Fostering Resonite’s Collaborative Maker Culture with Creator Jam Founder Medra – Voices of VR Podcast (2024)

Medra is the CEO and founder of the Creator Jam, which is a non-profit that’s been consistently organizing weekly and monthly collaborative-building events within the social VR platform of Resonite (and originally within Neos VR) since June 2, 2019. Resonite’s technological architecture allows for the rendering and editing of content in real-time in a collaborative fashion, which has led to a rich maker culture within Resonite as embodied by the Creator Jam Community.

Neos VR and then Resonite were both developed by Tomáš Mariančík (aka Frooxius). When I interviewed Mariančík in 2015 at GDC, I had regarded him as one of the few “mad geniuses” of VR. He had won 3rd place in two game jams at that point including 3rd place in the Oculus & IndieCade 2013 VR Jam with SightLine, and then 3rd place in the Leap Motion 2014 3D Jam with World of Comenius. Then he would go on to win 3rd place in the Oculus & Samsung 2015 VR Jam with Neos The Universe after participating in the Rothenberg River Accelerator at the invitation of Tipatat Chennavasin. When I interviewed Chennavasin in Spring of 2015, he talked about recruiting Mariančík for the Rothenberg Ventures River Accelerator by saying,

The mandate I had was, find awesome people in VR and support them and help them. I got to do that. Sightline the Chair was one of my favorite demos of all time in VR. When I saw that, I was never so jealous or angry. I was like, “This guy’s brilliant, smarter than me. Oh my god! This is the demo I wish I was smart enough to think of doing.” And I fortunately found his contact. He was in the Czech Republic, Tomas. I sent them a Skype message and it was just this amazing thing where I had to explain what’s a VC, what’s an accelerator program, how can it help them, what are they doing, and they were just kind of shocked, a little suspicious. But fortunately, after a couple talks, we got them out here and it’s just been amazing to see them, support them, and help them flourish as entrepreneurs, but also developers and innovators in the VR space.

After participating in the Rothenberg Ventures River VR incubator, then Mariančík and other Solirax co-founder Karel Hulec started working on his deep vision of Neos VR. That following spring Mariančík wrote a blog post titled “How VR became my day job because I didn’t give up” in what he described as the “Frooxius origin story” to r/Oculus. He details how difficult it was to make it as a full-time VR developer. Despite his many successes in different game jams, he wasn’t really receiving a lot of support from Oculus. Oculus always knew how to support game developers, but didn’t quite know what to do with the more education-focused and experimental apps exploring the boundaries of perception that Mariančík was working on. And to top it all off, the depth of vision of how Mariančík was thinking the medium was also probably 5-10 years ahead of anyone else. He reflected on this in his origin story post by saying,

The trouble is that Neos is a very complex and expansive idea and requires a lot of time to work through all the aspects of it and thorough consideration to make sure everything fits neatly together, because I needed to find a set of basic elements which are both very simple and elegant, but interact in so many ways that they provide extremely flexible, but also consistent system.

I always know what to do from moment to moment, but there’s just a lot of things to do. So I keep working for months, piecing the system and working through it all. But before the system comes together, there isn’t much to show for it.

What I found most difficult is watching as everyone else is showing off their VR projects with quickly made solutions, but with a fraction of functionality, gaining attention, winning awards, participating at events, demoing in public, getting invited to VR shows and podcasts, while I’m piecing together my big vision in the shadows.

I have to admit that it’s taken me this long to really dig into and appreciate what Mariančík has been able to accomplish with what was originally Neos VR, and then eventually pivoted into Resonite. The best description that I found of the core innovation of Neos VR was within a comment on his announcement post to r/Oculus on September 30, 2016 when he started doing a public dev log leading up to the 0.1 alpha release of Neos. User u/pardonmyskeff asked Frooxius to elaborate on the “technical comparisons between vTime, Bigscreen, Altspace, Recroom, Oculus Toybox and NeosVR”, and he gave a very detailed explanation saying,

NeosVR on the other hand has a generic synchronization framework (which is why it took so long to get to the stage where you can have even basic user interactivity like the one demonstrated in the video) and quite novel approach to how network synchronization is done.

Instead of providing networking for specific behaviors and actions, it provides you with a set of very basic elements and constructs, akin to a programming language constructs, from which you build all the behavior. As a result, you only worry about building the behaviors and the synchronization, persistence and collaboration is implicit, it just happens without you having to worry about it.

What’s more, these elements are highly dynamic, meaning they can be created, configured and modified arbitrarily at runtime, meaning you can construct completely new behaviors from within the app. The entire state is part of the same model, so as a result it is synchronized also.

In short, you /could/ use it to create applications like these, in VR and in multiplayer and more. In that sense, it is a bit like beginning of a game engine, although it’s not actually a game engine, but a world engine, it can be plugged into other game engines and sort of creates a layer of abstraction on top of them.

It is also designed to be as efficient as possible with CPU, memory and bandwidth usage. It tries to (or makes it easy to express it so) synchronize only the unpredictable stuff, usually user inputs. As a result, you can have large number of complex behaviors, while using very little bandwidth. Data are transferred only when the relationships or definitions change and otherwise are more or less static.

It’s from this key synchronization framework that has enabled a sort of simultaneous read/write state or a state where you could both render out the state of the system while also simultaneously be editing it in real-time collaboratively with multiple people. This has led to the core innovation of Neos/Resonite where it’s very much a sandbox environment that’s like Garry’s Mod or the Forge mode in Halo 3, 4, or 5 where players could both play and edit levels at the same time.

The 0.1 Alpha of Neos released on November 5, 2016 in a post to r/Oculus where Frooxius described it by saying

Neos is a world engine designed primarily for virtual reality.

At its core is a generic synchronization engine – a system using novel approach to network synchronization to make development of multiplayer social experiences and behaviors effortless and a lot more scalable, allowing to build more complex and plentiful experiences.

On top of this engine is a set of layers and concepts providing tools and interfaces to build content for VR from within VR and in multiplayer. These concepts try to rethink how design and game development should look like in VR, instead of just trying to port existing approaches from a computer screen into the VR space.

Neos VR officially launched an open beta on Steam on May 4, 2018 and Frooxius announced it on both r/Oculus and r/Vive. It would be a little over a year later on June 2, 2019 when Medra would start doing the weekend Creator Jams and month-long Metaverse Makers Competitions. Frooxius continued to be on the bleeding edge of implementing support for technology like Vive’s facial tracking as announced on March 21, 2021.

It was on February 10, 2022 that Frooxius posted a Tweet of a Discord message that showed that his co-founder and CEO Karel Hulec had control over the @Neos_VR Twitter account, and Frooxius said, “Any statements by Karel or the official Neos VR Twitter during this period do not reflect my views, or view of the rest of the team, regarding the values and future of this platform.” It was honestly a pretty cryptic and vague tweet that I responded to on Twitter with a thread tracing some of the emerging C-suite drama between the CTO Mariančík and CEO of Hulex and newly appointed COO of Andrea Maloney. I had suspected that it had to do with differences around the implementation of cryptocurrency within NeosVR.

I found a really excellent Twitter thread by qDot, which is honestly the best recounting of this emerging drama that is traced back to Facebook changing its name to Meta, and then seeing a huge spike of interest in all things Metaverse. The virtual world / Metaverse-connected blockchain and cryptocurrency projects all saw a huge bump of interest, and the $NCR Ethereum token jumped from a few cents up to around 10 dollars in a pump and dump scenario where tons of crypto bros flooded into the Neos community, which was primarily comprised of furry tech geeks and actual VR enthusiasts who were more interested in openly sharing knowledge and culture in the platform in a proto-gifting economy. The stress between the core furry VR users and the influx of financially-driven and motivated crypto bros had reached a boiling point after the CEO hired in a new COO and started posting messages to the main @Neos_VR account building off of the Metaverse hype cycle and announcing a collaboration with crypto artist Mirko Grisendi (@Hurcaland). Definitely check out the Twitter thread from @qDot for the blow by blow, and Thrillseeker also did a mini-documentary on the topic.

Neos VR co-founders Mariančík and Hulec ended up going into some sort of arbitration where Hulec maintained control over the @Neos_VR social media and website while Mariančík went into his coding bunker to create Resonite, which was essentially the same spirit as Neos, but it’s unclear as to what he could and could not use from Neos as their resolution was done in private. But then eventually a teaser for Resonite was first announced on Twitter on Sep 21, 2023

Frooxius and the rest of the team released more context the next day on September 22, 2023 where they said, “We’re launching in October! Learn more about Resonite at our Steam page” with a new Resonite Discord community and Resonite website.

Then they launched on Steam on October 6, 2023. Frooxius and the rest of the team created a pretty seamless migration tool to migrate over user information, assets, worlds, and social connections. For all intents and purposes, Neos VR community was now dead and they fully migrated over into Resonite.

So that gives a bit of the historical context for my conversation with Medra talking about the Creator Jam community and Metaverse Makers Competitions that have been happening consistently on Neos and then Resonite since June 2, 2019. It’s a super powerful platform, and I look forward to capturing more of this history.

This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.

Music: Fatality

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Rough Transcript

[00:00:05.458] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So in today's episode, we're diving into the maker culture of Resonite, which was originally launched as Neos VR. And it's a bit of a complicated, nuanced story, but I wanted to start with this quote from the CTO and founder of both Neos and Resonite. Tomas Mariančík also known as Frooxius so he wrote a origin story blog post on saturday april 2nd 2016 that was titled how vr became my job because i didn't give up and he describes neos in this way he says the trouble is that neos is a very complex and expansive idea and requires a lot of time to work through all the aspects of it and thorough consideration to make sure everything fits neatly together because i needed to find a set of basic elements which are both very simple and elegant but interact in so So he's essentially describing this architecture of Neos, which is kind of a read-write system that is synchronizing all these different changes so that you can be within social VR platform and make changes and edits to the platform in real time. So you can have this collaborative, co-creative vibe that is Neos. It's kind of like a sandbox game. You can think of it as like the Gary's mod of VR, or there's a mode within Halo 3 that I was told by Aegiswolf that's called Forge, where you can actually play the mode, but also edit it at the same time. And so that's the basic innovation of Neos VR and then into now Resonite. is that it has this kind of read-write, collaborative, co-creative spirit to it. But it's also very complex and expansive and an idea that has taken a lot of time to work through all the aspects. And I think probably a lot of folks within the XR industry don't really fully appreciate the innovations that have happened to be able to create that. In this post that Frooxius had made on April 2nd, 2016, basically recounts his journey and his struggles for how he came to the point of working on this full-time. And it wasn't an easy path, but he's one of those mad genius VR developers who really understood the core essence of what makes VR magical. He won third place in the Oculus and IndieCade 2013 VR Jam with a really brilliant piece called Sightline, which really blew my mind when I first saw it and when I had my DK1 and was hearing about all the different demos that people are raving about. This is one of the ones that you absolutely had to see because he was playing with these two concepts of change blindness and object persistence. So normally in our physical reality, objects persist in a space, but in VR, you can play with that. And so he played with this idea called change blindness so that you could Look in one direction and see an object, turn your head and look back, and sometimes you might not notice something that's changed, and other times you would because you notice different major objects that are changing. And so he was playing with this psychological dimension of VR that was... Completely mind blowing and everybody loved it, but Oculus kind of gave him the cold shoulder and he never really got a lot of support. And so he had to really hustle in order to get it out. And then he won third place in another game jam called Leap Motion 2014 3D Jam, The World of Comenius, which is the very beginnings of using hand tracking, but also like educational software that it was the basis of the educational software that would then kind of meld into what became Neos. Frooxius went on to get third place yet again in the Oculus and Samsung 2015 VR mobile game jam with Nios the universe. And that was basically like the powers of 10, but in VR and showing all the different scales. It's really remarkable demo that ended up winning again the third place, which was incubated in the first class of the Rothenburg-Vitchers River VR incubator that was happening from like February to April of 2015. So Tipitat Shavastin was working for Rothenberg Ventures, and he was just absolutely blown away with Sightline. And he actually tracked down Thomas and invited him to come out and be a part of the very first Rothenberg River VR incubator. He collaborated with Karel Hulec, who at that time was really helping run all the business aspects. And Frookius is somebody who is just a brilliant developer, and he just needs to get some food and enough money to live on, and he'll just basically code as long as he can to make these visions happen. And in this post of his origin story, he talks about in 2012, where he went to this Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, and Intel futurist, David Brian Johnson. He was reading a quote from Intel CTO, Justin Ratner, who had said, science and technology have progressed to the point where what we build is only constrained by the limits of our imaginations. And this completely incepted Frooxius's mind in a way that he wanted to dedicate his life to creating technology that allowed us to live into that promise of lowering the barrier between our imagination and what we're able to create with the technologies. And he's really lived into that promise. He wants to create something within the VR that gives you this sense of having like these superpowers. And so really optimizing the level of agency and control and being able to remix and hack everything and really create this creative commons gift economy culture, which is like this real sandbox collaborative collective environments. That is what eventually became Neos VR and then now Resonite. through a number of different disagreements with this co-founder of Karel Hulec, which involved a lot of cryptocurrency and trying to integrate this NCR token within the context of the economy. But that was really always kind of an aspirational connection. There wasn't really a tight coupling between this idea of using cryptocurrency with supporting a metaverse platform. And so Neos was the origins of where this all started. And there's kind of the fork into the second iteration of Resonite. They're actually two separate programs, but essentially the same community. And so he's actually got a lot of support from Patreon and crowdfunding to support anywhere from a team of 12 to 16 other developers to work on this. And then in September of 2016, Fruits just started doing these public dev logs where he was building up to the launch of what he calls this world engine. So rather than a game engine, it's a world engine. And so he announced it on September 30th, 2016 to the subreddit of r slash Oculus, where it's kind of like the intersection of the hardcore VR enthusiast world. with all these indie developers who were making these kind of mind-blowing breakthroughs of what's even possible with the technology. It was a really exciting time to be following that subreddit because there was all these different announcements that are being made of people who were releasing what they saw as the ultimate potentials of the technology. So Frooxius was announcing Neos back in like September 30th, 2016 to r slash Oculus. And someone asked him, okay, what is the basic difference between what you're doing and what other social VR platforms that are out there? And he said in the answer that I think actually kind of describes the nuances of what he's able to eventually go on to create. He said that Neos has a very generic synchronization framework, which is why it took so long to get to the stage where you can have even basic user interactivity like the one demonstrated in the video. It was a quite novel approach of how network synchronization is done. Instead of providing networking for specific behaviors and actions, it provides you with a set of very basic elements and constructs, akin to a programming language constructs, from which you build all of the behavior. As a result, you only worry about building the behaviors and synchronization, persistence, and collaboration is implicit. It just happens without you having to worry about it. What's more, these elements are highly dynamic, meaning they can be created, configured, and modified arbitrarily at runtime, meaning you can construct completely new arbitrary behaviors from within the app. This entire state is a part of the same model, so as a result, it is synchronized also. So that kind of gives you a sense of the synchronization that he was going for that allows you to both be immersed within the program but also edit it at the same time. So why am I going into all of this before we dive into the interview? Well, I think it's important to lay out some of the technological architecture because it's really this innovative technological architecture that is driving the maker culture of Neos VR, which is now Resonite. So this conversation is actually with Medra. It's not with Fruxious. I hope to talk to him at some point. But Medra is a part of the Creator Jam community, which I think is kind of the heart and soul of the Resonite community because they've been involved in these weekly game jams and Metaverse Makers competition that goes for an entire month. And so it's these communities of people that are coming together, making VR within the context of VR. And so I talk with Medra about how that maker culture has persisted throughout the Creator Jam event, which has produced probably over a quarter of all the different worlds that have been made within the context of both Neos and Resonite. And also just to hear a little bit more around this journey from Neos into Resonite and the fracturing and split that happened and some of his take on everything. So we're covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Medra happened on Thursday, July 11th, 2024. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.

[00:09:20.117] Medra: Hello, I'm Medra. I'm founder and CEO of Creator Jam, which is both a collaborative VR building event and a nonprofit organization. Prior to VR, I was a high school art teacher for nearly a decade, teaching all sorts of subjects from introduction art, photography, painting, drawing, sculpture, and computer graphics, which happened to be my favorite. From the ground up, I built a brick and mortar gaming shop that hosted events for Magic the Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Pokemon, board games, and things of that sort. 2017, I just kind of wanted to get back to my art roots, and I started to explore more seriously 360 filmmaking. And I'd been using a Lo-Fi Ricoh Theta for a 360 camera for about many years already. And at the time, I just had a cell phone and Google Cardboard. And for those of you that don't know what a Google Cardboard is, it's a simple headset made up of folded cardboard that you just jam your phone into. And I'd been playing with Google Cardboard, trying to see what like creative 360 degree films were out there. So I'm an explorer anyway, and I just love to find out what new things are going on. And I found this film called Catatonic. It was this horror experience where you're the main character in a wheelchair while someone pushes you along through insane asylum. So I started showing this film to many people and each person experienced it differently. One person experiencing this coincidentally happened to look up at a nurse that was wheeling them. And at the exact same time, the nurse looked down at them and she instantly had these chills that ran down her spine. Right then, I knew I had to get into that art form. But who wouldn't want to be part of something that's kind of like early film? To be able to say you like helped influence a new art form, that was like too tantalizing to ignore. So I purchased a Ricoh Theta Pro and was determined to start making 360-degree films until the technology caught up to more advanced experiences. By late 2017, there was this Black Friday sale at Best Buy for a combo deal which included an HP Windows Mixed Reality headset and a desktop computer. From there, I just deep dove into the art form, mainly looking on Steam and eventually the Oculus Store. I devoured these free experiences looking for bits and pieces of the VR language. And by VR language, I mean this in the way it relates to film. In early film days, no one knew what the film language was. They were experimenting all the time until they figured out what we're kind of used to today, like close-up and match cuts and fade to black. And this all became part of this film language and this kind of vernacular that we're just used to and just know. And at the same time while this was happening, I was filming a short production that was a 360-degree film called Braindrop Taste Test 67. And then in July... a little bit after its release, like a couple months, I stumbled in this software called Neos VR. And the interface was this circular interface, something I'd never seen before. Everything was really wonky and weird, and it was super disorienting. And the next thing I knew, I'm in someone else's world. There's this mirrored cylindrical space, and there's this robot down below. It's almost like I'm in this out-of-body experience. And then next thing you know, I'm in another world. And there's this couple hills in the distance and an abstracted bird-like creature on a hill says, welcome internet traveler. And he hands me this low poly ceramic pot and I just grab it and instantly it breaks. He says, oh no, you've broken it. And kicks me out of the world. It was just, I was in my home world now. I was like, what the hell just happened? It was this fever dream is really disorienting and crazy. I loved it. I was hooked. So that VR I wanted ever since being a teenager in the 90s, it was here. And so I could start importing my 3D creations and looking at them instead of just scouting for filmmaking on site. I could just try out and set up scenes inside NeosVR itself and work on these shots before filming. So I would just grab assets from all over, primarily Sketchfab, but other places too, and make these set pieces for another VR experience we would be working on. And so during this journey in Neos, it was a super duper tiny community. I mean, it's just been released. So you'd hang out with the devs and keep much of the world, your world's public. I mean, there's not really going to be many people coming in other than the people you know. And so it was a lot like visiting an art studio or like some mad scientist lab. Everyone had something they're working on. Or you could just hang out with someone. And next thing you know, the world would devolve into this weird sandboxy playground where there's crazy embodiments that you can take on or someone made. You're playing with odd interactions or toys within the whole environment that you pull out of your inventory, which is this thing that you can just save and pull things out of. And then the small community that was around was friendly, creative, and helpful. And they're willing to like share, teach you and help build. But one example, I guess I should mention is I was building a hub environment and it was from a ripped asset game of a Zelda milk bar. And instantly Fruxious, the creator and Aegis Wolf and this little cartoon fox named Vigilaboo start revamping the world. And this is super common. And they started coding light switches. One started making fans. They start working. They made these beautiful lighting changes. And this type of collaboration is commonplace. And even in its antecessor, which is Resonite, same type of thing. So by the time we get to April of 2019, Neos has their first contest called the NCC, or the Neos Creator Contest. And with a very small population, about maybe like 30 participants, we all had a great time competing and it put a little pressure on us, but not too much stress. And then in May of 2019, there was this show and tell meetup where all people came in and showed these interesting creations they made. And we hadn't had anything specifically like that. And so once again, Vigilaboo had this cool MIDI player and inside Neos and we all oohed and aahed. And there's wonderful conversations we had. And I was talking with this floating brain that had electric sparks all around as we talked neuroscience and philosophy. And the idea struck me. neos needs a community to rally behind the culture was growing but there was no leadership like this time now in 2019 culture probably had like 30 concurrent users and maybe 100 total that come in and out and the sandbox environment attracted a specific demographic kind of like this unique culture that's like a beautiful combination of like hopeful and technologically advanced similar to the kind of creatives you see in like the 1990s subculture And anywhere you'd visit, they would explain this crazy thing they're working on, like, hey, check this out. Or they'd teach you about how something works. And they'd openly share the creations almost always. And so I figured we needed like a bedrock event, something that would embody the ethos of what Neos is, this early Neos, just in case this was no longer going to be there. And a way to build a community, even if someone could hang out for only one day a week, if they're a veteran user or they're a newbie. And so we imagined something that probably is kind of like what VRChat would be today, where it's like lots and lots of people, all kinds of crazy events, all kinds of fun things to do. And what Neos would maybe be, and eventually now that is Resonite, could maybe someday be. And we thought that these type of creators, this kind of unique demographic and people might not feel comfortable there or want to find a nice place. And so on June 2nd, 2019, we got together a half a dozen creators and we built out a little creator jam event and it blossomed to so much more. So since 2019, we've been doing this Creator Jam event for weeks and weeks and weeks concurrently. And so I think we're on 268 weeks in a row coming up. And between that Creator Jam event and other events we hold, like the Metaverse Maker Competition, which is a month-long game jam, we've been able to contribute to having over 1,000 worlds to encourage being built, as well as over 4,000 unique visitors.

[00:17:44.977] Kent Bye: Wow. Well, that's a really comprehensive overview of not only your journey into VR, but also some of the early beginnings of the culture of Neos. And I wanted to take a bit of a step back and have you elaborate a little bit more about your own background as an artist. It sounds like you may have also had some experience with filmmaking. So yeah, maybe you could just give a bit more context as to your background.

[00:18:06.334] Medra: Sure. Probably a really core piece of all of this comes down to I'm originally a painter. I come into a background of just like anyone that's not sure what they're going to do and then realize like, hey, I kind of like this art thing. And next thing you know, what happens is we end up getting into such things as... like what kind of medium do I like? And so it was kind of this toss up between sculpture and painting. And I was always into technology. So I built my own computer in the nineties and had friends that were really into that sort of stuff. And so I kind of had this mixture of like DIY technological stuff, like learning blender when it was just like finally being released as open source and really just hashing through that kind of pain to also loving the visceral nature of painting and so eventually i go to college for that end up becoming an art teacher almost jokingly like oh this will be easy or this is going to be something that maybe i'll see what that's like and i ended up finding i really loved it i was able to kind of influence Actually, I have a good story on that, actually. So I was doing some, it's basically internship as a teacher just to see what it's like. And there's this fantastic firecracker human of a teacher. And so I was walking around seeing students and this one student was really frustrated. And I could see very easily since I already had a painting background, I said, Well, you're using a too small of a brush to try and fill up the canvas. And so I ended up showing how to do what on what techniques and some other types of painting techniques instantly that little fire inside them. And they were just like doing all kinds of creative stuff. Now, hindsight, they were already very creative. This is just barely a push needed, but that's what kept me as a teacher. But back to the, um, the artist stuff, I always kind of like experimenting and looking into what kind of forms are out there and playing around with stuff. And as far as filmmaking, I had always been interested in the medium two-dimensionally, but I never played with it tons. And so finally, when I had moved along after being a teacher and then doing some other things randomly like from making art toys and some other stuff i was like well what would i like to do i love film this is something i'm learning about on my own it's not something i was trained for personally even though i do have training in like art composition and other things formally so i was like okay well maybe i'll try this 360 thing and it was fun and i now i'm much more in a different place where i prefer to build inside virtual reality itself, because I think it has many more possibilities that I'd like to explore versus something that has a lot more pieces that are much more difficult to navigate and might not have necessarily the end I'm looking for in terms of how art would be created in that way.

[00:20:55.707] Kent Bye: Hmm. Yeah, and when I think about the social VR scene, there used to be a lot more other players. There's like Altspace VR and a number of other social VR platforms that have come and gone. I know that there's been some surveys of like into the hundreds of different social VR platforms, but VRChat seems to be one of the biggest in terms of pure social VR in the sense that it's not necessarily gaming centric. There's Rec Room, which I think is, it's social VR, but I feel like that's more of a gaming platform And then with Neos VR, I feel like it's a lot of creators, makers, people who want to get their hands into the dirt of actually making stuff, but actually being in VR while making it. And so the metaphor that I use a lot when I think about the differences between the SVR and other platforms is that, you know, the content management system, there's WordPress and then there's Drupal and Drupal is like, it's a very complicated Swiss army knife of a platform that has a steep learning curve to learn all the different things that you need to learn to use it. But once you learn it, then it feels like the world's your oyster and you can pretty much do anything that you want. And I feel like Neos and now Resonite is kind of like the Drupal of social VR platforms because it does have a lot of power, but with that power comes a lot of complexity. And you trade off between having something that is easy to onboard into like something like VRChat, but everything that's created in the VRChat has to happen on these pipeline and tools that are not native to virtual reality, but it's like outside of that through Unity and Blender, these existing 3D pipelines. But, you know, there's certainly some of that within Neos, but the thing that really, to me, shows what Neos is, is this platform for people to co-create and make these worlds together, but also a lot more types of functionality that we'll probably see in social VR platforms 5, 10, 20 years from now. feels like it's a bit of ahead of its time in terms of the abilities that you're able to do, but also again, coming back to this complexity. And every time I go into Neos VR or Resonite, I would feel like this complete overwhelm of wanting to do what I would think would be something very simple. Like how do I close the menu? And it's like mapped to a button that I wouldn't expect or things are located in a location where I wouldn't think to look. And so I feel like there's a lot of friction when it would come to just the basics of how to navigate and get around. And just the paradigm that Neo slash Resonant use, that's just a little bit different because there's... inventory system. And if I want to put on an avatar, it's not always just a matter of clicking a button, but it's like a three-step process that I have to be walked through by somebody who's there showing me. So I'd love to hear some of like your initial reactions on some of those reflections on the platform.

[00:23:42.048] Medra: Of course. One of my most disgusted reactions is when users not saying myself, they just blow off people's thoughts about a platform. There's a difference between someone complaining and someone having, especially like you or someone else, that comes in genuinely like, let's try this. It would be like trying to use Blender and saying like, well, how do I even do this one basic thing? And you're like, well... If it takes a three-step process, there might be something wrong. And I do feel that when I'm going into NEOS or VRChat or Rec Room or others, each interfacing system feels a little wonky to me, including Resonance. They all have things that work out pretty well that seem comfortable and other things not. And I always liken this to going to another country. that when you go to these other social platforms they have their different culture they have different customs on how to do things including i consider the interface part of that and i do think there's this type of ui need and i think it's all around the board including resonite for something that feels more comfortable i would think of almost like Photoshop's not a great example, but sometimes there's UI interfaces, 2D ones, that are kind of simple, but they have like a little check mark. Would you like the advanced mode? And you know when you're going to get to that advanced mode. I would love to see that within Resonite and elsewhere, where it's very basic. It just gets people to where they want to go in very small things. And there's these kind of nice step processes. Now, The nice part and the frustrating part with Resonite is there's so many kind people to help people along on that process. And there's this type of collaborative nature generally that someone's like, oh, let me help you so much. So we're overwhelming at one thing. Let me help you like multiple people talking to you. But to answer that, I would say some parts are quite intense. I think the inventory system, some of the stuff is going to be getting an overhaul. A lot of Resonite's design has different bits and pieces that have been in different finished states. For instance, that inventory system, all that needs an overhaul. It's going to need some love and some work. And that's known, and I think that's on the list right now. They're focusing on performance, which I think is very, very, very needed. If they want to have events in there that are large, they're going to need that. And certainly our event would love to see some performance boosts. But to further on that, like the world exploration, that's kind of mixed. Like it's not as polished as VR chats, but it has like some elements that work as far as when you leave and enter a world and stuff like that. Now, I guess I'm getting into the weeds, but yeah, that's a little bit rough. I do like some elements in Resonite that are a little bit alien, I would say in almost ways where the interfacing can be almost three-dimensional. And I feel that even though that feels weird at first, it feels super comfortable because like, Just like if you open up a portal in VRChat and everyone walks through, that feels natural. If you open up a world orb and everyone clicks on it to go in, that can feel more naturalistic, but like having something that gives you this transition thing, I'm going to do this and then here. Now leaving worlds, that's a mess. But now you're just getting in, I'm getting into the heavy stuff of it all.

[00:26:57.136] Kent Bye: Yeah, and just to clarify the leading worlds, there's a couple of events that happened during Rain Dance and I was going into a world and then they were like, oh, you need to make sure that you close out of your previous world. And I'm like, wait, what? So it was like in VRChat, you just go from one world to the next and it's very linear in that sense. But is that what you mean? Is that you can actually be in like multiple worlds at the same time and that you actually kind of have to go out of your way to close out, you know, a computer that you open up multiple applications and you'd have multiple things happening at the same time or otherwise just kind of close them out.

[00:27:28.357] Medra: yeah that's a good way to explain it like even in video games that are two-dimensional you're moving to the next level everything like even if you're loading you're going one part to another to another each part's its own scene and all the other social platforms the same in this one it's different so that paradigm and it's helpful to have almost like multiple tabs in windows to have that but you There's no mechanism to understand. Now, what's kind of funny is in Resonite, it still has some legacy stuff. And I have those checkmarked. They're in like a hidden little space where I can checkmark. And it has two things I use a lot, which hopefully when the UI rework is complete in a way that's much more cohesive, that there's one where you can have multiple windows up just like you would have in windows like microsoft windows or mac and you can kind of have all these inventory systems and other stuff around each other which is super useful so you can maybe have your worlds tab up in one space or something else around so i have that checked so i can basically have these legacy things so i can show people my inventory in public worlds so i can help illustrate like what's going on inside secondarily the one that we're kind of talking about with the worlds so when you go into another world it's kind of like you're in this chain of i'm in my home world now i have this other world open another and your computer just starts getting heavy because it has a lot of things in the background right well one of the legacy options that's really neat is you have this ugly piece of ui but it's cool that has like a necklace and it's almost like this little chain of one orb where you may be at and then another one that's connected like a family tree almost with another one chained to it another one and every orb you have opened is on this like necklace that you can see and you can basically go between these worlds just by touching them on this necklace. So it's really, really nice. But also you can hold on to one of the orbs and basically make it disappear. So you can close the world more naturalistically, instead of clicking one modal into another modal into another modal, just to say close world. So

[00:29:32.321] Kent Bye: Yeah, as you're speaking about all this, the thing that comes to mind is that Neos, I keep saying Neos because that was my first introduction, but now it's Resonite. And we can, I'm sure we'll get into that. But before we dive into that whole transition, I feel like these platforms developed by Frooxius, it feels like by computer programmers for computer programmers, like here's the Unix or Linux, or here's how to have the most power as a user to create and to really optimize for that kind of power user who is going to be going into this platform to be able to create. And my experiences as I've gone in is, like I said, I'll hit into some of those user interface frictions. And it's hard for me to really articulate how confusing the VR chat interface might be. If I was introduced to that, it could be just that I've seen it evolve over time and I've used it a lot more. And so it's just a lot more comfortable. So that thing that you're referring to before, but it does seem that this as a tool is really tuned and refined to prioritize those people who are wanting to really get into the weeds and set all the different advanced settings. It almost like, Neo's defaults to like showing you all of the advanced settings and that it could benefit from simplifying some of that and really getting to the heart of, okay, what are the things that most users are going to need? And what are the things that are going to be still available, but maybe hidden so that it's not so overwhelming or complicated. So yeah, it definitely feels like it's tuned towards people who are makers and computer programmers.

[00:31:03.072] Medra: Yeah, I would agree in that aspect. Certainly, there's one where we're talking about before about getting used to some pieces, but the advantage for the platform's demographic slightly is to have the Linux thing. I agree with that analogy quite a bit. Some aspects are just getting used to it, but other ones, there's this issue where... you open up an inspector and anyone that would, and I guess I'll describe that better. Since it's a sandbox platform, just like if you were to use Blender or something else, there's a large amount of options. And for anyone that wants to get used to using something like a Blender, There has to be some kind of segue into it, some kind of way to feel comfortable. And for Blender, that's not always the case sometimes. Everyone goes through this donut tutorial, which I haven't used, but I know all about it. And so with Resonite and Eos, there's this type of thing where if you can get over some of the little bit of the interface things, which I do consider some of the UI interfaces is tolerable with time. And that's not like trying to be supervised, but I think that there's little bits and pieces that are enough to like, I can go into a world, I can close a world, I can use my inventory. but if you're wanting to get into more heavier stuff using the different tools that requires like it's kind of like the maker pen like the maker pen for me is not intuitive like it's confusing but it's pretty interesting but they have maker classes which is fantastic and you can graduate it's really cute to have this little degree that you get by taking a class and i think that's neat well This segues slightly into what Creator Jam does. People come into these places super disoriented, and I come into pretty much any metaverse really disoriented. I like that kind of disorientation. But some people, they have high anxiety, or they feel real uncomfortable. And so we're there to greet them. But one of the goals is to say, hey, I know this might feel complex, but one thing you can do in here that's really easy to do is you can climb on things because you can just use your grabbing mechanic where you normally grip something to just grab and climb on something, which feels naturalistic. And another one that's really natural to do is to grab an object. So I could hand you a cube, I could hand you a building, a rock or anything, and you could just, as I'm handing it to you, it's an interactable object. which is something that's unique inside Resonite is you can pull out all kinds of models and other things, sounds, videos, and I can hand that to you and say, okay, let's move this around and turn this into some kind of environment by just kind of like the similar thing to like having blocks or Legos just to kind of place things around. And next thing you know, you're starting to have something built. And that's where I think People don't show that off enough in Resonite. Instead, they say, oh, look, you can do this, all these crazy things when really, if you had a bunch of good assets like rocks, you can put them around and next thing you know, you have this beautiful cave or beautiful environment you're hanging out in just by moving around stuff, which I think that part is an advantage of what a sandbox is that's more intuitive and okay, if that makes any sense.

[00:33:59.443] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I think part of my experience of going into both Neos and Resonite have been that there's inevitably some point in experiences where at the end or at some point during the process, it turns from you having the experience into the process by which this experience was made. There's kind of like a show and tell element to a lot of the experiences I've had within these platforms because people are using these tools and they're like, oh, hey, let me show you what I did. And then at the end, they're peeling behind the scenes and showing some of the different maps and stuff. I think during my experience of Alien Rescue by Jason Moore, there wasn't as much of that within the context of the actual performance. It's like a live immersive theater experience. And I've talked to Jason where he was saying, look, the type of experiences he wanted to have as a director and as a creator, he had much more control to really fine tune, especially with the onboarding, the experience of people coming in and having this live immersive theater type of experience within the context of like a social VR platform. So he chose Neos VR and now is on Resonite. But at least from the different experiences that I've seen at Raindance, at least, you know, three or four of them, it was almost like an inevitable part of like the Resonite experiences to like, you know, have the behind the scenes show and tell of like how this was made.

[00:35:16.601] Medra: That's very true. We did that with one of the earliest Resonite experiences, but there were some prior NEOS ones, and we thought we'd set the tone of having a show-and-tell as part of it because... And I do think that's culturally very, very common because... It is definitely like this mad scientist lab that someone, they might spend literally a week making some kind of meme joke, something that's highly complex and fun, spend a week coding that. That's insane. But I mean, great. So they want to share this. They're like, hey, check out this weird thing I've made. And almost like someone with a trench coat with some kind of cool, weird stuff. You're like, hey, check out this weird explosive thing. And you're like, OK, cool. And for instance, someone might show a thing that was built that you can wear these glasses that allow you to, when you're talking, it shows things reflect off of the objects, kind of as if you had echolocation. Really creative. It uses a depth map filter and some reverberation of the light to do it. But anyway, so this type of show and tell has been from the core and sometimes it can be a little bit overwhelming. Other times it's really enchanting and fun. And by that, we thought since Creator Jam, we're all about like encouraging people, hey, you want to try and tinker? We'll encourage you to do it. Get that artist inside of you to kind of have fun and play. And so we figured, well, maybe part of the Rise of Atlantis experience, which we built a majority of what is seen there in one day, which I think is pretty shocking to many people. But that's because of that collaborative element of everyone just peeling back the curtain saying, oh, look, we just put these rocks together here and these other things. And probably there's also this underdog-ish feel like, hey, check out all the cool things you do, like this weird type of advertising in some ways, which I think is not necessary. I think it's better just to show it more of adding to the wonderment of how something can be special or how something can be utilized. And I think different experiences won't always need to have that. And I think because Rise of Atlantis kind of set the tone for that, that other Resonite experiences were thought like, well, why not show that too as like an extra, kind of like a director's cut version.

[00:37:26.448] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, I think it's probably worth unpacking a little bit about this split from Neosphere into Resonite. And I'll give a little bit of the recap from my outsider's perspective as I was watching it unfold. And it really, I think, came to a head February 10th of 2022 when I started to see Fruxious, who's the CTO and one of the co-founders of Neos VR at the time, start posting Discord messages. And that at the time, the CEO, Karel Hulec, was the other faction. And that Karel really represented the business side, but also like really getting into cryptocurrency and this cryptocurrency. ncr token and at the time there was a peak of the hype cycle of cryptocurrency and so different tokens were latching on to like these metaverse projects but a lot of them were pretty like vaporware-ish that had very little to do with a lot of what i would consider to be like the metaverse a few of the projects that actually had some virtual world components, but most of them were pretty aspirational. And I think that Neos was probably one of the only ones that was really driven by a grassroots engineering perspective of actually making a social VR platform, but that there seemed to be this huge culture clash between these two factions of the hardcore engineering VR nerds who were like in the platform making these worlds. And then this kind of more crypto broke speculative hype cycle, crypto investors that were coming in and flooding into the community and their entire relationship around the community, just around a number go up type of, I want to make a lot of money off of this cryptocurrency token of NCR. And that it was tied together with Patreon and people would get a certain amount of tokens. So anyway, it ended up being this huge clash where Karel had a control over the NeosVO Twitter and that the people who were actually the users of the platform were kind of revolting in different ways. And that eventually led to the split and then... Frooxius went off and I don't know if he took any of that code from Neos or he just wrote it from scratch or how he was able to go off and do what ended up becoming Resonite. But it seemed like a lot of the core users, the original VR users from the original Neos eventually migrated over into Resonite. And it was very easy to migrate over both your users and world accounts from that previous platform. And so there seems to be like a complete platform shift over to Resonite. But I'd love to hear some of your take of what happened with all that.

[00:39:56.775] Medra: Sure thing. I'll start prior to NCR and its kind of purpose and kind of what people thought about. So from the very beginning, the idea of NCR was this, you're giving money to Patreon and then you get back some kind of cryptocurrency. And then it's almost like, it isn't this exactly, but having like stock in the company. And so people that are early investors would maybe, if the cryptocurrency would ever go up, you'd have maybe some money out of it. No one really cared that much, especially in the early times, but some people would still invest some in it. And then eventually, Facebook changes the meta, and there's a giant hype behind VR. And that just skyrockets NEO's NCR. And so people that maybe didn't have much money now have I don't know, tens of thousands of dollars. And it's pretty insane. And there was also this really interesting idea, while I'm not a personal fan of Karel's, and there's a lot of other information I can give some of it, we'll see. But one thing is there was this idea of a creator's fund. It was kind of like a grant that people would be gifted something that was kind of like NCR. It was its own weird thing called CDFT, which is something that was a token that would convert into NCR. It was kind of confusing and weird. But it ended up helping fund creators, which was pretty interesting. And I thought that's something that might even need to be brought back as far as maybe just within cash. Well, anyway, you have that hype cycle happening. I think that was in October and November. And everything starts peaking up and going up and up and up. And it's nuts. And no one knows how far it's going to go. And instantly, the company has, I think it was like, what, $60 million in revenue? Yeah. because of this. And somehow Karel, who was kind of active in the company and not really, decides to be more active. And then there's this kind of clash because Karel's being Karel, which is by that I mean not really knowing or paying attention to the whole development of what was going on, and Phyrexia's just doing, and team, doing their thing developing Neos. And so there's this clash of kind of like demanding things that were out of touch. and some other stuff that's a little bit more personal and other things that just completely explode. And it ends up causing a rift between the team and Karel. That is one angle of it from inside company. Then you have crypto bros coming in and crypto enthusiasts. And so, and since Nios, and this is no like mystery and some Resonite too, it has a larger furry base. There's different subcultures that gravitate towards it. And you'll see a lot of LGBTQIA within VR culture too. So it happens to be that's a larger user base within Resonite and also Neos. And so you have almost not completely these two subcultures, but enough where it's almost like crypto bros versus furries. And it brought out this spike of a new population coming in that were finance-focused, seeing NEOS as the only crypto-based metaverse that has a viable product. It has something that is already established. It has a population. It has use case. It has all kinds of things. And someone that might not even necessarily be this type of stereotype, nasty finance person is looking and saying, oh my God, yeah, I should invest in this. This is nuts. I mean, based on the hype cycle of, like, they look at Meta and see what's possible in that, in MetaHorizons, and then they see what's possible in Resonite. And they're like, yeah, it's nothing just to throw a couple thousand there or even more in crypto. And so you have... this new population moving in. And there's definitely a subculture within the crypto world culture that is just jerks, that are just this idea of pump and dump, where you pump up something and then you dump that and have ill regard on what you're actually investing in or anything. And so you had this really gross discourse that was going on in, not really in Neos or Resonite, inside the world's, people were pretty good, like inside the VR world stuff, but on Discord and also Twitter, not surprising. It was gross. Some people, I was just utterly shocked on the behavior. It brought out the nastiest things that they would say back and forth to each other. Regardless if someone was pro or anti-crypto, they would just have these broad stereotypes of someone else. And so I remember talking to some people that were like some of the more major investors of the cryptocurrency stuff for NCR. that were not nasty. And they were like, I'm really disgusted by people's behaviors. And what was interesting is people that were like the OGs of like Neo, some of the early people were like, what is going on here? We're like, look and say, why can't people just enjoy it for whatever they want to enjoy it for? And it was pretty disgusting time and disheartening to see people act that certain way. And so it ended up having this type of implosion where eventually there's a battle legally between f*ckius and Karel and eventually moves on to where f*ckius starts developing Resonite. And there's some other things that probably you should talk with f*ckius on. I probably am not at liberty to talk about, may not legally be at liberty to talk about either, but generally f*ckius builds Resonite. and has a project called durian which is the secret version of what Resonite would be and you end up having people test that and people are testing it and testing it and getting it ready and that's i think maybe summer spring or summer of 2023 and so eventually Resonite releases Then we have what we're at now and people do this great migration. So it's kind of, it's always interesting. Like when you're talking about alt space and other type of defunct places like high fidelity and other stuff like that, that they have a population that comes in that's that own culture. And so this was almost like the great migration from Neos to Resonite. I mean, we even had a fun little thing where there's like a Neos funeral that eventually when everyone knew they were probably going to leave Neos. Yeah. that we kind of had a nice funeral to set off in the years of the good times and things like that.

[00:46:10.466] Kent Bye: Okay. Yeah. So the name from Facebook to Meta happened 2021. And so as I look at the Coinbase chart that originally I have a Twitter thread that I made when there was the post from February 10th of 2022, but there was a earlier post from QDOT that really dug into a lot of the specific details back in December of 2021. He was following it a lot more closely. And yeah, it seems like that NCR really spiked up after that announcement. You know, one of the other things that I saw was that people were discussing how there was this kind of like stock buybacks, but instead of stock, it was crypto. And so a lot of the money that was being brought in was being reinvested into propping up and keeping the NCR price high. But it did a pretty big spike at the end of November and then got up to like $10 and then crashed from there. So I'm sure there's a lot of people that got in and got out, but it sounds like at the end of the day, there was this huge culture clash between people that were flooding into the Nios community, but really had nothing to do with the actual experiential parts of the platform and only were looking at it through the lens of a financial investment. And yet how that in-game currency or anything, it seems like that with all the overhead with Ethereum and other things, just for transactions and the, you know, it's not necessarily a great to actually use it as a currency for microtransactions. And so it's more of an asset rather than something that is actively being used within the platform. So I think it was probably at the time when they started to first implement the NCR token, it was way before the huge NFT and crypto craze that happened throughout 2021 happened. But it sounds like that Resonite now is almost like a fresh start using a lot of the same community. So when we talk about Neos and Resonite, they're kind of like the same community, at least at least different phases of when it was.

[00:47:57.392] Medra: Oh, definitely it's the same community or large core. But now one thing that I haven't been able to determine whether it's because of Resonite, if this is a natural causes in a culture, but you'll see people that were core like with Creator Jam or even Resonite just kind of leave and go on to other things. And I don't know if that's a normal VR use cycle or not. But, um, certainly it's maybe, I don't know how much percentage I would say is core the same, but it's definitely cycling. Like someone might been away for a year or three years and then come back and use it regularly. So definitely a large chunk of it is a similar population, or at least made up of some of the similar population.

[00:48:36.650] Kent Bye: Gotcha. Okay. So that's great to hear. Well, it's probably a good segue to talking a little bit more about the community that's there now that's Resonite. Because I know that like in the early days of different experiments in social VR, there was the Wave VR, which became the Wave XR. And it was very event-based. And in talking to Rue, it was interesting to hear her talk about how she would play a DJ set in the Wave and then they would go hang out in an after party. in like VR chat. And so it seems like you can look at the vibrancy of a social VR platform by looking at both the daily active users, monthly active users, but also like peak concurrency. And all those are just metrics just to see like from the perspective of Metcalfe's law, which is that the value of a network is the number of nodes in that network squared. So in other words, the more people that are on, the more valuable it is, meaning that if they're choosing between one platform or another, they might go with the one with more people because there's more opportunities for them to hang out with people that they can Resonite with. So when I think about social VR platforms and kind of the larger ecosystem, but I'd love to hear how you start to think about what's happening within the context of either communities or gatherings or events that are happening within the context of Resonite.

[00:49:49.935] Medra: OK. I foresee that it starts off with you have just a couple events. And Altspace is such a good example of this, too, that you start off with a couple events that have hopefully some varied types of interest and use case. So for instance, we have a builder event. There's also learning events. There's dance clubs and other things like this. And one thing with Resonite that's a little bit different because of the user count that you can have in one world, which I would say 20 is starting to get heavy. If you're at 30, that's pretty much max. I mean, you can have more, but it's going to be really uncomfortable. And so this limits the type of events you're going to have and what it's going to be like. And so a lot of times I consider them almost like little house parties. You can see on the world browser that it shows how many people are in each world. And a lot of times people will visit our worlds. just because they have the most amount of people inside. And so they're like, oh, I want to see what this is about. And I think that's very normal. And eventually I'd really love to see the ecosystem grow and be more like what alt space was, which, you know, you can go to something that is from some kind of church group to someone talking about aliens and improv comedy troupe. to some kind of other type of thing like yoga. It's great. It's great. There's just such a different variety of things to do and there's lots to do all the time. And I think that that's really in any type of big city. That's why I consider VRChat kind of like a big city. when you're in a nice downtown area that's thriving and especially at the right time, there's just all kinds of things you can walk into and do and see. And that's what makes a culture really vibrant and interesting. And I think that's the same for what makes a platform the same way. And so I do foresee if Resonite is healthy and it's doing well, which I think the performance upgrades will be necessary to allow for another step of having more users, which allows for different types of events, because who wants to go to a dance party that there's only a couple of people in it? It feels like you're kind of dancing alone, but when you can have like that 80 person amount of people and now it's feeling lively and you can feel that type of breathing of almost people around you. And so I think not all events need that kind of volume, but to have that option changes the landscape of what events can be. And that also brings in more people. And when you have more people, you have more variety of different types of people. I mean, right now we're talking about furry, but having people that are in other different cultures, like, and this reminds me of something actually very specific. It's not just to Resonite, but So the Japanese culture appears to approach events very differently. It's fantastic. It's almost as if the events are part of just an extension of life that people will come in in the morning before work and do what's called radio exercises, which are a form of calisthenics that used to be around back before television. And there'd be the radio telling you like how to exercise and everyone would exercise together. That is still continued as a tradition. even in vr now and people come in there's even two groups of this doing it one in this type of calisthenics world that's a radio exercise world and another person has a platform it's more than just a platform but it's quite complex they can just pull out of their inventory so they go visit the new worlds of these artists that have built and they just pull out this platform and start exercising kind of like if you could just drive somewhere and do tai chi in a park it's really fantastic And so the Japanese culture basically does things like this. There's nice weekend events. There's always very consistent and common events that are just known to be around and utilize that are just part of everyday life that are integrated into it instead of randomly saying, oh, there's this cool thing going on every once in a while I'm going to go do.

[00:53:34.750] Kent Bye: Yeah. And speaking of the Japanese culture, the piece that you were a part of helping to show and navigate and explain, but also to help produce or direct, or I don't know exactly all your roles of kind of the facilitator of the creator jam and working with these creators from Japan and a piece called Tales from a Mystic Cat. So maybe just give a bit more context for how that piece came about and to be featured within the context of Rain Dance Immersive's best immersive art world.

[00:54:01.516] Medra: So even though we run a weekly collaborative world building event, we also have a month long competition that's kind of like a game jam where people can build anything and we have different categories for that. And then they have that crunch and this kind of impetus to say like, okay, now I have this deadline, I better make something. And so that's where Tales of the Mystic Cats started is they built an art world and it won the art category. And so Maria always likes to explore and see what kind of cool art things are going on all kinds of metaverses and other things and so we gave a tour for her to check out these things and she saw tales of mr cat and said oh this looks great we'd like to see it extended to be able to fit into a festival type of situation And so I've worked with Japanese before, and one cool thing in Resonite, because it tinkers and everything else, there are above people's heads that you can wear translators. So it's kind of like you have your own closed captioning or subtitles. And so that adds to the ability to communicate. And so I'd already been working with Japanese in our Creator Jam events on session A. We make it specifically for Koreans, Japanese, Australians, New Zealanders, and stuff like that. And I knew a lot of the creators for Tales of Mystic Cat. So I asked them, would they be interested in Rain Dance? And they're like, heck yeah, I would. So I acted as a liaison and then noticed that they needed more assistance in the live performance and the polishing of the world to make it more performant. So really, I took on a producer director role that was on the next stage of what that was. And so the person that was original producer still helped out. But a lot of things we brought in some of our own crew to kind of help out. that might have expertise that they did not have. And so we were able to kind of have a collaborative grouping of people from all around the world, help pieces together to turn it not just into an on rails like art experience, which is quite fantastic, but also a live world building performance. Because like we were talking before about showing live behind the scenes type of stuff, how nice would it be to have something more like Amy Sekiguchi that is like, and it wasn't based on that, but just this live thing that builds around you because i always love the idea that when you're building that if you could do it fast enough that everything would just kind of grow around you and that's why the idea for this was let's have this type of two music have this next chapter in what the tale of the mystic cat was which tales of the mystic cat is about a bakaneko which is a cat when they become old enough they become mystical and that means that they can see this they can traverse between the normal realm and then this mystical realm which is like with filled with yokai which are kind of like mythical creatures ghosts and other things it's much more than that kind of like unexplained phenomena that would be the better way i guess to describe yokai So the Bacchian Echo's next journey from the on-rails going through the Festival of 100 Demons, which really means like infinite demons, then now moves on to this next where they're fighting a dragon. And so this live performance ends up kind of being built around you while the dragon is being built in front of you. You see by Gunberry, you see Terrazzo start filling around you like, and all of these and bamboo are just coming up and then rocks and then trees and then starts to have little tiny flowers and birds and other stuff. And then the sun starts changing. And so a lot of the different aspects of this world end up becoming changed from the ground floor being hit with a special type of tool, which People don't need to know what that is, but it changes the floor texture. And so now instead of having this paper canvas space, now they're standing on rock. And so basically my role essentially was a director producer role with other bits and pieces filled in there, which tends to be my role anymore for a lot of things.

[00:58:00.327] Kent Bye: I see, yeah. And there was this, again, really focusing on the process of things being created. And it felt like an analog that I think of is like, sometimes when you're at a live music show, you'll have a painter who's painting live. So it felt like a live painting, but instead of a 2D painting, they're using this tilt brush-like mechanic of, painting these like brushstrokes, but that's actually built in within Neos VR to have their own ways of painting shapes. And then all the other tools of adding in these different objects. And so there's kind of like this collaborative world-building experience of like going from what's essentially like an empty matrix-like room where you see this grid-like floor, but then all of a sudden getting closed and have the scene be constructed around you by all these different people who are helping to co-create this scene And it also reminded me a little bit of the end of the experience that I saw last year of the rise of Atlantis, which was another creator jam. Um, I think that was on the Nios. Was that, was that, no, actually that was probably like the very first Resonite experience that I ever saw, uh, was going into the rise of Atlantis. I think it had just launched earlier in that September or, you know, maybe very soon after that. But I remember going last year to the rise of Atlantis and November to see the rise of Atlantis. So yeah, I'd love to hear any thoughts you have around this kind of launch of the new platform and then very quickly starting to have a piece that's being featured at rain dance.

[00:59:25.950] Medra: Sure, sure. So the migration process was pretty seamless. But one thing that was frustrating is so you move all of, I mean, this is a true example, like from the MMC worlds and the Creator Jam worlds, it represented one fourth of all the worlds built in Neos. That's not an exaggeration. And so we migrated all this and we didn't migrate all the MMC worlds, which stands for Metaverse Maker Competition, but the ones that were. that migration was mostly seamless, but it broke some things. And so, and one of them that broke was one of our favorite worlds that was built was Rise of Atlantis. And so it meant, once again, Maria wanted to maybe see what Brez and I could do. And so I showed her this world and she's like, oh, What about this and this and this? And so I decided this would be a good world to completely remix and revamp and then working with some of the same crew, which is new project, final, final work in progress. They're fantastic crew that helps build our stages for the opening and closing ceremonies for Metaverse Maker Competition. So I knew what they're capable of. They're great to work with. And so we said, OK, let's make this experience for Raindance. And so it was pretty exciting. But We had to go back into Neos, look at the fidelity, because fog volume maps, things that looked really nice in Neos had a different type of render. The render engine completely changed. And so now we had to go in and fix a lot of things. It was pure pain, but we ended up pushing through and making it quite nice. And when you're talking about how it kind of reminded you of the show and tell session and the Rise of Atlantis experience, that's very interesting because that was partially the inspiration for what made me think. I was like, wait a second, because that's how we showed off like saying, oh, well, if you just had these rocks, you could just build them around real quick. I was like, wait a second. when we're doing this Tale of the Misty Cat, that would be very impactful almost. And it's definitely like live painting, certainly, that how nice it would be. Kind of like there's this cartoon I always think of. It's like an old one. I think it's maybe an MGM cartoon. Same people that did Tom and Jerry stuff, I think. And there's this shoemaker. And he's really sad because I guess he's going to go bankrupt or something like that. He has all these unfinished shoes that need to be built. And he falls asleep or something happens and overnight all the mice turn into elves and they start building and fixing things around. And I thought, how cool would this be if we had it so while someone's staying still that just everything goes around. And now an unexpected circ*mstance for that was I realized normally in these experiences it's not cool to talk while something's going on the artist because it's distracting or rude this it didn't really hurt the performance and i found out gunberry doesn't even mind if you get in their face or like right where they're drawing it doesn't even distract his ability or fear from what he can do and so now you had this nice thing where you could mindfully talk about everything while you're enjoying the experience and having it happen but to further on The transition migration, certainly that was good, but there's issues. And secondarily, the rain dance, it's fantastic. It was really nice. It's part of a larger overarching goal is to connect all the people in different metaverses together in a way that's A lot of the creatives are the same people, just a different country, really. And love to see everyone cross-pollinate and work with each other and be able to contribute to each other's works and just share creatively. And I'd love to see that. And that's been a Creator Jam goal, personal goal. And so we'll see if we can pull that off. And it's slowly getting there. Maria's doing a great job with the Raindance subculture of people that grow in there. And I think that that's only going to kind of spread from Raindance our little neck of the woods to other places and slowly kind of that web will become closer and tighter.

[01:03:12.825] Kent Bye: Yeah. This whole idea of a live painting within VR is for me, when I go into a virtual world, sometimes I want to have everything load in. Like when I go into VR chat, everything loads in. So when I go in, the world is kind of locked in. And then in Neo, sometimes when I load in a world, has more of a progressive loading sometimes where i go in and then slowly like things are loading in like as they come down and so it's like more you can get into the world quicker but yet you don't see all it may take you longer to see all the world maybe actually take just as long to see all the world because everything still has to load in at the same time so i've had that experience of like popping into a world within the context of like resonite and then like I was like, oh, go look at this over there. And I was like, oh, I can't see it yet. And they're like, oh, it hasn't loaded. So then I have to wait until it loads. So it feels like, you know, when you're loading a website and you're waiting for all the images to load to get a full sense of what's happening. That's a little bit of that experience that I get on Resonite. And sometimes I almost prefer waiting a little bit more in this kind of liminal space of a lobby. And then when everything is fully loaded, then just let me go into the world because that allows me to be more fully present to the world in a way that feels more locked in, I guess.

[01:04:23.550] Medra: i can i can see that i can see both ends it's neat to see things evolve but i totally understand the lobby space and having things that are like pre-loading worlds like you're in a partial piece or something else like that that ends up being something that you kind of stay in first while everything preloads it reminds me a lot when you're talking about that of janice vr one of the coolest things i loved about janice vr which is an earlier social vr thing was they had windows like they're kind of like doors and each door would preload like the other world. So it felt like the seamless dream you never ended walking through. So you'd go through another world, you're just in there next and in there next. It was fantastic. And I think with the performance upgrades, hopefully, ideally, we'll add a lot of the elements of having some level of preloading that would then have it so someone comes in that they're not waiting for everything to load in and cache. And there's deep insights that I talk with other devs that help with Creator Jam that we know all the reasons for this and why. And so we certainly will see a little bit of that improve, definitely with some performance upgrades. But I totally agree that When you come in and the world's just there, it's really nice. Now, I also feel personally weird sometimes when you're just going from one VRChat world to another that there's this type of almost like when you're playing video games and it's like, OK, time to load. And you just go get a sandwich. You go do something else and then, OK, now I'm ready to come in. That part's a little frustrating, but I can understand that it would be nice to have something where there's not even that lobby. There's something else that you're just going to, and it's going to have it preloaded. I mean, for instance, like maybe the under presents like that's fantastic. You know, you go into one thing and then you're just loaded into the next one when you go there. But yeah, I would agree that some of that would be nicer and hopefully we see improvements that way.

[01:06:10.444] Kent Bye: Yeah, there's just different trade-offs, I think, between the preloading versus loading, because you get disconnected from the other people that you're around. You get shot off into this liminal space of being in between worlds. And then there's the more fragmented experience when you have things progressively load, at least from my experience. But I did want to dive into a little bit more of the back end, just in terms of my understanding, at least, is that when Frooxius initially built Neos VR, that it was largely still connected to Unity in different ways, and that Resonite still has some connections to Unity, although it sounds like there may be a little bit less connections to Unity. So I'd love to hear if there's plans to completely disconnect from Unity, or if there's benefits from having people who already know how to work with Unity have some connections there. Obviously, because, you know, VRChat has a very tight coupling, you know, it's like, indelibly connected to Unity, because it's built upon Unity and all the different tools are kind of like a layer on top of Unity with their Udon Sharp and everything else. But with Neos, and then with Resonite, how closely tethered to Unity is it?

[01:07:15.526] Medra: I'm not sure the percentage, but there's certainly little bits and pieces that are connected with Unity. I used to know that a little bit better. I think it's changed over time also, but I do see that in the future it will be untethered from Unity altogether. Right now, a large chunk of it is Frux Engine, which has a lot of the different pieces, and some of them also are connected to different open source projects. and so i do foresee that that'll eventually be wholly and completely untethered from unity i think there's just a few different bits and pieces and as there's different types of data model reworks and other things going on chunks of it start chipping away now the advantage if you do already know unity and you're going into resonite a lot of the different internals that you see in a world when you're actually starting to do like deep dive world building looks very similar like the components look very similar to kind of the things you would see in unity and there might even be analogs that are almost the same and so someone that comes into unity that would come into resonite would feel familiar in the language of what they see around and that's pretty much i think most of what the connection is with it

[01:08:22.509] Kent Bye: And from what I heard you say earlier, is the instance cap size, is that like a hard limit of 30 or 32 or is that something that is just more of once you get to that point, then everything just starts to choke up?

[01:08:33.921] Medra: So what's interesting about Resonite Worlds, your home world or whatever, you spawn up an instance that's hosted on your own computer unless you have a special server that you have it hosting on that you can make yourself. And so someone comes into this home world, we'll say, and you can set the limit to whatever you want and have as many people come in until your computer just melts, which is pretty fun. Not fun to have your computer melt, but we've done load tests and I think I've had... 60 to 70 we've had i think tests were hit over 100 but you have to actually take off your bodies like a lot of the processing costs right now are in having a full ik avatar so every time and and vr chats worked around some of these they have all kinds of little tricks around this type of same problem because these are a lot of similar problems which are when a full ik avatar moves mesh is deforming which has little tries on it triangles and other information Every time those things are moving, it has to decode that information. And so the more of that, it compounds and compounds. And then if you're sharing a world where you're actually able to sandbox and build now, if I move some information from me to you, like a hand something, everyone else in the world needs to know that information too. And so there's this interesting overlap of data that needs to be swapped and passed around and it kind of compounds and you have to have lots of other tricks so basically you can decide on who can stay in a world not and all kinds of other things so when you set that cap limit You can basically do whatever. But generally, with full-body avatars, 10's a nice, healthy amount. 20 depends on the avatars. 30, probably not so much. And a big part of that is in VRChat, they have poor, good, and very good avatars. The problem with Resonite... is you go into it and someone could put like, what's great and awful at the same time is if I wanted to give you some kind of cool system, let's say it's an entire locomotion system for a vehicle. So you could just attach it to your cars and next thing you know, you have this cool car. I can hand that to you in a little cube, I can hand it to you in a little toy car, anything just to give as an object. Well, people can put on their bodies all kinds of specialized systems and things that are just nuts that you really shouldn't be doing when you're having on you in a social world because you're just compounding the amount of data and information people having to load and save. Kind of like when you're talking about loading into a world. Now you're loading someone's avatar that decided instead of being a certain size, be quadruple, 20 times the size. And sometimes people don't even realize that's a problem. And so that also compounds the issue and makes it difficult. And once again, requiring some sort of systems in place to kind of offset and allow for more volume of people.

[01:11:26.836] Kent Bye: You mentioned something along the lines of like it's happening on the local computers. Are there any centralized servers for Neos VR or is it a completely decentralized peer-to-peer type of metaverse network?

[01:11:38.894] Medra: It's a decentralized peer-to-peer. I think Resonite's toying with some just public worlds that they're hosting themselves for some stuff. But primarily what you do is if you're wanting to have something that's more hefty that can host a world, they call it headless because it's essentially using Resonite without the VR component. And so you're not basically putting on a VR headset on your head. So it's headless. and one that can spin up a server using cloud-based networking things. Like, for instance, we used, oh, I think Hetzner. We used basically some different cloud-based services. And because these are located in different parts of the world, we have to kind of be mindful of where they're located for our audience. So it found that West Coast was best for being able to handle Japanese and others. We had someone on a VPN in China, which was problematic, but thankfully we were able to mess around with our settings on the server itself to kind of overcome that. And so to answer your question, yes, it's mostly peer-to-peer. You can have servers, but there's no official Resonite. And I think that's the same with like VRChat's costs. The cost of having servers and using that data constantly is quite high or can be quite high.

[01:12:48.922] Kent Bye: Yeah. And I think the challenge is like with a platform like High Fidelity, which I think was probably one of the first aspirations to try to do this completely decentralized approach to creating worlds was that, again, it kind of gets back to the Metcalfe's law for where the people are at and in that most people wanted to just have the self-hosting system. Like when you go into VRChat, you upload it to their servers and then everybody can just join in. I think of it as hosting your own website. Many people have some sort of hosting service where you could have them do it, but it's almost like having your own servers in your closet and the sysadmins who are running it. And so there's just a lot of infrastructure requirement that I think is another barrier for people entering in. If they want to experience some of these things, then they have to have the technical aptitude and the resources to be able to host some of that stuff. So Like in platforms like VRChat, they have enough venture capital funding to basically subsidize all of that so that everybody's giving a free ride, but they're going to have to figure out their creator economy and figure out some way to really make all that sustainable and scalable. Whereas the approach that Resonite is taking, it may be like more scalable in that way, but it's also offloading a lot of that cost into like people's own individual infrastructure. So I don't know if that's accurate with what I'm saying.

[01:14:09.741] Medra: Yeah, I would think that that's accurate. It does. This peer-to-peer is advantageous in one way and not another. It's certainly like hosting your own, but it also is not just, sometimes you can have host your own where it's kind of like a closet and using your own internet, but other times you can also use cloud services that are not super duper expensive depending on the circ*mstance and what it is. Even with the peer-to-peer, you can have your normal like house party style, kind of like when you're talking about with Roo and saying like that people go from a large event down to like a more of a hangout space. Hangout spaces in Resonite, pretty much no problem to host your computer unless you have a really, really low performing computer than maybe in like bad internet or very slow internet. But I'm very interested. I would love to see the numbers behind the scenes on how much the expenses for VRChat, because it might not be viable for them to have that many servers that they're using and everything else with all that venture capital money and wanting to see a return on investment. I don't know if it's through user data or what, but I don't know. That might be something that's not viable and they're just whittling down the money until they have to say, sorry, we can't have servers like this. I don't know.

[01:15:19.520] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think they're still trying to figure it out because, you know, obviously they just had a round of layoffs where they lay off around 30% of their staff. And I think it's a larger question that a lot of folks within the industry are starting to think a little bit more about just in terms of they want to have a creator economy. But I think part of having a creator economy is that there's revenue streams so that it's actually sustainable as a business. When I look at Resonite and what Fuchsias has been able to do, I see that there's actually an incredible amount of money that's coming in through Patreon, somewhere around like $19,000 to $20,000 a month, which certainly a lot of the work that has been done with Resonite has been through Fuchsias. And I'm not sure how many other people are able... to sustain themselves through that income that's coming through the Patreon. But it feels like the type of community where there's a substantial amount of money that's coming in through that. Obviously, like VRChat has their VRChat Plus subscription. And so, yeah, maybe you just comment a little bit about whether or not it's a small enough team at Resonite that that's plenty of money for them to be completely sustainable or maybe even profitable now. And then as they move forward, how to really scale that up and actually... have other ways of doing all these other improvements and things that you're talking about with optimization and performance improvements and all these other to-do list of things to be done.

[01:16:34.929] Medra: Sure. Sure. I would say that first of all, there's this kind of joke about like suspiciously wealthy furries. And, um, well, I wouldn't say that's always the truth, but definitely even since Neos, the grassroots community has been really generous and that's included for a nonprofit organization. When we do fundraising for our competition, that it's been amazing. Like people have been very, very wonderful to help. And so as far as the money coming in, From Patreon, if that's sustainable for the team, I can't say one way or the other, but I would say that I wouldn't think that that would be the only thing they're going to need as a revenue stream in the future. Likely, it'll be intelligent to have multi-tiered. From any business, having one source of income is dangerous. would say probably having connections with businesses because certainly there's definitely use cases with businesses and that would be a nice revenue stream and then additionally this is definitely further down the road having some kind of career economy almost like some kind of gum roadish type thing that they get like a little bit of cut on the transactions but then they're able to have that but that's assuming the population grows as well like kind of more vr chat level and then you possibly might even be smart to have a server service where they already have something worked out with another business that allows for people to have a service that's really easy to set up. Cause we were talking about how, like when you're setting up a headless server, that's someone that knows how to do that stuff. not someone randomly that's like, let's click a button. Here's a server. I mean, you can do it for yourself, but like they have something that's for an event or something else that's a little bit more heavy that might require someone with expertise to have that streamlined and say like, oh, pay X amount. And now you have this nice heavy server that you can use for your event. Those are nice. ways to kind of start streamlining and making it to be a little bit more sustainable. And so I can't say whether it's not going to be sustainable, but I don't know. That'll be like seeing years from now, like what's working and isn't working. Certainly.

[01:18:34.915] Kent Bye: And there's also a bit of a stereotype with furries that are very involved with both the IT areas, but also system administrators and folks who basically keep technology infrastructure up and running. So I guess it's no surprise that there'd be a significant furry population on a platform like Neos that may require a little bit more technical aptitude to get some stuff up and running. So yeah, it sounds like there's some interesting intersections there.

[01:19:00.774] Medra: Yeah, definitely. Yeah.

[01:19:02.219] Kent Bye: Well, I also wanted to touch a little bit on some of the features of Neo so that I think is pretty distinct, which is like this whole visual programming language, where I know I've seen some books show behind the scenes of how things are wired up in it. It's like a node based system with all these boxes with lines connected to each other, which I think is good for like simple things. But sometimes when they get too large, then that's part of the reason why Udon sharp was created in the VR chat side was to be able to have people just write the code because It could be easier to maintain and debug if it has some coding aspect. But having a visual programming language means that you could potentially start to wire things up and actually still be immersed within VR. And actually, if you go all the way back to like Jaron Lanier, they had a whole like visual programming language was the VPL. That was at the very beginning of the ways that virtual reality could be connected to like new ways of programming things. And so I think there's a lineage there that goes back to like the very early days of the late 80s of VR. VPL with the virtual programming language. But yeah, I'd love to hear any comments on what you're able to do and some of the different trade-offs of that type of node-based visual programming language within Resonite.

[01:20:11.516] Medra: You can do quite a bit, actually. It doesn't have arrays. For those that are more into coding, people make arrays out of doing a lot of different other tricks. But we've even seen to where people have made neural networks inside Resonite for one of our entries that was insane, which I never expected out of a visual coding language. And so it is node-based. There is a certain learning curve. It's definitely nice to be able to visually show what's going on. And a lot of times, because you're in a spatial environment, you're able to kind of have things put in different areas. So you can kind of say like, oh, and this area is going to be this mechanism. And this area is something that's storing this information. And so a lot of times, originally it was logics, and then it was completely revamped and reworked. Code completely changed, not the same at all, to Flux. And generally, there's two different ways this kind of sends information. And one is it writes information, and another one, it triggers it. So one thing might write the data to say like, hey, this is the stuff it's going to save as far as like maybe a timer or something else like that. And the other one says, okay, when it hits this time, now play a sound or do this other thing. And so it's quite... fun and interesting to have this way to code that maybe people aren't used to now typing out. They both have their advantages and disadvantages because like node base is nice because you can visually see things sometimes and be able to kind of like point at and especially in a VR environment, actually just directly point with your fingers or laser pointers or whatever type of tool you want to use. And then what's cool about this stuff is when you compile the code, What you actually do is you pack it. It's called packing it. And you put it into an object. In Unity terms, it's an empty slot. But it can be anything inside that slot. So it could be a bowl. It could be an apple. It could be a dinosaur. You could pack it into whatever. So... sometimes the code that you packed inside there would be something that relates and is useful to the thing like maybe the dinosaur roars every so often or and maybe it moves but maybe it could be something else entirely that it's maybe something for an entire game mechanic for a sushi building game what's interesting with the difference between that like node-based and then the typing like so that the typing version of like the written is nice but typing in vr is atrocious and so it would be nice to see someday a mixture of people being able to build with flux and then also being able to move your typed stuff into resonite and be able to use that as well now there is some ways already to kind of offset that and because it has some nice web sockets and some other types of tooling you can actually build systems that it interacts with outside of resonite and that's been done quite a bit there is a sushi game that ended up doing a lot of the heavy lifting outside of resonite on on a server that was just like holding information that they just typed out all the code, which is open source for people to see. And so you could then have this interplay between people that want to code in a traditional sort of sense in that way. And then other people visually having the stuff inside game to kind of interact with each other.

[01:23:29.801] Kent Bye: And I think when I've been talking to a number of different people within the context of VRChat, and there's the public instance and private instances that happen there, and there's a lot of ways of controlling access to different worlds. And I think a challenge that has plagued these types of virtual worlds is how do you go from... entering in, not knowing anybody, and then getting connected to some of these different peer groups so that you can actually get into some of these different either private instances or events, or in the case of VRChat, now that there's groups, then that's helped to create new opportunities for people to find each other. One of the challenges is like, how do you go into a world and find the people that you want to really connect with, the people you Resonite with, the people who you consider to be your tribe? And so what are some of the different mechanisms for that in the context of Resonite, if there's any group system or how do people get connected to some of these communities that may not have a public face?

[01:24:26.744] Medra: Oh, it depends on what it is. Sometimes it's just this kind of gatekeeper. You always have to know someone that knows someone in certain types of things. Resonite's so small that it's not as much of a barrier, but a lot of times, and this is kind of an issue even with Viotrat, you go into a public world and it might be crazy. Thankfully in Resonite, it's not so crazy, but you go into a public world, you can kind of hopefully meet some like-minded people. Like let's say you're an artist and you're just trying to find that artist. like that artist community it might not always be so easy i mean it would be fine but that's why like we have our event that didn't come into we're trying to make it open so anyone could come in and then find looking for but other types of ways to do it unfortunately right now there's not an event system i think that's something that's on the on the list of things to do if you can go to an event that's public facing event that can kind of get you into private facing events hopefully and that's one of the ways to do it I always am concerned that I don't know if this is a natural thing that occurs, and this is also within culture, that people go into their own separate tribes and then you have to kind of find that waypoint that takes you into that tribe, which is unfortunate and makes it more difficult for people to find friends, for people to find like-minded individuals.

[01:25:45.097] Kent Bye: Can you describe a little bit about what are the type of things that you like to do, like more of a either daily, weekly or monthly basis? I know you're heavily involved with this event of these creator jams, but just more casual hangouts or other events or stuff that you enjoy going to.

[01:25:59.732] Medra: VR based?

[01:26:01.454] Kent Bye: Yeah.

[01:26:02.245] Medra: Okay, okay. So VR-based, things I really like to do the most, which I don't get to do as much. I'm pretty absorbed. I love to explore what new creations people have made. That's one of my favorite things. I really, really, really love doing that. Every once in a while, I'll hang out with people and it's really easy to display up a movie. And so I might watch a film with someone And then if I have more time, which I rarely do anymore, unfortunately, I like to build and create different things that play around with the experience. Unfortunately, I don't get to do that much. And so since I'm so heavily involved in VR, sometimes I do a lot of things that are outside VR to kind of balance out not being enclosed in some place and also use that for inspiration.

[01:26:43.908] Kent Bye: Okay. And I know that there was a piece called Luminal that was also in Rain Dance Immersive this year. It was also created within Resonite. And there was one piece that I was like, oh, this looks like a shader. And they were like, oh no, this is actually like doing like a whole complicated feedback video system and everything. And so is there any capacity to show shaders within the context of Resonite or is that something that's still on the to-do list?

[01:27:07.990] Medra: Okay. Shaders that are in Resonite are limited, but people do things to get around that. It doesn't have the same shader system as VRChat, unfortunately, right now. They are working on that heavily as we talk. And hopefully that'll be released in like maybe six months, a couple months, maybe sooner. And you can tinker with anything from the inside. Like that's one thing that's a bonus within Resonite. So you can tear apart material. And that would be what would be considered a shader in Resonite. And the material, you can have all kinds of things modified on it, and kind of changed around. So it has a certain style and look. And that's something that you can definitely do.

[01:27:47.825] Kent Bye: Okay. And do you have any favorite worlds or worlds that you would recommend people go check out within Resonite?

[01:27:55.943] Medra: There's one that doesn't work quite now after a transition, but I have to mention it regardless, and that is Transposer. It is this idea, I'll just have to get on and say, hey, you need to fix up the world. It's where you switch your embodiment with someone. It's a puzzler game. I've never seen anything like it, where you go to this one part and you end up being pulled out of your body and pulled into the other person's body. And then you end up controlling only parts of your body while the other person's controlling the other part. That's something that they need to fix and people need to check out.

[01:28:28.776] Kent Bye: Hmm.

[01:28:30.037] Medra: Oh boy. Offhand. Like that's tough because I have to think about what people would be into. And like, um, I think recursion labs, good. People like to play Cloudscape Harvest. It really depends on the style of what people are into. If they're wanting to play a game and they're wanting something that's more action-y or this or that or more chill or more social. For instance, something I think is interesting but might not be for everyone is Dugout, which is this World War I bunker-style thing. The idea is that it's a social hangout, which is crazy. But the idea is that you're just kind of huddled in this one small space to kind of like just to have more intimate interaction, not necessarily like physical intimate, but more just intimate, close conversation and other stuff.

[01:29:16.158] Kent Bye: Yeah, I know just in VRChat, there's certainly a wide range of different social VR genres. And I think one of those genres is like the cozy home world or just worlds that are hangout spaces for people to go hang out. And I feel like there's a lot of high fidelity, high polished experiences that people have on VRChat. And I haven't seen as much of those really transportive, immersive type of cozy worlds for people to hang out. And obviously I've only seen a handful of different experiences, but just curious if that's something you've come across very often where there's a real refinement on the look and feel of a space that just feels comfortable to really just chill out and hang out.

[01:29:54.892] Medra: That's a very good point. There's certainly places that are cozy to chill out in Resonite, but a lot of times people are in private worlds for those things for different reasons. What's super weird, and this is definitely a difference in VRChat versus Resonite, a very big difference in my opinion, is in VRChat, you go into a world that's cozy to hang out because it's socially focused and there's mirrors for various reasons. people go there for those reasons. In Resonite, people will go there for a sandbox. So what's cozy for someone that's a typical Resonite user, not someone that's visiting that would maybe be more of a social user, but typical for a Resonite user, is this kind of almost like grid space type of style. You might've noticed this when you see worlds that people are hanging out in, that it's pretty flat. There's not much going on around it visually as far as being visually stunning. And people are just working or watching a video. There's not as much of this, let's build... something that's really massively cozy and hang out there just for watching videos now people do have that for watching films and other stuff but i would say there's definitely lots of polished worlds but not always for the type of core social interaction that is the same as vr chat i think it's for those reasons

[01:31:12.287] Kent Bye: Okay, so I guess one way to think about it is like, it's more like a maker space for people who are making stuff rather than just a hangout space for people who are like watching movies. It's like the prototypical Resonant user is that tinkerer maker who's wanting to have a space that really gets them into that flow state of creation rather than a state of receiving an environment that feels beautiful.

[01:31:34.474] Medra: Now there is plenty of beautiful environments, mind you. And I would say I'm not always the best person to say like, cause for me, a social space like that, especially when it's trying to be an analog of real life, I don't like the analog of real life sort of stuff. There's a specific word for it. I can't remember, but I prefer things that have a beauty to it. There's something that can't be done or seen inside the real world and that's, or meet space or whatever. And so

[01:31:58.465] Kent Bye: Oh, I think the word is like skeuomorphic, where it's like really matching what the physical reality is. And you want something that's sort of more transcendent to reality. That's something that you can only get in VR, it sounds like.

[01:32:10.434] Medra: Absolutely. I'm not anti-skeuomorphic, but I prefer not. Skeuomorphic works. And so, yeah, that's why I probably don't gravitate towards hangout worlds generally. And, and a lot of times this is something that's that, I mean, it's true, a large body of what VR experiences are not for me personally, but totally cool for others is there's a large part of NSFW type of interests. And I think that some of the social stuff that we see really has NSFW underpinnings that are in private worlds, and some of those are published worlds that you can visit, they might not have anything that would be considered NSFW on the surface, but its use case may be. And so I think that sometimes some of those worlds that might be beautiful that are in Resonite might end up being private. And that might also be for personal reasons. Someone doesn't want to publish their world. Did they find it personal? That's also another thing I guess I should mention is that people have their own home worlds, just like you have a home world and that you can even bookmark inside VRChat. In Resonite, you can make your own home world and sometimes that's where the really nice, beautiful places are. People don't publish it because it's deeply personal and they don't want to make that public that this is their own personal world. Those will be sometimes where people will come in and watch movies or hang out, a lot of times actually.

[01:33:32.955] Kent Bye: Okay, so like you can have your private worlds, you can have private worlds in VRChat as well that are like invite only, but it sounds like it's a little bit more of the culture where there is a real privateness to some of those worlds. And yeah, certainly there's a huge swath of what's happening on VRChat that is also in that not safe for work or erotic role play or ERP communities, which I've only kind of been on the edges of hearing glimmers of different stuff that it sounds like that's just a part of Virtual culture that's always been on the internet, whether it's Second Life or VRChat or Resonite or any other corner of the internet that there's consenting adults or engaging in those different activities. So it sounds like that there's what you're alluding to is that there's kind of an ERP or not safe for work scene that's happening there on Resonite as well.

[01:34:18.894] Medra: Oh yeah, totally. And that reminds me of something else when you're talking about private worlds is that just like VRChat with having certain types of levels of allowance of others in, Resonant has that same type of thing where you can make something a private world, public world. They have now one where it's like friends of friends, basically. I think that's Contacts+. or like people you only know that are friends. And then there's this new setting that I can't remember the name entirely, but it's like, basically it can be broadcasting like, hey, I'm free to hang out. And so you can see that. And if you have your special setting on Resonite set up, it'll actually broadcast that to you. And so if you're looking to hang out with somebody that you know, and then you've already marked as a friend, at least at one time or a contact, that it would actually send off like signal like, hey, I'm here to hang out if anyone wants to hang. And so there's that too, which I haven't used. It's not really my thing, but maybe it's something that has a little bit more success or use case.

[01:35:13.420] Kent Bye: Okay. Well, is there any other aspect of the Resonite platform that you think is worth mentioning as we start to wrap up here?

[01:35:22.932] Medra: Well, I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about Creator Jam just for him. Yeah, Creator Jam is a world-building event we've been doing for quite a long time. And we build based on a theme every week. We start off with this idea, and then it can completely change from that idea. And anyone is welcome. They can be at any level. As long as you can grab and move something around, which anyone can do, you can be a part of it. Then from that theme, it just turns into this production at different various stages. It starts off with an event, five hours Eastern Standard Time at midnight to five in the morning. And then we stop for a little bit and then start from 2 p.m. to 8 p.m. the same day on a Sunday. And then at the end of it all, we have something to show for and we publish the world out so people can share what they've made. And we'd like to make this an open gifting culture, kind of like Burning Man. where anything in that world is CC0 or CC BY license. And so what that means is you can grab the object and just attribute to the artist. And so if you find this cool environmental element that you like or you want to have a nice cozy home and you're like, well, this is a cool lamp and I really like these string lights and some other things, you can just copy them and save them in your inventory, spawn them out and build your own world. So we like to invite users in and we're excited to see how we keep evolving with this type of medium.

[01:36:47.044] Kent Bye: Yeah, that reminds me of a lot of what's happening with the VRC prefabs community, which is a database of different assets that you can get and put into your world. So it's a similar idea where rather than being in VR and copying it to your inventory, it's just more of... here's a database of Unity prefabs that you can upload into Unity and then into your site. But similar concept of just this idea of the gift economy of people that are creating stuff and sharing that type of culture. So it sounds like given the fact that there's no real monetary exchange that's happening on the platform yet, that there's a lot of that gift economy that's at this core in Resonite. There's a similar type of vibe that I get within VRChat, just with people wanting to go in and openly create and just have that power of creating something that you can share with people. And then I think there's this point that VRChat's at right now where they're trying to figure out how do you take that kind of gift economy ethos and then make revenue come out of all that. I feel like the way that Neos is set up, it's got a little bit more of the core of that gift economy. And I don't know if they'll have similar challenges at some point of trying to figure out, okay, how do we have enough revenue that's driving everything? Although it sounds like there's many different opportunities to make the infrastructure just easier for people rather than hosting it themselves. There'll be opportunities for people to spend money to host things, which reminds me a lot more of the second life model, which is that in order to have land, you have to actually buy the land. And so even though there's no land to be bought, there's still some potential capital that people would have to invest in order to potentially host some of these different spaces. Unless you're just doing it on all on your computer or at that point, it's more of a, a private peer to peer type of experience. So. Anyway, just some reflections as I think about how there's a lot of gift economy ethos that has been in social VR up to this point. But it feels like it's at this inflection point where it's reached the logical extreme of that. And there's a pivot that's happening in VRChat. And maybe what's happening in Neos is going to continue as is because there isn't that same type of crisis. Or maybe that crisis was really catalyzed with what happened with NCR and the whole attempt of integrating cryptocurrency more tightly into it. And then more of a rejection into, okay, okay, we're going to do something completely different and not have that happen again.

[01:38:59.758] Medra: Yeah, I'm actually worried about slightly this migration, just like in BearChat in terms of the gift account, because you have... Patreon's a really good example of how it can work, but there is a limitation. And a lot of people want... There's this... I can't remember what it's called. There's been a discussion before on how people want everything for free because they're giving up their personal data rights in return, getting things seemingly for free, which is not true. Whereas... giving like a small dollar or a certain amount, then they're actually directly paying for the service, the person, basically being a benefactor to the person. And I hope that people see the benefit of being able to move from like a gifting culture where certainly there's always going to be that person that just wants to make for the sake of making, not worrying about the profit of it, but for people that want to make a living off of it or to also have that supplement personal income I hope that there's enough of a culture of people, people that are willing to feel that it's worth it to give some people some money here and there. And hopefully we can help facilitate and encourage that as well.

[01:40:07.136] Kent Bye: I don't know if the term that you were trying to think of is like surveillance capitalism.

[01:40:11.738] Medra: Yeah, yes, that's exactly it. Yes.

[01:40:16.400] Kent Bye: Moving from surveillance capitalism to these new modes of value exchange, I think the patronage model is one that, you know, it's like Twitch and Patreon and Ko-fi and other platforms that allow people to have a subscription or to help pay for creators. And I think that there's creators that are at the top that are able to make that work. And I think, you know, trying to make that spread out to have more of that value paradigm shift, I think is a value change that I think we're still fighting against. You know, people are used to getting things for free and that this is something that we're kind of entering it into a new mode. And so I think VRChat is actually at the frontier of seeing if they can like make the shift away from surveillance capitalism into some, some other new model that we haven't fully figured out yet. And if they figure out something, then others can also figure out. I think Resonites at that scale where they're able to still sustain itself, at least, you know, get a lot of the core bills paid for the core team through that patronage model through Patreon. But yeah, it's kind of an open question that I think a lot of folks in the industry are starting to think about.

[01:41:18.962] Medra: Certainly, certainly.

[01:41:20.963] Kent Bye: So yeah, I guess as we start to wrap up, I'd love to hear what you think the ultimate potential of VR might be and what it might be able to enable.

[01:41:28.887] Medra: Oh, definitely. This gets pretty crazy, but like I consider... when we move into like technology being really, really integrated, that basically it would be a seamless translation, a perception between others. And I could see something that in the way that we're thinking of it, that you and I are talking, but as we're just using our words to kind of like illustrate things that might be more visually present, that instead we're not even speaking, but we're kind of having an entire environmental and other types of things around us that immediately change and shift kind of like your dreams in a way to convey information. And so it's much more accurate because you can say, instead of like saying in words, do you mean kind of like this, this and this? And they're like, no, I mean that, that and that. But you could do that in a much more spatial visual way. The way I see our organization and how that might happen as far as like in a builder sense is it starts off with you have like AI systems that are better interfaced. So right now, you know, you type out a prompt and it makes some things or whatever, but eventually there'd be more voice commands. And so while you're in a world, you say, I would like a cup, a table, a barista and other stuff. And next thing you know, it's starting to spawn what it thinks it is like, no, no, no, no. The barista should be this tall. No, this person should be wearing this. The cup should be more brown. The table should be more made of Oak. It should be lacquered, you know, and you keep eventually telling it to kind of build things and you kind of bring in your own assets. You use systems and other software to kind of like work together while you're doing traditional methods as well as other types of generative methods. But eventually that becomes more and more integrated with like BCIs and brain computer interfaces where it's more thought-based like kind of creation. And you end up having this really beautiful method of collaborative building where instead of just one person thinking things And so if you think of like old school, like I would say like Star Trek holodeck or like the newer Blade Runner film and how they're like making the birthday scene, instead of just having one person that's kind of isolated, that you'd have this almost like a choir or an improvisational group that someone's laying down this one object over here and thinking through these ideas and someone's, oh, that makes me think of this. And then next thing you know, there's this type of back and forth of environment and props and other pieces all kind of intertwining almost like a jazz song or maybe even like a crazy fluctuating potluck dinner that could kind of like never be completely solidified until everyone says, we're done. Okay, this looks good enough. And I foresee that as like this potential between that perceptual translation for one end of it to a collaborative building in a way that's very seamless and beautiful.

[01:44:15.129] Kent Bye: Awesome. And is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?

[01:44:21.172] Medra: Just the standard Creator Jam type of invite. You're all welcome to come visit Resonite. There might be some hurdles here and there, but it's definitely worth, if you have an experimental mind about it and open mind about just seeing how things are, definitely always welcome. We'd love to see you at a Creator Jam. And thank you for your time.

[01:44:40.089] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, Medra, thanks so much for coming on the podcast to describe a little bit more of what's happening in the culture from Neos to Resonite now. And, you know, I really consider Frooxius to be one of the biggest geniuses of VR in terms of just the architecture. And he really is thinking about these things at such a broad scale. scale of like, I feel like I feel like I'm stepping into the future sometimes when I go into Neos and Resonite and to see the type of platforms and to see what's happening there in the community. I feel like one of the biggest challenges is the user interface problem and new user and how do you onboard people and maybe have the skins that like are a little bit easier for people to have a slower or at least some sort of training, like you said, the creator jam sounds like one of the ways. And I think another thing I actually think of like any lane was a similar type of program that had a lot of capabilities of doing in world. And that there was a whole way that people bonded over just teaching people how to use the tools. And so I think that's a part of the culture as well of going into Resonite and learning how to do this or that because there's subject matter experts who are helping you to figure it out and step along the way. So there's a kind of like this mentorship and apprenticeship type of vibe that you get when you go into Resonite because it's learning how to use the tool and use the power of the tool. So I definitely have seen the potential of that as I see what's happening with these collaborative buildings. And that whole focus on collaborative building within VR, I think is a really powerful thing that I don't see a lot of it. It happens within Rec Room, but I think it's at another scale of fidelity and complexity, all the stuff that's happening there in Resonite. So yeah, I just really enjoyed hearing a lot more about your own experiences and just a little bit more of what's happening there on the platform. So thanks again for joining me to help break it all down. Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure. So that was Medra. He is one of the co-founders of the Creator Jam event, which has been running for 268 weeks in a row as of the recording of this interview. And he started all the way back in June 2nd, 2019. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, Well, you know, as I think about, like, how do you describe the essential character of a social VR platform? Because for me, I really go back to Lawrence Lessig, who talks about these four different vectors of socioeconomic and political control, where there's the laws, there's the economy, there's the technological architecture and code, and then there's the culture. In a lot of ways, the culture is kind of shaping the different technological architecture. And then from there, you have like different in-world or outer world economies that are happening. And then also like, what are the rules of what you can and cannot do? I think for Neo slash Resonite now, essentially, they don't have any sort of limitations or boundaries or regulations or rules. They want to just basically have you become a demigod and have these superpowers where you can do essentially whatever you want. in essence lowering the barrier between your imagination and what you're able to do which ends up creating the technological architecture where you want to be immersed into these virtual worlds but also edit them at the same time and so there's no differentiation between the edit mode and the rendering mode where you can dynamically change all those different aspects and it's all synchronized and with that technological architecture what that means is that the culture is very much a maker culture it really feels like like that's like the lennox of xr where people who are like command line using you know system administrators who are extremely technically apt or very comfortable with a lot of complexity a lot of options they're willing to live into that trade-off of having and dealing with that complexity and learning how to navigate it because it actually empowers them to have like even more agency so there's this kind of spectrum between the the powers and flexibility that you have, but with that comes a lot of the complexity. And that sort of gets to the root of this quote that I come back to, which is in Frooxius's origin story of how VR became my job because I didn't give up. He says that the trouble is that Nios is a very complex and expansive idea and requires a lot of time to work through all the aspects of it and thorough consideration to make sure everything fits neatly together because I needed to find a set of basic elements which are both simple and elegant but interact in so many ways that they provide extremely flexible but also consistent system. So I think that paragraph sums it up better than I could articulate because I think that's actually still true today. I think this is a discussion that I heard come up when the conversation that she's had with in between realities with Alex and Skiba, where, you know, what are the different ways to have different levels or tiers or people just kind of onboarding and learning it? What Medra says in the course of this interview is that actually participating in the creator jam events is how you start to learn how to use these. They have a wiki. There's some documentation. But honestly, one of the best ways to learn is to just go into Resonite and start to have someone who knows all the different nuances of the interface start teaching you based upon whatever you want to do. And that's kind of like the culture of how people connect is that they are talking at a meta level like, oh, here's how you use this technology. And I ended up jumping into Resonite just to hang out into some social VR spaces. And it ends up being this really mind bending experience of people who are like basically showing off all the different tools and tricks that they have on their avatars and everything from like. shooting jelly beans out of their butt, or sending screaming potatoes across the way, or having these little puppets that are singing. It's basically very driven by this kind of meme culture of people replicating different memes and translating that into programming jokes that they're showing to each other. And that becomes the basis of a lot of the interactions that are happening on the platform. but also there's this collaborative creative vibe that's also happening. I mean, I went into Resonite with like a polygonal mind avatar. And so I was in this like kind of banana with sunglasses avatar. And someone just asked me, Hey, is that how you actually want to identify? Is this with this banana? That's a default avatar. And I was like, actually, no, there's a, another cosmic person avatar that I much more Resonite with. And they're like, OK, here, let's go into this world and then go ahead and upload it. And here's how you upload it. And then they're like, OK, push this button, this button. And then they started to essentially wire up and hook up all the different things that needed to happen. And it just said, OK, go ahead and click this button called create. And then I did that. And then I took ownership of the avatar. So essentially, I didn't ever leave VR and I was able to upload something that I downloaded from the Internet online. And then the community had come together to help me implement that as my avatar, but then also like modify the blue luminance value. And that's a perfect example of think of the kind of the spirit of Resonite is just this kind of collective collaborative space where people are just really excited to be in a space where they can use VR to be able to create and explore their own creative imaginations. I think that's kind of the overall vibe. Now, when I compare it to other different platforms like VRChat, I feel like VRChat has a lot more folks who are designing different beautiful spaces and hangout spaces. And I feel like the center of gravity within the context of Resonant is like people want to make. And so it's more matrix style grids, kind of like sandboxy. And it's essentially more of this live interactive moment where. The purpose is to pick up objects and to do really weird things. Like there was some object that I got. When you click a wall, it allows you to walk on the walls or walk on the ceiling. And so it's kind of pushing the edge of what's even possible in VR and just really optimizing for that. Now, that said, there's a lot of ways in which that, you know, how do you deal with the complexity? How do you deal with there's decentralized hosting of things? And so there's still a lot of like technological barriers, but also like performance bottlenecks, you know, making it performant, making it more of a stable platform, working out all the user interface wonkiness that feels like you're diving into like a advanced mode of Blender or any 3D software, because that's essentially what you have is like all the different tools and powers of something like Unity, but all built into like graphical user interface that you're navigating with your hands the radial system and all the different ways that you navigate is a whole other paradigm that has contextual menus and you have to push the right number of buttons when i go into vr chat or other vr platforms i just end up reaching my hand out and grabbing objects and i have it but here you have to like equip the objects and then there's these contextual menus and then sometimes oh when you go into a like another world, you have to close the world. And so it feels like there's like these levels of abstraction that give a lot of power, but also can be extremely confusing for people who are just going into the platform. So I think it's sort of like this trade-off between where you land in the spectrum of the power and flexibility with the complexity of how confusing it can be for people to actually use the platform without having someone like stand there and explain how to even open up the menu because the menus aren't mapped to the menu buttons that I'm expecting. So anyway, this conversation with Medra was just really fascinating just to hear a little bit more about the different dimensions of culture of Resonite. And I think it pointed me to really dig into the core evolution of how Neo slash Resonite evolved as a platform, some of the different visions that... Frooxius had for it. And yeah, the whole split between the cryptocurrency and meta changing its name and the whole metaverse hype cycle, it was all kind of like a aspirational connection between how the cryptocurrency would actually feed into the core development of the platform. And it was never really fully fleshed out and something that actually goes to be something that's really distinctly antithetical to the core gifting economy culture. I mean, if anything, there's like A lot of free assets and just generally more of a gifting culture that happens within the context of Resonite, where the economy is more around like you get social reputation by creating something really cool and perhaps even having a public folder where other people can get all your cool stuff. But also it's around like you sharing these different objects for this whole inventory system that people have. And so it doesn't have to do with monetary exchange at all, although they do have people who love the platform enough to be able to donate to something like Patreon. So in some ways, it feels like what Resonite has is like this foundation of a core group of enthusiasts who absolutely love the platform and what it's able to do. And they're supporting it through their patronage, and they're able to create this whole new model of And so whether or not something like VRChat is going to take their tens of millions of dollars of VC funding and find a way to convert this into some sort of scalable in-world economy that's able to really sustain the platform as it moves forward, because they have like servers that are hosting. It's basically like VRChat has all the VC money to reduce all the different frictions. to have the hosting and the service, but it costs a lot of money. And so the way that the Neos is architected is something that actually is kind of a little bit more decentralized. It could be more scalable in the future, but it puts a lot of that burden back onto the users to figure out how to actually host these worlds and to set up a headless server or to even have it on your own server. that you're hosting these different worlds. And so high fidelity was trying to do something very similar of like starting first with like these decentralized nodes, but it didn't necessarily work because I think you have this problem with like having enough of a critical mass of people to find each other and to actually hang out in these social spaces. You know, Philip Rosedale had mentioned to me, Metcalfe's law, which is essentially that the value of a network means that you have to have that critical mass of people on the platform hanging out and doing different things, which then makes it valuable enough for other people to just go in. And if you don't do that, then essentially you have a bunch of empty virtual worlds and no real community that's there. And so overcoming that problem is something that's like a flywheel that has to be figured out in order to create enough value and interest in these worlds and then also have a community that's willing to show up and connect either at very specific times and places at these different events or to eventually have a place where it just feels like you're walking into a city with enough vibrancy where there's always something that's going on or that your friends are just hanging out and that it ends up being driven by the connections and relationships rather than having these kind of event-based things that are going on. So anyway, I think it's super fascinating to dig into a little bit more of what's happening on Resonite. And regretfully, I haven't really covered Neos or Resonite yet in any meaningful fashion. I mean, I had a conversation with Frooxius many years ago, but There's this quote that Frukshia said in his origin story that I definitely thought of. He says that, And so I feel like that that's kind of like been the story of Neos slash Resonite for since the very beginning. You know, this was written back in 2016, but there has been this persistent, like the broader XR press industry kind of overlooking what's happening on Neos as a platform. There's been some folks that started to cover it when there was a whole crypto schemes that were going, and I can post to some links that QDOT did, which was a really great recounting. And I did a Twitter thread that was recounting, you know, this was like in February of 2022, some of the rift that was happening between Frooxius and Karel. I know that there's some videos on YouTube, Tavlo and Fiat Bunny with the virtual reality show got sponsored to do a whole overview of what's happening on Resonite. And also in between realities, there's a really great interview with Frooxius that I highly recommend checking out as well, because I feel like Alex and Skiva, they're doing an interview with Frooxius, but they also are sharing their own experiences and love for the platform as well. And also it's worth mentioning Alien Rescue by the Metamovie Project by Jason Moore. They chose to go with Neos and now Resonite because it just gave them enough power to do this kind of immersive theater piece as well. And I believe there's actually going to be a piece at Venice as well by Nanotopia diving into some more kind of mushroom explorations for making music with mushrooms. So definitely looking forward to that as well. So that is a lot of additional stuff. I had a lot to say and just kind of, I think, you know, this conversation with Medra, but also just reflecting on the power of what Frooxius has been able to create. Hopefully I'll be able to catch up with Frooxius at some point to get a little bit more of his journey with Neo slash Resonite, just because I feel like there's, there's a lot of like innovations that are happening there. And I've always considered Frooxius to be one of like the super mad geniuses of And it was just a real pleasure to kind of like dig into the evolution of his thought and to experience some of what he's been able to create with what originally launched as Neos and is now ResNight. So that's all I have for today, and I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a list of supported podcasts, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.