Announcement: The ghost is evolving

In the next times, I’ll make this little website to evolve a bit. I’ve started it as a little place where to put my thoughts… but know that it’s having its little share of success, it’s time to change something. I mean, I’m not UploadVR, but I thought that not even my parents would have read my posts… and instead I discovered that there are people finding what I write interesting! That’s surprising…

It’s time to make this website to evolve from a baby stage to a teenager one… so, in the next days you may experience same strange things when exploring this website… your head may even explode.

Mind blown (Image from Pop Key)

But don’t worry, The Ghost Howls will come back stronger than ever! In the meantime, continue supporting me!

Unity CEO John Riccitiello says that VR will become mainstream in 2019… and I agree

At VRLA Unity CEO John Riccitiello expressed his opinion about virtual reality market in the future… he has been very realistic and so I loved what he said.

The reason for so much love is that he showcased a cold analysis on the VR market, based on his expertise and the numbers owned by Unity, which is one of the most important solution for VR experiences development.

So, finally an analysis not driven by what we want, what we’d like to happen and by what we see in our biased surroundings. Because yes, let’s be honest: we see virtual reality everywhere just because we are a lot involved in the VR ecosystem: reading reddit posts or my twitter feed, it seems that VR is everywhere, while all my friends here own a smartphone but do not have a virtual reality headset. And a good number of them do not even want one.

Is virtual reality (Oculus, Vive, etc…) safe for kids?

In the last times, I found myself arguing a bit on online communities with people sharing videos of their babies wearing Vive or Oculus headsets and having funny reactions. While the videos are surely amusing, I’m worried about little kids using VR and I often comment that… and usually people answer me that there’s no problem in children using virtual reality. In fact, out there there are virtual reality headsets especially crafted for children (like the Mattel View Master of the header image).

At the good old Oculus DK2 times, we all remember the first HEALTH & SAFETY warning stating that the device should not be used by kids under 7yo. That age was risen in 2014 to 13yo: this decision was interpreted by me as a move by Oculus to play ultra-safely. Even now, Oculus says that kids under 13 years old should not play VR. Vive and PSVR come with similar warnings (12-13yo age limit). But people seem not to care about these warnings and continue saying that there are no practical and proven reasons for this limit.

The good ol’ health and safety warning (Image from Oculus Forums)

Well, actually, there are. And I’m going to briefly list them here.

How to fix the USB issue of Samsung Phone continuously disconnecting from PC (useful for GearVR devs)

Today I want to talk about a really annoying issue regarding some smartphones. It is slightly off topic, since it’s not directly a VR topic (and this is a VR blog), but since I use my Samsung Note 4 to do mobile VR… we can say that this is absolutely a VR-related post… can’t we?

The issue is the following: you connect your Samsung phone (in my case a Samsung Note 4, but the issue happens also with the S7 and other models) to a PC and everything works fine. Then you try maybe to move some data (e.g. backup your phone photos to your hard drive… or you try to deploy your APK for an awesome VR game) and suddenly the phone disconnects from the PC. One second later, it reconnects. And then it goes this way, with a connect-disconnect schizophrenia that makes you become completely mad. Even because there’s no exact reason because this happens: sometimes it stays connected more, other times less… but anyway you can’t use it in peace. And for me, during continuous deploy of big APKs of VR applications, this bug has meant an enormous waste of time.

Oculus, USB 3.1 and blue screen of death loop (thread exception not handled)

In these days I’ve completely formatted my VR PC. The reason? A damn blue screen of death loop.

My friend Max was playing with Robo Recall and having a lot of fun. Then suddenly he started having some audio issues, so after a while I decided to restart my PC. Well, blue screen of death. F*ck.

Oh, f*ck (Image from Oculus forums)

Immotionar post mortem: goodbye and thank you

In these days I’ve written a lot of words about my startup Immotionar that is shutting down. I tried to explain you what errors we made that lead to our shutdown and I also tried being of help in telling you how to recover from the psychological downtimes of seeing your company closing. Today I want just to thank all people that have been part of the project and recall some good memories to close this serie… from the next post on, I’ll return talking about VR reviews, tutorials and so on.

First of all I want to thank Gianni, for having taught me so much in these three years and for having been the one starting this virtual reality journey. Actually it was more an augmented reality journey at the beginning, since our first idea was to use Google Glasses to do amazing AR applications… then we tried them and… cough cough… they were really terrible! Right eye had to look at this little display while left eye should look forward… only derp could use such a hardware!!

Derp’s eyes are the ideal ones for Google Glasses (Image by urban dictionary)

Immotionar post mortem: how to recover psychologically from your VR startup failure

In this third episode relative to my startup failure (first one was the failure announcement, while the second one talked about the errors we made that led to our failure), I want to tell you how you, as a startup founder, can help yourself in recovering psychologically from your startup failure.

Seeing your startup failing is fucking hard, trust me. It’s like losing a person you love. When you start your startup adventure, you know that you have 90% chances of failing (these are the startups statistics), but you think that this won’t regard you, since your startup is based on a great idea and you’re super-determined to work to make it become a great success. When things become hard, you keep pushing and you continue think that they’ll get better in the end. You don’t realize it is failed until the moment of the final shut-down decision.

Immotionar post mortem: what errors we made in our VR startup and how to avoid them for yours

In my last post I told you that my startup has just shut down. If you don’t know it, its name was Immotionar: our purpose was to offer full body virtual reality to every kind of headsets, mixing VR HMD with body tracking sensors like Microsoft Kinects. An innovative product, that has failed nonetheless.

With today’s post I want to highlight some errors we made, so that you can avoid them in your startup journey (if you plan in becoming an entrepreneur).

So, this is a list of the main keypoints I want to higlight.

Immotionar VR startup shuts down: f**k you all.

With the classical “thank you all” post, the adventure of my virtual reality startup Immotionar has closed. We tried to push virtual reality beyond its limits for 3 years, adding full body of the user in the virtual world without worn sensors, but in the end we lost the battle.

I made such a strong title for this post not because I hate you (I love you, my readers!) but to mock all those thank-you-posts that are all full of hypocrisy: when you close your company, the last thing that you want to do is be kind and say “thank you to everyone”. When you close your startup, you feel sadness, anger, shame, emptiness: a mixture of all the worst feelings… the ones your mum has told you not to feel in your life. “F*ck everyone” is the title that every shut-down post should have… it would be more honest.

I’ll try to not make this failure useless, explaining you what I’ve learnt in these hard times. Especially I want to explain you:

• The errors we’ve made, so you won’t make them as well;
• How to recover psychologically from such a failure;

My next posts will be about that. It will hurt, but I hope that will help someone else in his/her journey for becoming an entrepreneur. Stay tuned.