7 Years Of The Ghost Howls!

Today my blog becomes 7 years old. I think that the moment I decided to start it, that August, 15th of 2016, has been a “Sliding Doors” moment of my life. I just started it to follow a suggestion from Tommaso Di Bartolo using a free template on WordPress.com, thinking that nothing would have happened and no one would have cared. Instead here I am, some years after, with this blog still up and running, and with lots of new friends I have only thanks to this platform, which helped me a lot in connecting with the other people in our community.

I’m writing this when it is clearly not the best moment for this platform. Because of my current high workload, I have had less time to dedicate to this blog recently, so the number of articles I could write has diminished a lot. There are lots of devices I have used but I have not had the time to review: for instance, I have never written a detailed review of the Pico 4 and Quest Pro, and I have still a DPVR headset waiting on my desk to be unboxed. It’s hard to coordinate a demanding daily job and my passion for content creation: I’ll have to find new strategies to integrate better these two activities. An idea could be writing shorter reviews for the time being, or publishing more during the weekends and less during the weekdays. I’ll see.

I’m still doing my best to keep this platform alive, and the fact that I’ve always managed to publish at least one article every week (at least the roundup) in this last tough year, shows you that I’m fighting with all my forces to keep blogging about AR and VR and informing this wonderful community made by all of you. I thank you all my readers for having always been big supporters of my work, in all moments. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

7 years is a lot of time. When I introduce myself and I say that I have been working in the XR field for 9 years (from that far away 2014 when I started Immotionar with my buddy Gianni), I am surprised myself. I’ve gone through many evolutions of the technology and the market. This year we are in the middle of a new transition, with all companies switching their interest towards passthrough Mixed Reality. Apple has also finally announced its headset after so many years of me watching useless Apple keynotes where I wasted my life two hours at a time just to hear about the updates of the iPhone, that introduced the same features added to Android 2 years before, but saying that they were new features invented by Apple. We’re in a middle of a new transition and I can’t wait to discover what the future will reserve for us. For sure many other Apple keynotes, which now I’ll be forced to watch because now I have to follow the updates of the Vision Pro. Please someone save me.

And of course, I’ll be here to tell you the story about this new course of XR, here on this little blog.

I’m blogging about XR since 2016 and if I have learned one thing about VR in all this time is that VR is always dead. Every year, it is dead. I can’t sleep 5 minutes that I wake up and it is dead again. It’s 7 years that VR is dead. Considering the time I started this VR blog, I’ve started thinking that it is my blog that killed VR. Sorry, everyone, that was not my intention. I’ve also understood why zombie games are so popular in VR: because zombies are like VR: they are dead for a long, but they are still very active… and when they bite you, you become one of them. Exactly like when you try a good VR experience for the first time, and you become a VR fanboy. I’m still confused about when VR will be alive again. Probably by the time I will be dead.

In these 7 years, I hope to have brought you something good. The best moments for me as a blogger are when someone thanks me because something I did helped them. Some of my tutorials helped some indie studios in publishing games, some companies got funds also because of an article of mine… I even know that the boss of one of the applications showcased by Apple for the Vision Pro got passionate about virtual reality also because of me. That’s something that makes me proud of what I did in all these years. Sometimes people just thank me because of a smile I’ve gifted them with something stupid I said in my articles: I’m happy to make people smile.

And the fun thing about blogging is that you never know who is going to read what you are writing: maybe one day I will meet Zuck in person and he will say “Hey Skarred, I love your blog. Thanks to your jokes I’ve learned how it is that thing that you humans do when you show the teeth and exhale air in bursts. I think you call this ‘laughing’. I like doing that while drinking the sauce I keep on the shelves” and he will proceed to tell me about all my browsing history on the Meta Quest browser. No Zuck, it wasn’t me watching that VR porn, it was a friend of mine that sometimes uses my headset.

Today is a holiday in Italy, but for me is literally a special day because it is when this adventure began. And every year I like to write an article like this to thank you all of this amazing community for your neverending support. And to thank all people that contributed actively to making this blog grow, including Max for his help in implementing the new layout, Rob for the detailed articles he writes for me once in a while, and Mati for being one of my longest-time followers. Because VR may be dead, but it has an amazing community that is very alive.

Happy anniversary to me! As a gift to the community for this celebration, I will spend the next weeks writing a detailed article about the lessons learned during the development of the alpha version of the VRROOM platform, hoping that it will be useful to many of you. And if you want to brighten up my day, please write me in the comments here or on my social media channels something nice :). Let’s celebrate together!