Ben Lang gives us great lessons about XR journalism, marketing, and technology

Tony: Hey, Ben, thanks for joining me!

Ben Lang: Thanks for having me, Tony. It’s nice to finally have a formal conversation here after we’ve interacted for so many years in the industry.

Tony: It’s been a long time for both of us, even much longer for you. We’ll talk about this. Let’s start the interview: I guess maybe there are a couple of people who still don’t know you. Can you introduce yourself to these two people?

Ben: Sure. I’m Ben Lang. I am the co-founder and executive editor of roadtovr.com. I started this back in 2011, so we’re coming up on 15 years next year, I think. I was really curious about virtual reality and augmented reality technology in the early days, actually before Oculus was founded. Oculus was founded in late 2011, maybe early 2012, or at least the Kickstarter was in 2012 for the original Oculus Rift. I was a little bit before that, and nothing was really happening in the space at the time. My curiosity was really about where virtual reality went. A lot of people are familiar with the fact that in the late 80s and early 90s, VR had a moment in the spotlight.

There were things happening, but it just completely petered out. By the time I started Road to VR in 2011, there was no real such thing as a consumer VR product on the market that you could just go buy. The stuff that did still exist was all medical, high-end military. It never happened for consumers. I was like, “What happened to that?” I got really curious about where the technology was then and where it might go 15 years later, and hence “Road to VR“. I wanted to chart where we were and where things might go in the future… and now here we are.

We went from when I was writing about scraps of information to a couple of years later, we had the Oculus Rift Kickstarter, and what we started to call the VR community started to come along. Now, everybody says the VR industry or the XR industry “is a whole multibillion-dollar industry that’s happened, that’s grown up”, and I’ve watched it from the beginning to today. I have, luckily, a lot of context for what’s going on. I’ve been reporting on all of that as we go along and hoping to try to help people understand where we’re at and, again, where it’s all heading.

Tony: That’s quite a fascinating story because you started right before the Kickstarter campaign. I always wondered if you had the feeling that something was happening, or if it was just luck.

Ben: I’d love to say it was total prophecy, but let’s be honest, it was some luck. I will say the thesis behind it was, at the time, in 2010, 2011, I was actually doing tech journalism before Road to VR. I was writing about smartphones and tablets and pocket computers and all these things. I was immersed in the tech space, and I was seeing that we were having things like touchscreens, Siri, Kinect, and Wii. What I was seeing in those things was that computing was moving away from a keyboard and a mouse or a controller, and it was starting to become more human-centric. The way that we were interacting with our devices was starting to become more natural.

I started to think about it, like, “Where does this go?” As it becomes more and more natural, it feels like that ultimate destination is not only that you’re touching the digital content, but you’re actually looking at it. It’s actually surrounding you, or it lives in your environment. Hence, I wonder what happened to VR and where it might go in the future. It was a bit of a hunch, and it was a bit of “right time, right place”. I started Road to VR when I was in college, really as a total side hobby project, just to learn for myself what was going on.

By the time I graduated from college, it was like, “People are actually interested, and things are starting to happen. Should I go full-time with this?” 15 years later or so, apparently, I made a career out of it.

Tony: I think you deserve the success you have. I always mention you on my blog as my “review hero”.

Ben: [laughing] I appreciate that.

Tony: I think you’re a great journalist. I want to steal something of your knowledge. Before getting back to talking about VR, I want to talk about the intersection of VR and journalism and ask you, for instance, what are the criteria to provide a good review about a game or a piece of hardware?

Ben: I try my hardest not to get wrapped up in the hype of stuff. This isn’t even purely a professional thing. I’m a pretty avid gamer. I like movies. We see trailers for games and movies, and they all look awesome. For whatever reason, I’m pretty good at not letting my hype levels build something up. I’m also not particularly forgiving about the circumstances of the thing’s creation. The way that I approach reviews, and that’s not to say I don’t appreciate all the hard work and the struggle that goes into making things, even if they don’t turn out amazing, but the way that I tend to approach reviews is a pretty pragmatic thing as someone who does this as a job.

My thought is: my audience is the audience of readers. My job is to help them understand if the thing that I’m reviewing is worth their time and their money. If I’m serving any other purpose other than that, I don’t think I’m doing them justice. I don’t think I’m giving my audience what I hope they get out of the site. I do my best to… For game reviews, let’s say, a huge criterion is, “Am I having fun?” You talk about the graphics and you talk about all this and all that but if I’m not compelled to be going through this game, if I’m just not enjoying it, then I’m not going to let those other factors, like, “Oh, it took five years to make and it was a miracle that it got off the ground or whatever” influence me.

Again, appreciate all that. When it comes to answering the question for my audience, “Is this worth your time and money?” That’s really where my focus is. I don’t want it to come off sounding like I don’t care about developers. That’s actually completely not the truth at all. That’s just my take on reviews. When it comes to developers, I’m… Ask around the industry. I’ve been hands-on with a lot of projects before they were ever announced, giving people advice on marketing, design, and comfort. There’s a lot of stuff that I do because I want to see great content. I want to see developers succeed. That’s all really important for keeping this thing going.

I do occasionally get comments on a review where I’m like, “I didn’t think this game really pulled it off. It didn’t mesh. We didn’t give it the best score in the world.” I’ll get a comment that’s like, “You’re destroying the VR industry. You are ruining this by giving this game a bad score.” I understand that reaction, but it blows my mind because I think if you take more than 10 seconds to come up with that knee-jerk reaction, you realize that if I’m artificially inflating a score of a game that I didn’t really think I liked, but I thought, “Oh, this is going to hurt the industry.”, all I would be doing is setting an expectation for people.

If I say this is a great game, and really it was down here, but I was fluffing it for the sake of the industry or the developer or something, all I’m doing is having people think, “VR people are saying this game is great, but I don’t think it’s very good. If this is what they’re calling a great VR game, then there must not be very many great VR games.” I really think that honesty is actually in the industry’s long-term interest. I think it is the healthiest thing you can do. I don’t think this is, for me, it’s not about cheerleading. It is about trying to give constructive, honest feedback and help people understand if this product or game is for them.

Hopefully, that honest feedback means that developers can change and see what needs to be tweaked instead of just saying, “This game is amazing”… when it’s just not. That is my approach to reviews. Again, it’s not that I don’t care about the industry. I genuinely think that this approach to honesty, objectivity, and trying to keep everybody on the same page, and not being super promotional, is in the industry’s interest in the long term.

Tony: I think that’s very wise. I totally agree with you because, anyway, people are going to play the game, and if it is not good, they immediately comment that it’s bad. It makes no sense to lie about it. Are there also some other rules that a good VR journalist should follow?

Ben: Yes, I don’t think it’s even unique to VR. There’s a lot of basic stuff. As a journalist, you should be confident in the information. If you’re not confident in the information, you should say, “This is a rumor, we haven’t verified it.” I would say they are fairly unique in this day and age of media in general, which has become very influencer-heavy. I wouldn’t call myself an influencer, not in the way that most marketing or PR people use the term. We live in a world where influencers are an outgrowth of marketing. Many of them, not all of them, are the “hype people” for some of these products and services and whatever. They form a close relationship with one company or many companies to get products.

They know in the back of their head, “If I’m not saying good things about this product, then I’m not going to be on this company’s good terms anymore. I’m not going to get the cool freebies, blah, blah.” We really try to, from the very beginning, steer Road to VR toward more journalism and reporting versus influencer marketing. We have a very strict line on this. People approach us all the time with the same kinds of deals and perks and things that they go to for influencer-type people. We just have a pretty hard line and set of rules to guide how we’re going to handle that stuff.

For instance, many games will send influencers a swag kit with all kinds of cool stuff, statues, or, I don’t know, memorabilia from the game. They expect influencers to post coverage on this and say, “This is so cool. I got this figurine from the game. I can’t wait to play it. It’s awesome. Look how cool it is.” Our stance is that when people come to us asking if we want that swag kit, we just say, we appreciate the invite, but if it’s not directly related or necessary to our coverage of the thing, then we would politely decline. It’s a lot of little details like that we really try our best to keep in place and stay truthful to make our reporting good. I will say, for a lot of people, this doesn’t matter one bit.

We have passed up tons of money over the years in deals and blah, blah, to do this stuff because I personally think it’s important, and it is the kind of reporting and information that I would like to read from sources that do these kinds of things. Most people don’t really care [laughs]. It is an unfortunate reality of the media landscape that we live in that by doing these things, you actually make it harder for yourself in terms of running a sustainable business. We’ve managed to get by because we’re a scrappy team and we know what we’re doing, but it is the harder path, for sure. I wouldn’t do it any other way. It’s just so important to me.

I hope that maybe one day people will be a little more willing to support people who operate in this way in their interest, not in the interest of advertisers or marketers or these other parties that are behind them.

Tony: That’s very interesting. By the way, if I can tell you an opinion from the outside, actually, you have a very high reputation because people can feel that you are very serious about this.

Ben: I appreciate that.

Tony: It will pay in the long run. I’m pretty sure about that. In the short run, it’s a problem with money… we all know that we are not in the best moment for the ecosystem. Compliments on what you’re doing.

Ben: Thank you.

Tony: We all love your magazine, and actually, many people, including me in the past, for some things I did, tried to get coverage on it. You are mostly two people. You and Scott write most of the articles. Of course, you cannot write fifty articles per day, so you have to be very selective. How can people, let’s say, be chosen as the topic of some articles you are writing for your magazine?

Ben: It’s a good question. I’ve definitely fielded incoming things from you and cool stuff that you’ve done. We’ve also reported on some news that you’ve broken and stuff like that. We do source you. To go back to what I was talking about, we try to be objective with our coverage. We love you. We love the stuff that you do. When you came out and asked us in the past to maybe cover something that you were working on, it’s not a guaranteed thing just because we have some kind of relationship that’s important to us. It comes down to two things. Primary one is bandwidth. As you said, we can’t write 50 articles a day. I would love to.

There are a lot of things that I have to pass on that I think are really interesting, but we simply don’t have the time for it, unfortunately. That is the number one thing that stops us from covering stuff. If I could cover everything that I found interesting, we’d have a lot more stuff going out the door. You’re right, we have to be selective about it. What that ends up coming down to is usually just a priority list. Something like what you were working on may have started at the top of the list. I’m just using it as an example. This wouldn’t be exactly how it happened, but I might be going through my inbox and through my feeds and looking for what I’m going to cover in a given period.

That thing might have been at the top of my list, and then maybe I get through, and there’s some other thing up here, and another thing. I start on that list, and I just don’t always make it to the bottom of that list, unfortunately. We really do our best, but we’re trying to balance solid reporting and giving a lot of context and analysis in our articles compared to just repeating what a company has said, which you could just go read what they already said. We spend a lot of time trying to make sure that our reporting is adding some value as opposed to just rehashing the facts out there. Unfortunately, that takes quite a bit more time.

I would say, in terms of like “We want to pitch Road to VR, how do we do it the best way?” Please email us or reach out. I read all of it. I can’t always respond to all of it, but I read all of it. I appreciate it. I appreciate seeing what people are working on and what they’re doing. I would say I’ve covered some really small projects that maybe somebody thought were not even worth a pitch, whatever, that I just thought were really unique and interesting. For whatever reason, I wanted to highlight this thing. For me, it comes down to a lot of interesting design, interaction, and development stuff I find particularly intriguing. Of course, we have to cover the major news stuff anyway.

I would say it comes down sometimes to individual reporter interest. We have Scott and me who are doing the vast majority of the content on Road to VR. We, as two different people, have different interests and things that are going to pique our interest and that we’re going to want to write about. I think if you want to pitch us or really any other publication, rather than just throwing something at the publication as a whole, go to some authors that have written about similar things that you’re working on.

To get an idea of it… imagine that a person tends to cover, let’s say, new launch trailers for games. If there’s one person who really focuses on that, try to reach out to them specifically and say, “Hey, I’ve read your reporting. I see what you do. I love that you keep me up to date.” Make an effort to understand who you’re actually talking to in the first place. I think that goes quite a long way compared to just sending a generic pitch out the door. That’s more work, of course. In the day and age of AI, you can get a real leg up on that by getting some information and maybe using it to write more custom prompts faster than you would have been able to do it by hand. There are a lot of different things out there, but for us in particular, definitely reach out. You never know what might pique our interest.

And keep us up to date. There have been some projects where somebody has written, and we read it, and we just didn’t have the time to do it. Then, on the third time that they sent us information and they reached a certain milestone, we said, “Oh, this has reached a point where we think we’d like to cover it now.” It’s not like, oh, we just want it done, get out of there. It’s really a combination of our bandwidth and our interest. Again, we love to stay up to date, even if we’re not necessarily able to write about everything people send us. Please keep it coming. We like to be in the loop and see what’s happening.

Tony: That’s a very good suggestion to all the people outside there, and especially a category of people I’m interested in. I’m talking about VR indie game studios: there are many people with small studios that try to succeed in this space, where it’s very hard to be noticed by magazines, to be featured in the stores, which is a huge problem. You’re an expert on our ecosystem, you have knowledge about marketing, journalism, et cetera. In general, what suggestions do you want to give to these people to try to be noticed and be successful?

Ben: Similar thing. It is definitely making sure that you understand your audience. That’s both who you’re developing for and who you are pitching to try to find coverage. Let’s just say there are other outlets out there. You should really do your 30 minutes of basic research to understand what my top five targets are that I would love to be able to be covered in and go understand a little bit or learn a little bit, research a little bit about what it is that they do. Understand their mission. The closer you get to understanding who you’re actually pitching to, the easier it’s going to be.

Again, like I say, it tends to be very valuable to go find a specific person rather than just the name of the organization and send it to some generic inbox. If you can find a specific person and reach out to that specific person, and they’ve covered things that are similar to what you’re working on, they’re probably interested in what you’re working on too, and you can make that pitch to them. I think also there is, I would say, a minimum bar of polish that is somewhat important. Ideally, when you’re pitching your game or app or whatever it is, you should think about, “How do I make this as easy as possible for the person to cover me?”

In many cases, one of the biggest things to do for that is to approach them with a thesis. Don’t just say, “I’m making a game. Look at it. It’s fun.” Approach them with a thesis. It’s, “I’m making a game. It has this particularly unique feature that I’ve spent a lot of time on that does X, Y, and Z better than any other game in a genre.” Help them have an angle. They don’t necessarily have to take your angle, but if you approach them with an angle for what makes your thing unique, that is going to get you so much farther than just coming and saying, “I’m working on a thing. Please look at it and figure out what’s interesting about it. Do that work for me to figure out what’s interesting to tell your audience about.”

It’s much more effective if you have inside your own head an idea of what makes your game unique and stand out, what you’re especially proud of with this thing. I think that’s not even just for marketing. If you’re building something, you can’t just build a similarly good version of another thing that’s very similar. Otherwise, why would people who are already using that go to another thing? There’s got to be a standout feature. There’s got to be a hook that really makes people want to try your experience. You should know that from the beginning and be actively building your app to foster this hook that you’re creating.

Do that basic groundwork of knowing, “What is my hook? What am I trying to do to make this game stand out?” A very specific thing. Not just, “I’m making a great shooter.” It should be a very specific thing. “I’m making a shooter that has the best weapon handling or the best weapon customization ever seen in VR.” You’ve got to believe that you’re building that and deliver it [laughs]. Otherwise, you’re just making a shooter. There are lots of them out there. Be specific about your vision. Once you do that work to know what you’re building in the first place, it’s going to be so much easier to pitch your thing.

If you started with that thesis in building the product, you’re not inventing a story out of thin air from what you made. You are staying true to what you’re actually working on in the first place. That’ll make everything else easier. It’ll make trailers easier. It’ll make pitching easier. It’ll make selling easier.

Tony: That’s great advice. I think it’s very good advice for all the indie developers out there. I want to ask you another piece of advice about another topic. One of the columns I like the most on Road To VR is you delving into VR design, interaction design of VR experiences, etc. I know you wrote quite a good number of articles about that. Of course, you cannot summarize them in five minutes now, but please choose maybe a couple of suggestions you want to give people in general about how to design their VR experience so it’s good to use.

Ben: That’s definitely a tough one because it is a huge area. I try my best in my coverage to help raise up and highlight the design side of VR development, AR, XR, all of it, really. There is a huge emphasis on the coding or programming side of development. I don’t see nearly as many resources on the design side, which I think for VR is extremely important because on the one hand, it’s more challenging because it’s 3D. On the other hand, it’s multidimensional; it’s not your mouse and keyboard input. But on the other hand, it’s newer. We can’t carry over so many of the paradigms that have come up over the last 25 years of flat-screen gaming design. They just don’t translate.

I see this mistake happen a lot. You’ll have someone who says, “I want to make an RPG.” They take what a flat screen RPG looks like and bring it into VR, but they don’t do the heavy design work. So you’ll have a VR RPG with a laser pointer for inventory management. There’s a lot of inventory management. Pointing with a laser pointer, dragging and dropping, and equipping my stuff by dragging a square picture onto a picture of my guy. It’s not necessarily fun in VR. It’s the difference between taking a concept and taking a feature. If UI management with a big grid and a bunch of icons is a feature, you don’t want the feature; you want the concept.

In RPGs, it is fun to get equipment. It is fun to equip new stuff. It is fun to get those upgrades, but the fun part is not using the laser pointer or using your mouse and dragging it around, at least not in VR. You need to think about how to bring inventory management to VR in a way that is native and enjoyable to VR, instead of just bringing the feature as it was built on a flat screen. You can say this about so many things. It’s hard. The way that flat screen inventory management works, there’s a common set of ideas now that most people understand. When a new game comes up, they pretty much bring those ideas over, maybe with tweaks here and there. For VR, you’re in fairly uncharted territory.

I think the best way to approach this is actually not to invent it from scratch if you don’t have to. There are a lot of VR games out there. There is a lot of really smart design out there that, if you have a wide enough knowledge of having played enough VR content, you will see some really smart little things that people have done. Inventory management, weapon management, how a door works, etc. All this stuff is out there.

It pains me to see VR developers spend a ton of time reinventing them when another developer has already shown a pretty darn good shot at it, a good starting point that could be brought over and adopted, save you a bunch of time, and let you work on your actual unique thing that no one else has done yet. That’s the whole reason why you mentioned I have this video series, an article series called Inside XR Design. If anyone’s interested, just search it on YouTube. It’s all there. In those videos, I’m trying my hardest to find games that are doing things uniquely well that have not been recognized, or we haven’t seen their contribution to the design repeated anywhere.

It hasn’t made its way into the design language of VR for a million reasons. Sometimes the game is not popular enough, or people don’t want to put on the headset and look at it and say, “I’m going to recreate it, and I’m going to take off the headset and jump into my game.” It’s difficult. I’m trying to get those ideas out of the headset for people so they don’t have to go in themselves and look at it. Put them in a video. Make it accessible. I want everybody to learn from this stuff. Maybe even learn what people have done wrong. That’s important too. I want people to be able to build on this.

I would hate to see a developer waste time trying to rethink, again, how exactly a door should open when there are great examples of the best way to do that out there already. Or how do we spawn people? How do we move people comfortably? There are all these, what I think of in my head as lessons out there where I’ve played these games, and “Wow, look at that. They did an awesome job with that.” For instance, the cover system in Synapse comes to mind. You can grab any wall with your hand, and you can move your body around with it, and it makes this really natural peaking cover system that I haven’t seen replicated in a lot of places. Then, you’ll have games where it’s functionally a cover shooter, but they don’t give you that tool. They just expect you to be crouching down, and it’s a worse experience for it. Why not attach that feature? There are so many of these little lessons.

Inside XR Design is there to try to highlight some of these interesting design contributions… less development, more on the design, the why behind how it works, as opposed to the how it works, like coding and programming. There are a thousand things, and it’s tough for VR developers. I absolutely understand that.

That’s why I think trying to build upon the base foundation of what’s been done already gets you so much further than going in and saying, “I have to make every single system and feature from scratch as if no one else has done it before.” Sometimes people are trying to carry over features from the flat screen stuff, which is not good, and other times people are trying to recreate VR native features from scratch, which is also not the worst thing, but it’s going to take you a lot more time and effort. Finding the VR version of the flat screen feature and going from there, I think, tends to elevate VR games to be more immersive and more interesting.

Frankly, a VR game needs to be more fun to play in a headset than it would be on a flat screen. That’s a critical bar. Otherwise, why would I put on the headset in the first place?

Tony: That’s amazing. You said you started in 2011, and now it’s almost 15 years since you entered the industry. How have you seen the evolution of the XR ecosystem? What has remained the same? What has changed? What has gone differently from the original plan?

Ben: That’s a good question. I think the thing that stands out to me, probably, is that I think hardware, like headsets, let’s talk about VR in particular, has evolved more slowly than I would have expected. Let’s go back 15, 14 years to the Rift DK1. We have come a long way since then, but let’s say the Oculus Rift CV1, the first Oculus headset that had six DOF tracking, and not too long after launch, it had full motion controllers. Things are not fundamentally different. The headsets are functionally in the same class in terms of size and weight. We have the same tracking features for 6 DOF on the head and hands.

There are definitely improvements to the experience, generally. Standalone is a big help, wireless is a big help, inside out tracking is huge, but the box that we wear in our head, I still would have forecasted or at least hoped, would change faster, become smaller and more comfortable, but we’re still in the same place. I hope that once we reach all the “good enough levels” of things like field of view and resolution, then the size will start coming down. Because we exist in this space where, at the beginning, resolution had to be the most important thing. It was just the screen door effect, and all of that was really rough. It was distracting. It reduced immersion, so we had to get that up.

In order to increase the resolution, it’d be very difficult to both increase the number of pixels on the screen while also shrinking the size of the screen. That’s doing double the work all at once. The headsets have, I think, stayed the same largely because we’ve wanted to get the baseline, like the tracking, and the resolution, and the various features up to where it’s like, “We’re good enough and we don’t have to go any further.” I’m in a Vision Pro right now, and the resolution on this thing… I would be fine if it stayed this way forever. There are diminishing returns. It could get a little bit better, but it’s really quite good.

If I were given the choice between double the resolution on the next version of this headset or half the size of the headset, I would 100% go for half the size of the headset. I think we are just hitting this peak, hopefully, where we’re maxing out on the features that we even want in the form factor, and then hopefully from there the emphasis becomes smaller, more comfortable, et cetera. On the software side of things, I’m still waiting patiently for something like Vision Pro to become closer in cost to Quest because that competition is extremely healthy and it’s been missing in the VR industry for a long, long time.

Facebook/Meta has been here since the beginning, essentially, and their approach from the very start has been, “Let’s aggressively subsidize these devices to make them affordable and get them in the hands of people.” That’s nice for consumers in the short term, no doubt, but it’s made it extremely difficult for real competition. You had companies like HTC and Valve and even Microsoft and some of their partners making headsets, but it was extremely hard for any company to make a headset that was… Even if it was comparable in quality to what Facebook was making, it was extremely hard for them to make it cost the same. It would just inevitably be more expensive.

That makes the competitive landscape extremely difficult to break into, which means the leading player, which has been Meta for the longest time, just doesn’t need to respond too much to what other headsets are doing well because they know, “You might have a cool new feature or a better resolution or wider field of view or whatever but our headset is half the price of what you’re charging.” That just makes it really hard for anyone out there doing something better to really influence and push Meta to be more aggressive or more innovative. This is just the nature. This isn’t unique to the VR situation. This is the nature of competition in general.

Vision Pro has been on the market for almost two years now. We are starting to see some real competition, which is weird because this headset is way more expensive, but Apple has done well, whether it’s their brand or just the work that they’re doing, whatever it is, Meta has been a lot more responsive to what Apple has done. I think that because Meta understands that Apple is a true competitor at their scale. Even though this headset is so much more expensive than the Quest headsets today, Meta has made a lot of changes that are improvements or features that have been added from Vision Pro.

It’s not to say that they’re not doing other cool stuff on their own and have other features that Vision Pro doesn’t have, but it is the first time that we’re really seeing them respond, and that’s making headsets and VR better for everybody. If one company comes up with a really cool idea that just works really well, the others, hopefully, should adopt it and give that to their users, too. I’m really looking forward to this headset or future versions of this headset coming down much closer in price to where Quest is at, because it’s going to amplify that competition.

It’s going to make Meta respond faster and be more innovative to retain customers who might otherwise say, “Yes, the Vision Pro, whatever 3, is twice as expensive, but it’s got a lot of great stuff as opposed to just being just as good, but still twice as expensive.” I’m really looking forward to that. If I look back over the last 15 years and then ahead to the next 15 years, I think the next 15 years, because of this competition also with Android XR and Google, and Samsung coming in, I think the next 15 years are going to show a much faster pace of improvement compared to what we’ve seen over the previous 15.

Again, form factor, look back at DK1, I’m in a Vision Pro, functionally, we’re still in the same size class and even weight class. I’m really looking forward to that competition finally coming online. I hoped years ago Apple would’ve jumped in to make this happen sooner, but things take a little longer than they seem. I think once that happens, it’s going to be a really good thing all around and going to lead to better products, more adoption, and lower costs.

Tony: That’s been a great summary about the past 15 years, and maybe a cue about what is going to happen in the future. But what about the present? We are in a bit of a transition phase where mixed reality did not really take off. Meta is changing its priorities. At Connect, most of the talks were about smart glasses and Horizon Worlds. There was some mention of the Quest, but it seems not to be the top priority anymore. Apple and Google are coming, but they are still in another category. How do you see the current situation? How would you describe it?

Ben: It is a really interesting time. Meta, I don’t think it’s their official slogan anymore, but “move fast, break things” was for a long time their ethos. I think it continues to be. For web development and app development, maybe that worked really well. I don’t think it works great, or at least we haven’t seen it work particularly great when it comes to a brand new medium like VR. I think if you’re just building, iterating on apps, that’s good and great, go for it, go to town.

When you’re making fundamentally new interfaces and paradigms for how people are going to interact with this stuff, I think it really benefits having a strong foundation and a strong vision for how it should work and how it should feel as opposed to saying, “Let’s just keep making stuff and then see if people like it and then try to make it more.” It’s like they’ve meandered a lot. I see this particularly in the software. I think Meta’s hardware is really great. Their hardware team has always been good. They’ve consistently delivered some of the best headsets on the market from a hardware standpoint. On the software, it just feels like there’s not a whole lot of… It just feels very scattered. It feels like there are a lot of people who want the headset to do a lot of different things, and it ends up not being particularly cohesive.

Now, I think we’re seeing that scatteredness of just wanting to chase after what looks like it is doing well as it happens. We’re seeing that now with the headsets, too. I think Meta saw that their smart glasses did well, and so, of course, they want to pursue that. I hope that what looks in the near term right now, like in the next one to two years, what looks like a distraction for Meta is actually part of a longer plan that actually plays out in the long run. I don’t think that’s impossible. I think Zuck actually does have a very long-term outlook, as he claims to. He was the one starting this stuff up back when they acquired Oculus. I think it was 2014, if I recall correctly.

He did it thinking “10 years later, we want to have something, and we need to start that project now to be there before other people are”. I do think he has a genuinely long-term view. I’m hoping that this distraction from VR or immersive XR is actually just two things happening from two different sides. Right now, of course, they need to deliver on a product that they see is working. They’re just not going to work on that, which is trying to expand the glasses.

I do think that the glasses are starting small with the minimum features and then trying to add more as you go. And then you’ve got the VR headsets or AR headsets, XR headsets, whatever you want to call them, mixed reality, whatever Meta’s calling them now, is starting with the maximal feature set and then trying to make it smaller. I think those things can happen and exist simultaneously and eventually, hopefully, meet in the middle. Ideally, we’re trying to make the headsets smaller and more comfortable. Ideally, we’re trying to load the, what is today, smart glasses with just an AI chat assistant or a tiny static display.

Hopefully, we’re trying to get wider fields of view, more tracking, more immersive features in there. I empathize with the feeling of it being like, “Oh, no, it feels like they’re forgetting about VR because in this last Connect we didn’t hear a lot about it.” I’m a player, I’m a user of the headset, obviously, I’m very immersed in the technology. Looking at this longer term, I hope it’s not going to turn out to actually be the distraction, but it’s actually two parallel tracks that are hopefully going to converge at some point. Again, I think the pace of this will all be dictated by what the competition looks like. Apple is probably doing something very similar.

They’re probably in their labs working on something that, again, focuses heavily on form factor at the cost of some features, whereas Vision Pro is heavily features and it costs some form factor. I think they’re going to do the same thing. Depending upon who hits the market at what time and what the response is, that’s going to drive the pace at which one gets pushed faster at any given moment. In the end, I think they do all converge. We want to be able to wear something comfortable, that can be immersive but can also be like get out of the way and not annoy us.

It would be great to be able to walk out the door and see nothing on my display except for floating turn-by-turn directions when I want them. Then, when I walk back in my door, I have a whole room full of virtual apps pinned to my walls, weather, my mail, and my calendar. Then, hit another button on the same headset that takes me to a fully immersive social space to hang out with some friends or play games. We want it all in one headset. What we’re seeing right now is the very beginning of the little glasses headset on this side, and we’re seeing the larger headsets on this other side. We want all that to be in one. All the features, tiny package. I think that’s where Meta’s heading.

What might seem like a distraction, I think, is actually burning the candle from both ends.

Tony: There is one thing that we have in common: both you and I are not easy to get excited about something. We don’t fall much for the hype. I want to ask you: is there something that you have tried, maybe in the last 12 months, that instead made you say, “Oh, this is really cool”?

Ben: I would say, actually, most recently, it would be the neural band that is shipping with the Ray-Ban Meta Display. From the perspective of an XR person, a 20-degree static HUD display and glasses don’t excite me too much. The neural band that comes with the glasses, which is used for the input, is basically like looking and pinching with Vision Pro, which works really well, but without needing to have your hands within the field of view of the camera. Which is a big benefit because if you’re going to be walking around outside and you want to interact with your headset, like start a music track, you don’t want to talk to your headset in public.

It’s just weird, and it’s probably not ever going to seem normal if you’re in a crowded space and you start talking to your device. Being able to have a wristband that can be down at your side and you can make really subtle pinch and swipe gestures to navigate what’s on the screen, I think that’s the future of input for all-day devices for a long time. For immersive games, we’re going to want the full hand tracking, the full controller tracking. If you just need to be able to navigate a menu and thumbs up a message or start a song or what have you, being able to do it with really little motions, I think for AR glasses and stuff where you want to be outside, that’s going to be the way to go for a long time.

I think it’s very smart because it’s already functionally a device people wear. They could easily make it a watch. They could easily make it a smartwatch, a health tracker kind of thing. It’s not like something brand new. It’s not like telling people, “Hey, wear a special backpack or wear a heavy necklace that has this technology in it.” It’s just something many people are already wearing and would make sense. Even if you only used it to control your glasses 5% of the time, if you’re still getting watch and alarms, and health tracking out of it, it’s already a good product. I’m wearing a smartwatch right now. You can’t see it because this isn’t my real hand [points to the hand of his Vision Pro avatar], but I’m already getting all that value out of it.

If you can take all that value that people already know in a smartwatch and then add the technology that you need to be able to do these really subtle inputs, I think that’s just like a pure win. There’s really minimal downside to it. Why it’s exciting is not just because it’s a good idea, but what they showed works really well. At least in the 15 to 30 minutes that I had to test it myself: zero calibration, just swipe, tap, pinch different fingers, it’s all working. That’s the thing that’s exciting me going forward. I would actually…. so I’m in Vision Pro, great headset for a lot of reasons. The pinching works great. The one problem with it is when your hand is out of the field of view of the camera and it can’t see it, which is rare because they have the downward-facing cameras, but it does happen.

If Apple said, “Hey, we could, instead of watching your hands with the cameras, we could just do the sensing with the watch and do the same look and pinch for the interface, but we’re going to sense it with the watch”, I would say, “Yes, please do it.” I think it would make it more consistent. I think it’s better for the basic need of pointing and clicking on a thing or making selections. I think that is the better approach. Again, obviously, you want full hand tracking for different reasons, controller tracking, all that stuff. That is what I think is the wow ripple effect in the next couple of years. I think this is going to become the way for a lot of outdoor devices.

I think, just like on this headset, we’ll see an Android XR and probably future Quest headsets, that the camera-based look-to-pinch with eye tracking will probably be the way for devices like this in the near future. Then again, hopefully, we have some convergence eventually.

Tony: I hope so. Unluckily, we are getting towards the end of this interview. I want to ask you: since you’ve been in this space for a long time, do you have a fun story, maybe from the early days, that you want to share with us?

Ben: I have a few, but I will share one for now… maybe more another time. One that comes to mind is… I think it was one of the early Connect conferences, back when it was still Oculus Connect, back when Palmer was still with the company. I was there attending the event to cover it for the press. At some point, I can’t remember the exact circumstances, but I think I was invited back to the house where Palmer and some of the early Oculus people… I think they were living there at the time. It was in the Bay Area. I think they had 10 people living in one house in the Bay Area because they were pretty young at the time. They were just like, “Let’s all crash and jam.” They were having fun and hacking stuff together.

They were hardware and software nerds together, basically hanging out. Somebody invited me to come back and hang out after the conference for a little bit. People from the industry are coming back and hanging out. I went and was chatting with Palmer there, and some of his friends and people he was working with. At some point, I was like, “What is that thing? What is that big metal thing right there? Why is it in your kitchen or wherever?” It wasn’t in a workshop, I don’t think so. It was just on their kitchen table or something crazy. I was like, “What is that?” Palmer was like, “Oh, it’s a ramjet.” I was like, [surprised] “What is a ramjet?”

He explained that this was some novel type of engine that has particular pros for… I can’t remember the exact explanation. It was a funny moment for me to realize that Palmer and his friends were such nerds that they were working on a completely different technology other than VR after having just been acquired by this company. They were still nerding out and working on other crazy projects. What is funny to me is not just that, this interest in ramjets, which I think they were using for basically launching miniature rockets and just figuring out how to do that better and better.

But it was the earliest glimpse that I have looking back that foretold where Palmer ended up, where he is now, which is after getting kicked out of Facebook or Meta, he founded a military contracting company, and basically started building this kind of technology as a full-time thing. That was like a little hint that he had this other interest in him that so many years later I saw translate into him getting super serious about it and saying, “We can build this stuff. I can build a headset. I can build this stuff.” Obviously, the company, Anduril, has become really successful and raised a ton of money, with a big valuation. Pretty funny.

On the one hand, you have a guy who had a huge, as far as startups go, huge acquisition on a thing that he built, and then had this middle time where he eventually got kicked out, and then over here founded another company and had another, not an acquisition, but huge valuation. At the same time, it’s this guy who had a ramjet in his kitchen and was like, “Yo, come hang out and have some beers or whatever after the conference back at our tech frat house, essentially.” This is funny. It’s funny to see the through line there after so many years. Palmer remains a really interesting character. He always has been. He has not exactly been the typical tech guy. It’s been cool to see.

Tony: That’s amazing. The final question is always the same: Is there anything else you want to say? The mic is yours.

Ben: Please check out Inside XR Design. I really put my heart into the episodes that I’m making. Again, the goal is really to share with people what I think is design that is worth knowing about. There are some hidden gems in there. There are some details from bigger games. I really hope that I can save people time and give you the lesson without having to put on a headset and play through the full game. This is stuff that I’ve seen from playing games over the last decade in VR and finding where stuff works so well that it’s really memorable to me. I’ve gone back to some older games that are still doing things better than we ever see in new content today.

For the most part, I think the reason we’re not seeing that is simply because these are hidden things. It’s not obvious to know where to go to find these little smart designs when it comes to VR interaction and such. If you’re interested in development design, check that out. I hope you learn something, maybe that you hadn’t seen before, or are inspired by something. Again, hopefully, I would love to see people see something there that inspires them, build upon it, and show everybody how to do that thing even better. It’s a “on the shoulders of giants” situation. We need that to be happening more in VR, I think, than it is. Hopefully, there’s some value there to be had for people.

I think we’re up to almost two hours of content on that series and more to come.

Tony: That’s amazing. Thanks, Ben, for being part of this interview. Thanks for sharing your knowledge. I have to say, you’re amazing. One of the best journalists we have in our space.

Ben: Thank you, Tony. Appreciate it.