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Read more about John Vechey in “For Years, VR Promised to Replace the Office. Could It Really Happen Now?” Subscribe to Distributed at Pocket Casts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RSS, or wherever you like to listen. “A new form of communication” After leading PopCap Games to a successful exit, cofounder John Vechey started Pluto VR to help humanity transcend physical location through a virtual reality chat app. In this episode, John explains how VR might be used in distributed workplaces to enable people to have high fidelity meetings that capture the nuances of human conversations. The full episode transcript is below. *** Matt Mullenweg: We’ve been hearing about virtual reality since the late ’80s, but this technology still hasn’t yet leapt from the pages of science fiction into our universe—at least not into the mainstream. The VR revolution seems to be always just around the corner, but some people believe that we really are on the verge of something that’s going to change everyone’s lives. John Vechey, cofounder of Pluto VR, is one of those people. He’s specifically interested in how VR is going to change the way we communicate. John found success as the founder of PopCap Games–you may know them as the folks behind your favorite mobile games like Bejeweled or Plants vs. Zombies. After selling PopCap, he transitioned into virtual communications. I wanted to speak with John because he’s got some big ideas about how VR will one day be used for work. Pluto VR is building a communication platform that will allow people with VR headsets to talk to each other in a way that feels far more immersive than a phone call or a video chat. His goal is to seamlessly recreate the experience of speaking with someone face-to-face, with shared presence and context. He wants remote conversations to have more fidelity, so they can capture the nuances and subtleties of communication that humans are used to experiencing. If distributed work is going to take off, we’re going to need really good communication tools. But how realistic is it to assume that we can have virtual offices that are so lifelike and useful that they replace physical ones? Are we really anywhere near this dream? Matt: Hello, this is Matt Mullenweg, we are on the Distributed.blog podcast and I’m talking to John Vechey, who I’ve known for a few years now. John, tell us a little bit about your early career so we know how to catch up to where you are now. John Vechey: So in 2000, I started a company with some friends called PopCap Games. And at the time, PopCap was like, we’re gonna make some games, but instead of for games, which at the time was pretty much sixteen to twenty-five year old males, we’re gonna make games that everyone can play. Our first game was a game called Bejeweled. Matt: I love Bejeweled! I played it on the Palm Pilot. John: Nice. And that was like the original, like, great format for it with the touch of that stylus. Matt: With the pen, yeah. John: Yeah. Bejeweled, Plants vs. Zombies, Peggle, we started as a web game company, transitioned to a downloadable game company and then a multi-platform company and then eventually a mobile company. So over the course of like fourteen years there was a lot of different phases of PopCap. Matt: Of those, which did people get most obsessed about? John: Of our games, like, Bejeweled and Plants vs. Zombies were our most popular. And people got obsessed about them in different ways. In Bejeweled 2 we put a Zen mode in so you couldn’t even lose. All you could do is just play. Like, it would never hit a losing condition and there was just points that would rack up. And it was one of those things where I realized that there were people that had spent over a year’s worth of hours playing that mode. Matt: Wow. John: Right? Matt: Last night I told friends I was coming here to Seattle to do this interview and Plants vs. Zombies came up, and it turns out both of them had taken a whole Thanksgiving where they just got obsessed with it and went through every possible level. John: Yeah. And I think that’s the Plants vs. Zombies story ’cause it had a linear aspect to it that Bejeweled didn’t have. Bejeweled was more like an arcade game and Plants vs. Zombies was like an exploration and collection game. And so you’d hear stories about people like yeah, we went on this vacation and we just beat Plants vs. Zombies, that’s what we did for a vacation. [laughter] I’m like, that’s cool. Matt: No I totally get it. So PopCap sold to Electronic Arts, right? John: Yeah, in 2011. We were around four hundred people. Matt: And was PopCap all in one office? John: We had a joke at some point that the sun never set on PopCap. So we had offices in Seattle, San Francisco, San Carlos, Vancouver, Dublin… period, I think that’s it. [laughter] So we had a lot of offices and all offices were pretty — I mean they were all kind of doing a mix of regional work and game development so it was definitely a lot of travel. Matt: So you were a multi-office? John: We were multi-office, yeah. Matt: Most of the people working there went into some office somewhere in the world everyday. John: One of the weird things about PopCap was one of the cofounders, Jason, who was the creative director, he was always remote. Matt: Wow. John: So we had this really weird thing where one person was distributed and that actually shaped our culture of game development. Matt: Where was he? John: He was up first in Vancouver Canada and then he moved to Vancouver Island. The core of what we were was always distributed. And he came down quite a bit but in some ways it was frustrating for him because he’s like, well, I can come down and not get work done or I can just stay up and get work done. Matt: You’ve been running companies and doing highly creative and successful development with games for a long time. Why don’t you introduce us to what you’re working on now? John: I left EA in 2014 maybe, after working there for three years. I knew I didn’t want to make games anymore and so I started looking around at what was happening and I went to D.I.C.E, a gaming conference, and saw Palmer Luckey talk. And he talked about what virtual reality was doing and how it was closer than anyone realized and — Matt: Say who Palmer was. John: Palmer was the founder of Oculus. It’s a VR headset and it was bought by Facebook. And I saw this presentation, and I was like, wow, this could be really world changing. Matt: It must have been a good presentation. John: There was a lot of passion behind it. And it was like, I wonder if any of this is real. But it was. It was real enough to at least be like, hey I wonder if there’s something there. And so I started just going around town being like, hey let’s say I want to do this type of thing or that type of thing in VR, does anyone know anyone I should talk to? How would I do that, right? I wasn’t an expert in VR. And I met two co-founders, Jarrod and Forest, who had this startup called Impossible Object. I head up north into the far Seattle suburbs into this studio they had, where they had this high-end professional motion capture set up, and then an Oculus development kit. And their first words were like, take your pants off and put this suit on. So I had to like, put this motion capture suit on. And I had experienced a bunch of different experiments that they had done where I could like walk around the room, I could look at my own body, I could manipulate things with my hands — things that weren’t possible with the current consumer VR hardware. And so I was like, that was amazing, what are you doing with this? What’s your plan? And they were like, well we’re not thinking that anyone’s gonna buy this forty-thousand dollar motion capture system, but we think this is where VR is going, so we’re trying to learn as much as we can about the future five years from now, instead of trying to think about how to develop for the world right now, which is gonna rapidly change. Matt: And those are your co-founders at Pluto? John: Yup. And then with another person that I was friends with. Matt: How do you go from this mixed reality thing to thinking about work and how people collaborate together using these technologies? John: I had come from games and I didn’t want to make games. Jonathan, one of the other co-founders, had come from animation, didn’t wanna — Matt: Why didn’t you want to make games? John: I was just done with it. You know, you do something for fourteen years and you just want a break maybe. Matt: So one of your co-founders also was done with games. John: Well he had been in animation. He came from Disney Animation for fourteen years. Matt: Wow. John: Yeah. So his career was interesting ’cause he started with Lion King and ended with Frozen and he’s like — and everything in between was very different than either of those extremes. [laughter] He was like, it was like a long walk down and then a looong walk back up. Matt: Interesting. John: And I think I was sitting there being like, well I really don’t want to get into VR and then start a game company. So for us, what was important about coming together was that there was something that existed above us and above any kind of decision-making power structure, even ownership structure. Our purpose was to help humanity transcend physical location. So that was important, and that we could align ourselves around that was the second thing. And then the third thing, what was it? So really we felt that the power of what was happening with virtual reality at the time wasn’t just that you could go to a place, but that you could go to a place with someone else. Matt: Hmm. John: It wasn’t just like cool, I can essentially take a drug and space out, it was more about like, well what can we do together? And we took it even farther, like what if right now we’re so tied to our physical location, right? Like just today alone I got up, I went to an office, then I went to go have a meeting in one part of town. I came back to the office to have lunch, went over here, right? I’ve already done more trips than I would care to do. It’s nice to be in a car for a little bit, it’s nice to be on a bus for a little bit, but it’s not really serving my life. I could’ve been more present working on something, reading, or just sitting out in the sun. Matt: Help humanity transcend physical location. John: And we spend a lot of time on each word. Matt: Help humanity, as opposed to robots. John: I think you can actually break it down literally one word at a time. Like “help,” what does that mean? It’s like, to aid, to be a part of, to make something possible that wasn’t possible or make it easier for other people. So I think that the help part really for us came down to — we don’t need to own the solution, we just need to be part of creating something bigger than us and helping other people do something. Like, we are in service of other people. And then “humanity” is like, who is it? It’s humanity. It’s not companies, it’s not tech bros, it’s not Americans, it’s everybody. Every choice we make we need to think how is this helping all of humanity, right? Matt: At a global level. John: At a global level, at an able-ness level, at a gender level. Really being like hey, we need something that serves and can help everybody. And then “transcend,” right, that’s like a — we spent a lot of time on that word. Matt: [laughs] That’s a big word. John: It is. And so for us it’s about moving beyond, making something thoughtless. So if you think about things that have transcended something before in our society, you can certainly say commerce has transcended physical, I think would be a pretty fair thing to say. What else has transcended? Matt: ‘Cause now we have credit cards and… John: Yeah, how much do you touch physical money, much less prioritize your life around it? Matt: Yeah. John: It’s pretty rare that you’re like, oh I’ve really gotta go to the bank to do this large financial transaction with physical currency, right? Matt: Yeah, almost never. Are there technologies in the past that you feel like helped humanity transcend location that you find inspiring? ‘Cause that was actually one of my first thoughts is like, from the telegram to the phone to email, you know, all these sorts of things. Like, we are more connected than ever and I think it’s the primary thing responsible for our progress. So in theory, if your mission is successful, and this new technology brings humanity closer together, it’s just like upgrading the routers and ethernet between a data center. Like, it’ll get faster and better and we’ll be able to create better things. John: So there’s been this history of community of making the physical limitations smaller to communicate over a longer distance and then at the same time there is a higher quality of communication. And so you think about the telegram to the telephone to the mobile telephone, but then you pretty much get to audio chat and then you add some video — and we’ll talk about video in a second — but then that’s it. And then it’s in-person, but there’s this giant gulf between what it means to be in-person and what means to use video chat or talk on the telephone. There is all this information you get from in-person that you don’t get from those other mediums. And that information is what is fundamental to what we’re trying to do and it’s fundamental to our purpose. Because you can’t just say we’re making a better video chat. Great, humanity has transcended physical location. You’ve gotta do something that we can’t even imagine right now. The closest we can get is a high def video of you but you’re never watching a video being like, I feel like I’m in the same space as you. Matt: So what is Pluto today? John: What Pluto is today is the start of a new form of communication. We call it shared presence and this idea that you can share our presence with someone and feel present. And so we have an alpha version of an IOS client right now that we’re working on. So IOS to IOS, one to one. Matt: But that has to be a flat screen, right? John: Yes, it has to be a flat screen but it doesn’t have to feel like a flat screen. Matt: What does that mean? Mind blown. [laughter] John: It’s like imagine if you were looking through a portal. Matt: So I would be holding up my iPhone and then on the screen I’d see you sitting in a chair across from me? John: And instead of it feeling like you’re looking at video of me, you’re feeling like you’re looking like — think like a magic portal, right? So it’s just a portal in space and you’re just like, oh yeah, I’m holding my hands up like a little rectangle, I’m still looking at you. And it just happens to be that we’re in the same physical space and I’m doing this, but what happens if it’s like, oh, it’s like a magical portal and you can be anywhere? Matt: So for our listeners, John was just holding up his fingers right in front of his eyes. Now if my phone were there though, the camera would only be showing you like my eyebrow and eye, one eye. John: Correct, if I – Matt: So it seems like we normally position these things for the sake of the person on the other side. John: Right. And so what happens is when you’re communicating with a shared presence and Pluto’s product, there’s a mutualism — Matt: To position it so you see my face, I need to hold it farther away, right? John: Yeah. So you can’t just do a small segment of it. And it’s one of those things where it’s like, there’s things you can do on video chat that you can’t use Pluto for. Pluto is really bad for walking. ‘Cause just imagine you’re walking backwards and I’m walking forwards and we’re still trying to talk, like it doesn’t — that’s not how walking communication works. So like Facetime, for example, or video chat, is really, really good for that type of communication. But if you’re in a long distance relationship and you really wanna connect with someone, Pluto is way better, right? You sit the device up on a sta…
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