One of my earliest VR demos was a BASIC interpreter, running on the screen of a 3D model of a Commodore PET. I wrote the interpreter specifical to run a proto-v

One of my earliest VR demos was a BASIC interpreter, running on the screen of a 3D model of a Commodore PET. I wrote the interpreter specifical to run a proto-version of Oregon Trail that had been released in a magazine in the early 70s, OCRed in the really 2000s, and largely ignored for much of all that time. The interpreter was pretty easy because I already had a bunch of tokenizing code for rendering syntax highlighted code. This was all in WebVR, back when WebVR the DK2 was the only headset around. I have VR JavaScript code from that time that predates WebVR, running on a smartphone, in a cardboard box with lenses from before Google Cardboard was a thing. I do Unity3D VR now, back into my favorite language, C#. But I do miss a lot about that time. People were just happy anything worked. I didn't have to compete against huge corporations for attention. I didn't have people telling me I was reinventing the wheel, citing projects younger than mine. I didn't have to constantly justify my engineering decisions to someone much less experienced than me. I could just build and have fun. Now it's a job.