in it? “Hi, I made a game. I would like you to report on it. Here’s information on the game, maybe a trailer. Here is an ability to contact me.” That’s it. It’s really all you have to do. Send us as much information as you can. If you can do a press release, do the press release. That’ll come to us. Send it to us 10 times in tips, I don’t care. The worst thing that could happen is we go, “No.” Best thing we can do is go, “Okay. Here, somebody on the team, you go check this one out.”
What happens if you send us something and we all look at it, we all go, “This guy thinks it’s amazing,” or, “This woman sent us this game and it is awesome, the only problem is it only functions on one headset that nobody has anymore.” It’s a little too little too late. It might be a great game. We send them an email, and say, “Hey, do something different, do something better.” I don’t know.
How do you get on Upload? You’ve got to get on our radar. We’re not out cold-calling developers and saying, “Hey, do you have anything for us to report on?” “No.” “Okay. Thanks.” “Hey, do you have anything for us to report on?” “No.” “Okay. Thanks. Bye.” Get it in front of us. Contact us. Be persistent. Be very persistent. Show the passion in your work. I hate to always say this, but you can buy a sponsored post on our site. We have them on the site all the time. People pay to have something very objective. We’re not going to make comments, we’re just going to say, “This is the game, this is what it does. If you want to know more about it, you should read this article.” It says, “Sponsored. This has been paid for. Somebody paid for it.”
Not everybody has that to do. If you’re a starving artist, which most indie devs are, you don’t have that kind of money. You’re trying to put mac and cheese on the table for the kids. You can’t be spending money on advertising…, but it does work. I would love to say, “Hey, everybody just call me and I’ll…” I can’t do that. It would be non-stop, it’d be chaos, even more than it already is. So… tips@upload, easiest way to do it.
If you see one of us at an event, come find us. AWE, how many people came and found me and said, “Hey, I’ve got this, this and this that I’d like to show you”? If I don’t know it exists, I can’t report on it. It’s that simple. Be loud, be obnoxious.
Tony: That’s a good advice, because sometimes I always have the sensation that I’m disturbing people by sending the info about the products I do. Instead, I should not have this fear. I should just promote it and say, “If they don’t like it, they just don’t publish it.” That’s it.
Kyle: The worst response you can get is, “No, thanks.” That’s it. “No.” Ask. Ask. Ask. Be proud. Be loud about your project. It’s you. It’s a representation of you. If you don’t feel that way about your project, maybe you need to rethink that.
Kyle: It’s curious. The evolution of this industry has been peaks and valleys. I feel like it was obvious to me early on. If I go back and listen to some of my old podcasts, things from 2014, 2015… Well, everybody who is a fan of my content or has seen me on the VR Download, Upload’s show, they know that I always talk about being a bespectacled individual. I wear glasses. I’ve worn glasses since I was five and a half, six years old. To me, it’s very important that this industry gets to the point, and this is where I predicted it a decade ago… I was just saying it, but it was pretty obvious to most people that these, the Meta Ray-Ban Wayfarers that I have on, are closer to where I thought we were going to be than any of these other headsets that I’ve got.
I said many times that I want to be able to wake up in the morning, grab my glasses, put them on, and then I can tap and go VR, AR, MR, XR, QR, I don’t know, whatever…
A reality toggle, a reality scroll wheel, where I can scroll through all the different realities, I said that that was the ultimate goal. That was the ultimate form factor.
Are we computerizing glasses, or are we glassifying computers? That’s something I saw debated online recently, and I thought that was intriguing because I don’t know whether these function as glasses first or as an AI device, I don’t know.
This is so close in one way, but only one way. I think where we’re heading is, like I said, the scroll wheel of all the different realities. Once lenses and light fields and lasers, once all of that comes together and creates whatever it is that we’re going to have to give us the different realities on our head, this form factor, this style, maybe a little stronger battery someday, I don’t know, I believe that this is where we’re heading, that it’s the road to this. Will it go further? Probably. Is it imperceivable? Uhm… 50/50, maybe.
I guess you could Arthur-C-Clarke it a little bit and predict some crazy stuff and be right. I feel like there’s a lot of potential still for this sort of nonsense [He shows the Meta Quest 3] to still keep evolving and becoming something totally different. I think it’s going to be iterative. I think it’s going to be baby steps from here. I think we went this way [moves the hand to simulate a steep parabolic curve] and it’s parabolic. Actually, it’s more like this parabolic [makes with the hand a logarithmic curve]. Now I think we’re just going to do little iterations for the next couple of years until we end up with this, where everybody just has this [the glasses]. It provides everything that all of these other headsets do, and then some more. That’s where I see us going.
How long will it take? Another 5, 10 years? How long before mainstream adoption, where grandma is walking around with one of these things on? 5, 10 years. It’s easy to predict 5, it’s impossible to do 10 fairly well. I don’t know. That’s where I’m thinking we’re heading, is we’re just going to do small iterations over time. It’s computational power and Moore’s law, or whatever version of that we’re at now. I think it’ll just keep getting better and better. It’s just obvious, the direction we’re heading. Who knows where we’ll end up 5 years from now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now. It’s exciting. Keeps the fire in my belly going. That’s what’s fun.
Tony: It’s the same for me. Talking about the old good days, we’re still in the old good days… [laughs]
Kyle: Are we? I don’t know if we are or not. Michael Abrash said that many moons ago at Oculus Connect. I think it was Oculus Connect. “These are the good old days”, but are they? Are we still in it? Are the good old days over? I’ve had a few people ask me that, and I’m not really sure how to answer.
Tony: I think we are still maybe for one year or such. Talking about really, when you started, when the industry was even much more amateurish than now, do you have some, I don’t know, interesting or fun story to tell from those times? If I ask Ben Lang about them, he will mention, I don’t know, the Oculus killer, which I always answer, “It worked because Oculus doesn’t exist anymore.” It killed it in a way. [laughs]
Kyle: Oh, that’s funny. That’s an interesting way to look at that.
Tony: Do you have something that comes to your mind now about some fun moments in your past in XR?
Kyle: I’ve had so many fun experiences. I don’t even know if I could pick one…
I was at the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Expo in 2014. For a lot of us, it was the first time we had all come together and seen each other in “meat space”, actually being physically in the room together. Ben Lang was there. Palmer Luckey was there. I’ve got a picture of the three of us together. First time, all three of us together in a picture. It’s kinda fun.
I’d gone up to Palmer. It had to have been right after Facebook bought Oculus. Yes, I think it was right after. I said, “Hey, me and a bunch of the other podcasters from the industry, we’re going to do what we call an Ubercast.” It was the very first time we’d ever done a big podcast with all of us together, the Ubercast.
It’s a fantastic listen because we all just started talking, and I had said to Palmer, I said, “Hey, Palmer, if you’ve got an opportunity to come in here, we’re going to be in here recording, if you feel like coming in, come in.” He looked in, we’re in this big conference room, and he walks by. He’s got a plate, which is some cheese and fruit, and stuff. He’s walking by and peeking. He comes in and, without missing a beat, I just go, “Oh, we’ve got this special guest that just walked in the door.” He comes in and he goes, [screaming] “It’s Steve Jobs.” He sat down. He was so gracious to sit there and just yak with us like one of the boys. He was just a fan like the rest of us, just having a good conversation.
He talked about injecting guacamole into chicken bakes at Costco and the most ridiculous things. It reminds me that it’s real human beings with real passion that made all of this possible. It’s the passion that made it possible. If nobody cared about what they were doing, if nobody wanted to be the first to try to drive this new mechanism or this new game mechanic, or this new experience, “What if we did this? What if we did this?”… Those are all important things.
I think it’s critical that a lot of these people come together and put their brains together and drive the industry forward. Little stories. I could tell so many stories. I could share so many pictures. Man, you’d have to schedule a whole another hour or two just for us to go through and talk about old stories. I got so many fun ones.
[By the way, if you want to listen to that Ubercast, you can find it in the Internet Archive at this link]
Tony: I would love to. Maybe next year, let’s do it. We’re almost out of time, but I want to ask you these final two questions, and they are very typical of my interviews. You have been through an amazing VR career and also you shared a lot of improvements about your personal life. You went through a lot of good things. Do you want to share some life lesson in general to people reading this interview?
Kyle: People who remember me in the beginning of the industry probably have a visual representation of me in their brain that is not compatible with the current offering. I was a bigger guy, I had a ponytail, and I looked a lot different back in the day, sporting a fedora, just embracing the stereotype, is what I used to say. I’ve gone through a lot of significant changes in my life for the better. It was because I simply said, “It’s mine. It’s my life. It’s my decision to do what I want to do”. I’m not into this whole, “If you will it to be, it will be.” Sure. I’m sure there’s some value to that.
I can’t remember who the quote was from, but somebody said, “These people haven’t figured out magic. There’s no genie in a bottle granting wishes. These people, they’re doing something you’re not doing. If you keep doing what you’re doing, you’ll keep getting what you’re getting. If you want something different, if you want a different result, you have to do something different.” So, if you’re not happy with your stage in life, if you’re not happy with your presence, if you’re not happy with anything, then change something. It’s all about change. The delta in your life. What are you doing to change? At the same time, what things are working for you? Embrace those.
I guess it’s just good life advice. These people who are happy and successful, it’s not a secret, they’re just doing something you’re not. You just got to go do it and take charge of your life. I guess this is good advice to all the developers in the world. Make your game known. Make your game popular. Make your game famous. Put it in front of my face. If you have to come and knock on my door at my house -please don’t do that-, but if you’re willing to do that, it means you’re passionate. That should come through in the way that you talk about things, because people should hear the passion. If you’re listening to me and you don’t hear the passion in my voice, then I’m doing something wrong.
Tony: I can feel it!
Kyle: It’s that simple. That’s good. It’s good.
Tony: You’re doing it right! For the last moments of this interview, my usual final question is… say whatever you want!
Kyle: Sure. What I’ll do is I’ll give you the same thing I do at the end whenever I’m on VR Download, which you can find on YouTube if you search for UploadVR or go to uploadvr.com. This is what I do at the end of the show: I just say, “Hey, if you’d like more news reviews, comments, and interviews-” I think I did that in the right order, “-go to uploadvr.com. If you’ve got something you want us to see, get it in front of our editorial team, T-I-P-S, [email protected].”
Go to uploadvr.com every day, at least a hundred times a day. That would be my recommended dosage, is take daily a hundred times and watch VR Download. Our YouTube channel is so wonderful and awesome, has some great stuff there. I think you should also read Skarredghost, because, it’s awesome. Anthony here is a great guy. I’ve met him several times. I love the idea that there are so many unique, interesting, and valuable personalities in this space. I don’t want you to choose one. I want you to patronize all of them. Read all of their stuff. Watch all of their stuff. A rising tide raises all ships. I’m convinced of it.
And if you see me at a show or you see me at an event, say hi. I like to meet people. Come tell me your story. I want to hear it too.
Tony: That’s amazing. Ladies and gentlemen, this was Kyle Riesenbeck. Very, very passionate guy. I loved hearing this interview. Unluckily, we are tight on time, otherwise I would speak with you, really, for hours. Thanks again for taking part in this and to celebrate my little blog birthday. Thanks also to everyone watching this interview or reading this article on the blog. Of course, being a reader of UploadVR (every week I read it), I invite you to read it. For the rest, I invite you also to enjoy your time in VR. Bye bye. Thank you, Kyle.
Kyle: Thank you.
(Header images from Kyle Riesenbeck)
Disclaimer: this blog contains advertisement and affiliate links to sustain itself. If you click on an affiliate link, I’ll be very happy because I’ll earn a small commission on your purchase. You can find my boring full disclosure here.
Related
