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When Google Cardboard first came out and the Oculus Rift DK2 was first shipping, I had already been making AR apps and anaglyph stereo apps in the browser. I pa
by moron4hire 9y ago
When Google Cardboard first came out and the Oculus Rift DK2 was first shipping, I had already been making AR apps and anaglyph stereo apps in the browser. I packed up a bunch of code I already had for Device Orientation API in mobile browsers, write a new side-by-side rendering effect for myself, and made it all into a simple framework to make stereo WebGL/Three.js demos easier to throw together quickly. It basically became the first "WebVR" framework, a few months before Mozilla and Google had announced anything about officially working on the API. I called it Pyschologist.js.
It got a little attention, but the biggest surge was when I created a text editor inside of it that rendered to a texture, rather than using CSS3D transforms of existing, content-editable text editor components like a few other demos had done. I called the text editor Primrose, but people seemed to respond to that branding better than Psychologists, and nobody seemed interested in a myriad of small components, just a single, integrated solution, so I sunk the text editor into the framework, rebranded everything as just Primrose, and spent a ton of time writing a website and basic documentation.
I've been trying to build a business around VR ever since. First, I tried to sell the framework. Made $10 on one license sale. I tried consulting services. Made about $2000 for a company I had joined that pledged to sponsor my development and do marketing and sales for me. I tried building a WebRTC teleconferencing app, but couldn't get enough focus from the company to push it well. After a year of no movement from the sales team, I'm back to being on my own now and back to trying to figure out my own path.
I think the teleconferencing app idea still has merit, and I have a few other idea that have some potential, but I don't really know anything about marketing and selling SaaS. So I guess that is my next project, to learn.
https://www.primrosevr.com https://www.primrosevr.com