The co-founders of the first iPhoneDevCamp in 2007, Raven Zachary and Dom Sagolla, are planning on hosting the inaugural VisionDevCamp in the Bay Area a week or two after the Apple Vision Pro launch, which is currently expected sometime in the first quarter of 2024. I had a chance to get more context for the origin story of the iPhoneDevCamp, iPadDevCamp, and iOSDevCamp gatherings as well as how it has helped to facilitate innovation of mobile apps and development frameworks.
They are hoping to bring together Apple iOS developers, web developers, react native developers, XR developers as well as immersive artists and storytellers to VisionDevCamp for a weekend hackthon to facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration and to catalyze innovations in spatial computing. It should be the largest gathering of Apple Vision Pro owners, but owning a device is not a requirement for attendance to encourage more collaboration and diversity of participation.
Sign up to the email list on the VisionDevCamp website to get notified once registration opens up, join the VisionDevCamp Discord, let us know if you’d like to speak at a potential Vision Colloquium ahead of VisionDevCamp, and follow up with Raven if you know of a location in the Bay Area that could host 150-600 people. And tune into this podcast for more information and context on the VisionDevCamp and to hear some of Sagolla’s hands-on impressions of the Apple Vision Pro and his friend’s claim that it has improved his productivity levels by around 10x.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the future of special computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. Today's episode, we're going to be diving deep into the Vision Dev Camp, which is a hackathon gathering that will be happening a week or two after whenever Apple announces the launch of the Apple Vision Pro, which is Currently expected to be sometime around quarter one of 2024. So sometime probably in February or March So vision def camp will likely be sometime in March or April and a lot of those details are yet to be determined You can find more information at vision def camp org where they have a website you can sign up and get on the email list to get more information whenever they launch as well as join the discord, but Today I have the co-founders of the Vision Dev Camp, Raven Zachary and Dom Segola, who also happened to be co-founders of the iPhone Dev Camp all the way back in 2007, where they had for a number of years an annual gathering of all these iOS developers to push the latest innovations of what's possible with the new device. At that time, it was the iPhone and then the iPad. So they've had the iPhone Dev Camp and iPad Dev Camp and iOS Dev Camp, and now they're going to be starting the Vision Dev Camp. So they're going to be having lots of owners of the Apple Vision Pro coming together somewhere in the Bay Area a week or two after the Apple launch, and basically have a hackathon from anywhere from 100 to their largest gathering that they've had in the past is around 600 people. So it kind of depends on how much interest they have to bring together the different development communities of iOS developers, the web developers, as well as Rack Native developers, and the XR developers. It'll be a great opportunity to push the limits of what's possible on the Apple Vision Pro and create this whole hackathon environment where people are able to experiment and push forward what's even possible with the device. So we'll be giving a lot of the history of the iPhone DevCamp and what led to the founding of the Vision DevCamp, as well as some other impressions of the Apple Vision Pro on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Raven and Dom happened on Tuesday, November 28th, 2023. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:17.640] Raven Zachary: My name is Raven Zachary. I'm one of the founders of iPhone DevCamp and now Vision DevCamp, which we'll be talking about on the episode today. In my day job, I'm the chief operating officer of a company called Around, AroundAR.com. We work on augmented reality experiences for live events.
[00:02:34.189] Dom Sagolla: I'm Dom Segola, also co-founder of iPhone DevCamp and Vision DevCamp. As my day job, I'm co-founder of a company called Arcapella. We're a code provenance and software security startup. just going to market now.
[00:02:49.532] Kent Bye: Maybe you could each give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into both emerging technologies with the first iPhone Dev Camp, but now with XR technologies with virtual and augmented reality. So I'd love to hear your journey into the space and your relationship to the spatial computing dimension of it as well.
[00:03:06.652] Raven Zachary: Yeah, sounds great. There's two parallel paths. There's the Apple track and there's the mixed reality, augmented reality, virtual reality path. And let me talk about each briefly. I go through the Apple path in great detail on the visiondevcamp.org website with a post I did back on the 15th of November called the origin story, which tracks from the moment I was in the audience for the iPhone announcement all the way through the launch of Vision Dev Camp. I've been working with Apple technology for a very long time. My father bought an Apple II for us when I was a kid and had a Mac in college and started an iPhone company, iPhone Dev Camp, built apps for big brands, built the app for the Obama campaign in 2008, built the first Starbucks app for iPhone, worked with Dom on both of those projects. big brand iPhone projects mostly, sold my company to Walmart, spent three years at Walmart managing mobile product management teams around the world for Walmart's brands, then started a mixed reality company for the HoloLens back in 2015, 16 timeframe, just before the launch of the HoloLens. We were in the initial group of eight startups that went through the Academy program at Microsoft to be certified HoloLens developer partners. and over the course of six and a half years rode that wave up and then precipitously down during COVID until the company was shut down largely due to the combination of the factors involving COVID and Microsoft stepping back from its full support of HoloLens, unfortunately. That's kind of the quick summary. Also, Kent, as you know, you and I founded the Portland Virtual Reality Meetup together. So I've worked with you in the space and I've really enjoyed that and love your podcast. But Dom, with that, let me turn it over to you.
[00:04:52.893] Dom Sagolla: Great, thanks. I think similar to Raven, I've been an Apple fan since the earliest days I can remember. I guess I could say I started programming when I was early on the Apple II with Logo. And since then, I think my earliest memories of making something work of my own was, I think, hacking the chooser extension to do something fun in college. Got started programming in college back when nobody liked the Mac. And I've been very assiduously promoting it and being a huge fan and believer ever since then. And it's sort of like, to me, comeuppance and happy circumstance that Apple's so popular today, but I've always felt this way. And it's been an awesome journey to be a Mac developer, iPhone developer, Apple Watch developer, and hopefully now a Vision Pro developer. you know, starting with the first web apps on iPhone, you know, prior to that, it was native apps for the Mac at macromedia at Adobe. I was at Hewlett Packard back in the day. And then I've just been something of a tinker and a hacker test engineer by trade and then a founder and a product guy and all things related to like shipping software prior to the app store. And then since the app store with Raven on the Obama app, as you mentioned on Starbucks, a bunch of other great apps, I've advised many, many companies through iPhone developer camp over the years, I'll refrain from mentioning those are all on the website. I don't like name dropping too much, but some great projects, some amazing people, the earliest stages of innovation on the platform. So I feel like I've been a fly on the wall or like next to lightning striking, like my entire career. And so when it comes to the beginning of this platform, for me, it's an inflection point that tracks along with the other major turning points we've had in computing itself, right? From the server apps only, right? To desktop and personal computing, to then laptops, to then the web itself and then web apps and then mobile and now machine learning and spatial computing. So I feel like very lucky to be part of all these inflection points. And it's just an awesome pleasure and a privilege to be here with you guys really exploring this new frontier.
[00:06:56.134] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, the vision dev camp is going to be sometime in the first quarter of next year. A lot of those details are yet to be determined because it depends upon when Apple decides the Apple vision pro launch date. And then a week or two after that, you're going to hold this camp where you're going to bring together lots of developers. And I wanted to take us back to 2007 because I happened to be living in the Bay area at the time. Chris Messina introduced me into Twitter, the new dimensions of social media. You had gatherings like Tim O'Reilly's Foo Camp, which was an invite only people coming together and talking about technology topics with the open space technologies. And then there's a group of people that created a more democratized bar camp. And so there's all these bar camps that were happening at the time. So I guess the iPhone dev camp was sort of in that spirit of kind of like a hackathon, but bringing people together who were very interested in these emerging technologies. At the time you had the most iPhones in one location. I happened to be in the area and I came to it and participated in it. But I'd love to hear from your perspective, like why do an event like this, especially because Apple, they tend to be very controlling in terms of what happens. And so this seems to be a very grassroots driven event to bring the community together, to do some sensemaking processes or community building, or just to figure out these new emerging technologies. And I feel like we're at a very similar time with Apple's entry into spatial computing, which most people call virtual reality or mixed reality, augmented reality. If anything, it's virtual reality with mixed reality pass-through is what I would call it, but they're calling it spatial computing. So I guess we'll use spatial computing for the rest of this podcast, but I'd love to hear some of your reflections on, you know, take me back to 2007 and what were some of the larger contexts that you decided to bring people together and then the evolution of that up until we get to today.
[00:08:56.049] Raven Zachary: Yeah, yeah, let me start it off and then there's a nice handover point where I meet Dom and Dom can carry it through to the event. Basically how this works out is 2006, 2007, I was an industry analyst tracking open source technology for large venture firms and financial institutions and the disruptive impact of open source software on traditional software markets. I got to meet Chris Messina at the time because he was heavily involved in the open source scene in San Francisco. So we met there. And from that started talking about things we could do together in the open source community. Those of you listening will probably know Chris best from his work on inventing the hashtag as an early Twitter user. How this started was Apple announced iPhone in January of 2007 at Macworld. There was a lot of excitement because Steve Jobs got up on stage and said that this device would run Mac OS X. And you had a lot of Mac OS X developers in the audience get very excited about the possibility of translating their skills from the Mac at that point, which is a very small, you know, two to five percent market share in the U.S. for desktop computers to potentially hundreds of millions of phones at the time. Now we know, of course, it's billions of phones. And what happened then over the course of the summer, getting ready for the launch of iPhone in late June of 2007, was Apple had their annual Worldwide Developers Conference, which most people know as WWDC. At WWDC, Steve Jobs got up on stage and said that he had a sweet solution, his words, not mine, a sweet solution for development on the iPhone that would be web. And he was delivering this message to largely a group of Objective-C developers who developed native apps for Mac OS X. And it was not the reception that I think Apple was hoping for, although it probably was the reception that they expected, because you had a room full of Mac OS X Objective C developers who were disappointed. We wanted to essentially turn lemons into lemonade. There was a lot of negativity in the Mac development community in early part of June, just after that announcement. I called up Chris Messina and said we needed to do some event. At the time, Chris was involved in BarCamp, which was the alternative to FooCamp. And there was another event going on in San Francisco at the time called Super Happy Dev House. And it was kind of the confluence of those two concepts into one event to focus on basically celebrating this new platform, even if we were limited at that time to web. And the first person Chris introduced me to was Dom. It was only the seed of an idea. We didn't know the structure, the format, the location, the date, anything, how many people we could accommodate, what the focus was going to be. And then Dom showed up.
[00:11:30.321] Dom Sagolla: Nice. Perfect. In parallel to that, while Raven was an analyst in 2006, I was working at a startup called Odeo, which is where Twitter was created as a side project in their own little hackathon, right? So I'm user nine on Twitter, although I never worked at Twitter Incorporated. Long story, I wrote a book on it. You can read 140 characters on Amazon to learn that story. But in parallel to what was happening with Raven, I had this formative experience of a hackathon. Before pivots were a thing, we pivoted the company. And a bunch of us went and created this little thing that no one knew what to do with called Twitter. And it was a web app, barely. It was more or less an SMS application, which became a web app. And I really don't know what it was any good for. It was a bunch of us nerds on there, self-organizing in the same way that we use Twitter to organize this organization called iPhone Dev Camp. I literally learned about this from Chris in a tweet referencing Raven. And I, you know, at the time was after that experience, I was working at Adobe back there after my experience in macro media and working in R and D and voiceover IP and open source really tuned into anything I could find out there at the pulse of the web. And Twitter was the pulse of the web at that point. And it just seemed natural that the folks who were creating Twitter got the golden egg. Right. But like, I felt like I left that organization with the golden goose, which was this process, which was this hackathon thing. And so when Raven and Chris approached me, I thought, well, let's do this. Let's do this thing the way it should be done at scale with as many believers as we could find at Adobe town hall. Now you'll have to remember at the time, no one knew what would be shipping on iPhone. And at the time, the big mobile application substrate was Flash and Flashlight. And everyone at Adobe at the time believed that they were going to ship the Flashlight extension on iPhone Safari, which no one could say for sure. But I managed to, through the grace of all that is good, book Town Hall independently without asking anyone for approval. And so I felt like we could go ahead and do this. Now, we talked about it in public and launched and announced it before the powers that be could tell me no. And I did have a conversation with the powers that be at Adobe, which I'll never forget. I won't get into it, but it wasn't really pretty. The point is that it was becoming clear that flashlight was not going to ship on that first version. And as that became more and more clear, it became more and more awkward. And as Apple started to learn about us, they were keeping their eye on us. And I'll never forget looking at the roster of those who are going to attend and finding a couple of names I didn't recognize. They were pseudonyms for people at Apple who are going under a different name, which is great. And actually, I saw some folks I recognized from my days at Macromedia, and I knew they weren't registered. So I figured those are my folks. And sure enough, those are the folks that ended up coming as non-representative representatives. So it was just so nice to have those folks who could attend and just be there with us, you know. And they weren't necessarily keeping tabs on us, keeping an eye on us, they were just there as one of the members of the community as much as they could be to see what would happen. And so many things happened that event. Frameworks were developed, open source was released, People met and became co-founders. Movements were launched. I remember the next camp, we gone from there. Open authentication as a working group was established in 2008 at Adobe Town Hall for the next event. The first iPhone gaming contest ever happened at iPhone Dev Camp the following year when App Store launched. People launched their careers and retired fast because of App Store success that occurred. Raven and I were recruited to be a part of the campaign when Obama was the Senator and became President Obama that year while we were at Twitter headquarters, I'll recall. Yes. Watching the results come in. So just such a confluence of a social network emerging, a Twitter as a web app, right? And as a community of makers and builders, this new platform of mobile web where you could create a new experience and take it with you anywhere. And then the promise of a native application framework, folks who were pioneers on the Mac and pioneers in their fields being directed and driven towards the new platforms. And then just so much opportunity, just an insane amount of opportunity and a hockey stick of growth in terms of adoption of the tool, of the device. In parallel to today, it's a very different situation, but there are some analogs, right? We have now a reset in the social network field, like Twitter is now bye-bye. And we have all these new things coming through. I get my news from Astadon these days. And it feels like a bunch of nerds just back in the day as it did at Twitter. And we have the unknown of what'll come with this new platform and what it's good for. I don't think anyone really knew what iPhone would be good for. I don't think anyone really expected that it would be this incredible web application tool that it was. And so I guess the killer app for iVision Pro is yet to be seen. And so we're in such a similar space in some ways, and yet other ways, very different. I don't think everyone's super excited about getting together for a conference these days with COVID still raging. But I would say that there are a couple of disadvantages. But I'd say in general, there are quite a few similar inflection points. It's a brand new thing. No one's really tried yet. I've been lucky enough to try it. We can talk about that later. But I find such parallels. And it's just so awesome that Raven came to me. longstanding relationship and professional understanding and synergy. Because like, I think we share the vision, shall we say.
[00:17:14.807] Raven Zachary: Yeah. And there's two things I want to bring up before we move on to the next question. The first is, what is the structure of a DevCamp? And the second is, what have we done with DevCamps? And that's a two part story. What is the structure of a DevCamp? Basically, as we have created, you show up on a Friday, generally after work in the afternoon, you get to socialize, you meet with other team members, you pitch ideas on stage, We help you meet and build a team. And basically, you start working, you start coding, building the concept, getting ready. You know that on Sunday evening, you're going to get up on stage and you're going to demo whatever it is that your team is going to build. You've got most of Saturday, with the exception of maybe a kickoff Saturday morning, where we go through kind of the rules of the event, the logistics, and generally a keynote speaker or two to work with your team on coding and designing and working together. Sometimes teams form Friday, sometimes teams form Saturday, and sometimes teams arrive together with a concept already to work on. That's the basic focus. Sunday afternoon is demos. Everyone goes home, pack it up, and we leave. In terms of the heritage of the event, 2007 with Dom at Adobe, that was the first event. We had, I think, 400, maybe 300 people at that event. That focus was, of course, web dev. That was the only way to do development on the iPhone in 2007. In 2008, we had the launch of the native SDK. So we had a combination of web and native app development also at Adobe. That was the last event we ran at Adobe. 2009, we moved to Yahoo headquarters. That was our biggest event ever. The amount of hype and hysteria for the iPhone and the App Store in 2008 was palpable. It was a huge phenomenon in 2009. We had over 600 people attend. We also had BT, the electro artist, come and perform. Kind of tells you that's our peak event in terms of attendance and support I think we had 30 sponsors. Great event. From there, we moved over to PayPal and eBay for a series of years. And I was involved in the event up and through 2012 and then stepped away due to other commitments. But Dom kept it going. Do you want to talk about after that?
[00:19:21.466] Dom Sagolla: So yeah, sure. Exactly. I think the other big inflection point was the iPad dev camp. Yes. We had like Larry Tesler speak. We had Oren Jacobs speak. We had, I mean, it's a luminary, so it's just an incredible event. And again, no one knew what would have had become. So, yeah, it was awesome to have the crew for that one. 2012 and then 2013, it was continuing to just look for gems and needles in the haystack in terms of great opportunities on this new platform of all kinds. a more inclusive developer camp. It was an iOS developer camp. They eventually split the platform into iPadOS and iOS. And so we just kept the words iOS for a while. After that, I kept it going to be developer camp. And then it was essentially iPhone specific, but we included other types of development, especially because it had roots in the web. And we had different sponsors and hosts, like one year we had it at the Computer History Museum. We had it at Google for a number of years, both here and in New York City. We just kept it going in any way we could to keep the community rolling. And I think for us, it was about inclusion, diversity and empowerment. That was an alternative to the kind of competitive type hackathons that you've seen. Because if you think of the word hackathon, you might imagine people elbowing their way to the front, trying to win. And that wasn't always the spirit of Developer Camp. I mean, there's one other tradition that Raven neglected is MacHack. And this is this group of people out of Berkeley that kind of just would go and build something, and the winner was the least useful thing. Really, that was the winner. And so there were a bunch of early ideas at the Developer Camps that were so ridiculous. that they were funny. And then we actually had a couple of categories that were dedicated to things that were not useful or funny. In the spirit of that, I took a couple of cues from other communities like girls who code and women who code and a bunch of other communities that I just was inspired by to create categories for women, for kids, for families, for moms and daughters, for dads and daughters, to highlight them and really diversify the community and include everyone we could because it felt like there were fewer opportunities for those folks. And it was wonderful because at some point I did the numbers and realized that we'd achieved, I think, a 44% female attendance rate and like some in the double digit number of LGBTQ identifying folks. And At some point, I retired the special categories because it was like almost every other person was a team that included women or led by women. So we didn't have to specialize anymore. It was truly a community of diversity. And that's been the signal this whole time. So the way we've had it the past couple of years is just everyone shows up. and everyone self-organizes. I do a little bit of matchmaking and it's just a lovely self-regulated community of inventors and builders and makers that are dedicated to each other's success. And the grand prize we've had for the past, I think, seven years is the most helpful. And I've reserved the best prize for the person who has voted by the community to have helped the most number of people. And what I'll do is we'll have these tickets. And if someone has helped someone else, they can come to me and get a ticket and give that to that person. And so it's wonderful because you just at the end of it all, the biggest applause goes to the person that everyone knows has been the most selfless, amazing helper. And the wonderful thing about this community is that there are people out there who all they want to do is just hack and make things. And they don't really want recognition. So they almost humbly walk up and accept this grand prize. But it's been a wonderful way to both recruit and have organizers and key members of the community, and they become mentors and alumni of that prize, and they become what I call camp counselors.
[00:23:17.213] Raven Zachary: Yeah. One other thing, just to make it clear, and I should have said this at the beginning, was this is a not for profit event. Basically, Dom and I do this because we love working with development teams on doing work in new technologies. Where possible, we have sponsors directly pay for costs without even money going through our hands. We prefer that a sponsor just pick up a meal or buy our t-shirts or buy our signs. In the rare, rare instance where there's any money left over at the end of the event, it rolls over to the next event. Dom and I never take money ourselves unless there's an expense that we have personally incurred to run the event. That's just an expense to charge against the cost to run the event. But, you know, not-for-profit is very important to us. This is not a commercial conference. we'll try to be as low as possible. We had the good fortune the first year we did this where there wasn't even an entry fee. It was free. I think follow-on years were 50 bucks or 100 bucks. You know, we try to keep the costs low because the money goes right to basically supplies and food. And we generally get a venue donated to us by a very generous sponsor who lets us come and use their facilities.
[00:24:24.595] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, this is going to be sometime in the spring, I guess, Q1 or maybe Q2. We don't know, like probably March or April timeframe. And there's a number of events in San Francisco. There's the Game Developers Conference, and there's also South by Southwest that's happening in March that may be bumping up against this. So I guess once the final date is announced, when are you going to open up registration? Is it going to be after Apple announces the date?
[00:24:50.013] Raven Zachary: Yeah, there's a couple of different factors. One of them, of course, is we're waiting for Apple to officially announce a launch date. My hope is that they will treat this launch similar to how they treat other Apple product launches, which is if you pre-order a device, you're guaranteed a device on the day. When Microsoft announced HoloLens, they did this in waves. There were different waves depending upon the size of your company and the relationship you have with Microsoft. So my hope is that Apple does not do a slow-staged rollout. I suspect it will be like an iPhone or an Apple Watch rollout. That's how Apple does their launches these days. When we did the first iPhone Dev Camp in 2007, we did it the weekend after the launch of iPhone because that Friday at 6 p.m. your local time is the earliest you could buy an iPhone and people were queued up in line. We didn't want to run the event the moment you left the line, got an iPhone and ran down to the event. So we did it a week after. I think one to two weeks after is probably ideal. The one potential reason why we might run this the weekend immediately following the launch would be because this device will ship only in the United States initially, is my understanding based on what Apple has announced, that there will be a significant number of international Mac and iPhone developers and VR developers flying into the US to purchase a device and go home with that device to begin development work. If that's in fact going to happen, I think there's some value in us maybe trying to encourage international developers to fly to San Francisco, or Oakland, or San Jose, or wherever we happen to run the event in the San Francisco Bay Area, and to basically tack on a few extra days of their trip after they've purchased a device to immediately begin developing it with it at the event. So that's the one potential issue that we just don't know yet is the impact of international travel on scheduling.
[00:26:42.009] Kent Bye: Yeah. And you also had at the very first iPhone dev camp, the largest gathering of iPhone owners in the same place. And I imagine that this is going to be the largest gathering of Apple vision pro owners in the same place. When I went to the iPhone dev camp, I actually hadn't bought a phone and I was working with other people and I waited to the second generation to get my first iPhone. But I imagine because of the price point and maybe because of the scarcity of how accessible it is going to be even possible to get ahold of an Apple vision pro, there may be a selection of people who have access to the hardware. and a bunch of people who have been playing around on the emulator, either with doing the native vision OS development with Swift, with Unity, Poly Spatial, with web development stacks, with React Native has just launched today their pipeline to do React Native and have Apple Vision Pro apps created. So I imagine there's a lot of people that have already been tinkering around on the emulator. But there's nothing like having the opportunity to actually test out your software on the hardware. And this will be an amazing opportunity for people to maybe get their first opportunities to experience some of the applications they've already been tinkering around with. And so, yeah, I guess it does depend on how widely available these headsets are. And like Magic Leap, when you bought a Magic Leap, they had to come to your house and basically do a whole onboarding with you and basically have you step through all these steps to ensure that you're able to get it working. So not sure if Apple is going to go to that length or how they're going to actually roll this out. But I guess the other thing to note is that just like the magically, you have to have specific lens inserts. And so even though you may have a specific headset, if you have glasses, you're not going to be able to use it unless you have The Zeiss lens inserts. And so the details around that, I think that would be something to potentially think about having extra lens inserts for the team, or for some people thinking about either getting contacts or, or God forbid, laser eye surgery, just to be honest. to see it, but there is constraints around how easy it is to share some of these headsets. But yeah, I'd love to hear any reflections in terms of both the software ecosystem that's already been developing and some of the other logistical things that you're thinking about in terms of like actually pulling this off.
[00:29:07.173] Dom Sagolla: I've had, I'll just close. I've had the privilege of using one of these devices. and we as a crew of people were using it. I experienced that issue. One of our folks had forgotten to bring his contacts and so couldn't actually focus on the images he was seeing, and his experience was stunted for that reason. The device that I was using was fitted to the owner and so I know and I can tell why it's so important that it be outfitted for you. So my understanding based on all the literature I've seen about this is that Apple's most likely going to have like an experience where it's like a fitting experience and sort of an onboarding experience in the Apple Store so that you're very comfortable with it because I can tell you that it is fairly substantial in terms of its weight and heft. It was a 40 or 45 minute experience that I had. And after that, I know I can tell you I was getting fatigued because it wasn't fitted properly on my face. That said, I would go through any amount of pain and discomfort to continue using the thing because it was so amazing and magical. And after I took it off, I got my phone out of my pocket to text Raven and it was looking at a historical relic. And I just asked myself, what am I doing with this thing in my hand? Because it was like, had been in the future. And then it's kind of like jump bump back to the past with this new iPhone, which by the way, is one of the new devices. I love it. But you know, I felt awkward using it after that wonderful experience. Now the thing that was so, there are two or three things that really just turned my brain on. One of them was the interface where you use your fingers to double tap and you use your fingers to gesture and move and you see yourself. The pass through is perfect. It is amazing. The second thing that blew my mind was the immersive experience of video and photo. You can see your library in a different way. The panoramic photos you've been taking all these years that you kind of like kind of glance through when you're scrolling through your photos. Now it's where you will be spending your time because you turn your head and you're in that photo. 3D spatial video is great. There's a certain technique I'm sure you'll need to film them so that your head doesn't wobble while you're watching because you really need to be steady while you're producing these things. It's disorienting enough. to view 3D video without the frame moving. So you'll want to be very careful when you take these spatial videos as soon as Apple releases the technology on iPhone. But those were two major pieces of the experience that gave me insight as to how magical it is. The third one you know, I've read about this, I've thought about this and listen, I'm a person who reads a lot of science fiction and I have a kind of disbelief dial, right? I can dial it in and out. I can really fine tune my sense of disbelief and suspend it or not, right? So I walked into this knowing what I was going to see, knowing that I would be tempted to feel and be tricked, right? but the dinosaur coming at you at first, it's the butterfly that lands on your finger and you're trained through the experience to feel and interact with the environment. So the butterfly lands on your finger and you're like, Oh, that's nice. Then you get the chance to touch the dinosaur. Now I knew what I was doing. I'm an adult. I knew what I was going to see. And still, when my hand reached out to pet the dinosaurs, tame appearance, my hand and arm started to tingle in a way I can't describe other than synesthesia. It was such a strange phenomenon and there was no other feedback except the visual experience and the sound happening through the device that I just could imagine anyone else with less of a anticipation and less of the knowledge of how this is produced and less of the sort of veils of software engineering being pulled back would be overwhelmed by that. and feel that sense of magical immersion that I felt, but to another degree. So I'm just looking forward to getting back into that mode. I want to like really dial it in so that it's fully VR. What I had was you can actually dial the amount of virtual reality so that there's a pass through or not, and you can get the frame to show some of the realm around you. So I had it like halfway dialed. I could still see the room around me. But the wonderful, immersive, environments that they've created for you, I think those will become an entire experience of their own. And I expect that Apple and others will want to open that up so that you can be on the moon, you could be in that crater, you could be in the forest, you could be on the ocean or wherever they have you and play there.
[00:33:33.629] Raven Zachary: Yeah, this is going to be an interesting dev camp for us doing Vision Dev Camp, because not only do we have three equal development platforms, we have native, we have Unity, Polyspatial, and we have web. But we also have 2D and 3D, and we have 3D plus immersive, right? It's a vector, like the number of different types of projects taking place. You know, it's nine to 12 different combinations, whereas in the past we'd have one or two or three combinations. I don't know where this is going to go. I mean, I think. With any new medium, there's that desire to bring what the prior medium had into the new medium, and that's a short-term gain. And then generally the evolution and transition goes to something that's unique to that medium. So I think we'll see a lot of initial 2D iPad apps. I think we'll see a lot of Mac developers and iPhone and iPad developers port their existing apps for the workspace, the 2D workspace. And I think I will probably do a bit of 2D workspace, but ultimately I think we will probably move into a category that's different and more akin to what the XR development community has been experimenting with for the last 10 or so years.
[00:34:37.134] Kent Bye: Yeah, I imagine that it will be a lot of people's opportunity to actually get both their hands and heads into the headset for the first time. I was not invited to any of the Apple press events. I'd love to go if they do have any, a launch event or anything, I'd love to be there, but this event may actually be the first opportunity for me to actually see the Apple vision pro. And so there's this deeper question, which is how are you going to handle the amount of people that just want to see the technology?
[00:35:07.354] Raven Zachary: Yes, great question. Dom and I have spoken a lot about this. The intent of this event is for developers to build and showcase apps. It is not to demo the Apple Vision Pro. We are not the best group of people in the world to create a demo experience for a new device. That's Apple, and Apple has Apple Stores. The best place in the world to demo an Apple Vision Pro is to go to an Apple Store when Apple announces that. And my suspicion is, as much as my fear is, is that our event may have to be a little bit more catered to the developer with a little bit more of us pre-vetting attendees, which we've never had to do in the past, is that Apple will have a clear path to demo. People will be satisfied with going through that path and that we won't have to do as much pre-vetting on the attendee base. But Dom, I don't know if you have any thoughts to share on that topic. We've talked about it a lot.
[00:35:59.659] Dom Sagolla: Yeah, I mean, so one of the guidelines we have for the camp is that we want each group to have a device that they're working with. So someone who has a device will be the nucleus of a group. And so the device itself will be where you develop together, and then you show the pass-through video on the screen, and that's how you'll be demoing, right? I'm sure there'll be people who just only work on the SDK because that's what they have. But we're hoping that we'll have enough actual owners that those people who want to show the capability of it in the actual experience itself will be able to pair up. So I think that will be the way people sort of nucleate. And I will be bringing mine right now, the organizing. So there'll be at least one group that can use one to develop with during the weekend, most likely my family. But the thing is, we encourage people to cooperate and share for the purpose of actually building. So I don't think there'll be a whole lot of time for folks to be playing with it and like showing it off and showing it around. Remember that when you show up at developer camp, it's like the starting gun fires, right? So you have roughly 36 hours from Friday evening to Sunday afternoon to get something done. And like, there's not really an incentive to just mess around. You get there, you find your team. Hopefully you find enough people to get the job done. You're going to need designers, developers. You're going to need storytellers. You're going to need maybe an artist. Probably you're going to need someone to present, right? And it's not always the same group of people. Like really the best groups are folks who have a great swath of talent, And finding those people is enough work the first night. So you're really kind of pitching yourself and your team and your idea. So we give them the forum. Everyone gets 30 seconds and they just say what they're going to do. And some people go up there and say, hey, here's what I can offer. I'm looking for a team. That's wonderful, because then we can just matchmake. And so a lot of matchmaking happens that first night. The second day, there's an opportunity to reach out. But by that point, you're pretty much already starting to work. In fact, a lot of people stay up all night Friday and just keep going to get an advantage. And it's not like they want to win amazing prizes and be the winner and excel. It's more like they just want to make enough progress to show that what they thought was real is possible and then get the recognition of having done something amazing, done something that no one thought was possible. And there's so much groundbreaking that happens. To me, that's the incentive I've detected the most is innovation just for its own sake. my experience of innovation is just a whole lot of room for extraneous activity. So those people who come to just gawk and try and be, they're going to kind of like get out of the way of folks who are just moving fast.
[00:38:47.998] Raven Zachary: Yeah. Yeah, I agree. And speaking of innovation, I mean, you were on one of those innovation teams. I mean, the team you worked on in 2007 created IUI. which was used for a considerably long period of time in the web development community for iPhone. I mean, IUIkit, I still see web pages today that are running on IUI occasionally.
[00:39:06.790] Kent Bye: Well, I was paired up with Joe Hewitt who created Firebug and he was a bit of a savant of coding. So I didn't have much to contribute in terms of the development, but yeah, Nicole Lazaro was wanting to build one of the very first games for the iPhone and they were able to create that. So. Yeah, it's definitely a palpable memory of this turning point of technology. Certainly as we look back, it's been this huge paradigm shift from laptop or PC-based computing into mobile computing. And I do think that this is another paradigm shift from 2D into 3D, but also the spatial computing dimensions. Oculus meta quest has been out for 10 years now in the developer's hands. So there's actually been entire ecosystem that has been tinkering around on this stuff. So it'll be a very interesting confluence between these XR developers who have a decade now worth of experience with the web developers who may be developing with three JS has also been around for around a decade or so. And then you've got the. iOS developers have also been around since 2008, I guess. So the first year of DevCamp was just web-based. Within the second year, they actually released the native app capabilities. Or I guess maybe people were jailbreaking stuff before that. I don't know.
[00:40:20.222] Raven Zachary: We never had jailbreak at our events. You know, we wanted to stay on the right and narrow path. You know, we had a contact at Apple Developer Relations and we made sure to communicate with them about, you know, we want to be above board. We want to make sure people don't violate NDAs or any of the terms. Jailbreaking really has never been part of our event. We have discouraged it. And it's not really a relevant topic for the Vision Pro, of course, because there's not a phone layer that you're trying to disintermediate in the same way. And we have Unity and web as equal citizens with native development for the Vision Pro launch.
[00:40:53.899] Kent Bye: Yeah. Also React Native. React Native is another pathway. Yeah, absolutely.
[00:40:58.690] Dom Sagolla: Absolutely. Yeah, so it's so amazing. My understanding from people who are heavy into the development of their app in the second round now of Apple's kind of like auditioning for their first launch is that those people who I know who have been developing on different platforms you mentioned to great difficulty and struggle tell me that developing on Vision OS is like a 10x improvement in terms of productivity. or their apps. So I see this as both an incredible advance in terms of hardware and experience, but also developer experiences. I love Xcode for its simplicity and its capacity and its design decisions that Apple's made. I think there's a similar advantage to the SDK for Vision OS that Apple has here.
[00:41:48.135] Kent Bye: Just to clarify, are those people you are talking to, are they coming from a background in Objective-C and also iOS development, or are these Unity developers?
[00:41:57.460] Dom Sagolla: These are both. The person I'm thinking of specifically is a longtime Developer Camp winner and alum who has been working on an app I can't really talk about, but has told me, this is the quote, was like, it's a 10x improvement in terms of his productivity, having done all kinds of AR and VR over the years and done a lot of Objective-C for both native and mobile.
[00:42:17.282] Kent Bye: Yeah, I've heard a little bit of skepticism in terms of the specificity of some of the things that you can and cannot use within Unity. And so I've heard mixed things from developers, especially for people who have established apps, where it's not going to be just a matter of simply porting over apps that you've already created, because if you're making something from scratch, that may be one thing. But if you're more of a brownfield and trying to take a lot of legacy code and adapt it, it may be more difficult. Versus a greenfield app where you're building it from scratch. You might be able to use stuff that you're just developing for the first time. So I've heard different things from different people in terms of the complexity of say, porting something versus, you know, maybe it's different if people are making something from scratch, but it's exciting just to hear that 10 X improvement in productivity, because it goes against some of the other people that I've heard from more of the XR community. who were a little bit more frustrated of how, you know, just as an example, there's no controllers for anything that you're doing for Apple Vision Pro. So if you've developed an app that's very reliant upon buttons that you would normally have, then there's not going to be sophisticated input that you would get. So I guess the people that I've heard, it's challenging to kind of uproot and almost rip everything out and re-architect a lot of things to fit into this new paradigm. I don't know, Braven, when we talked before, you were talking about how Apple really wasn't as concerned around creating systems that were really catering towards the XR community, but they were actually preferencing their own native iOS developer community with their tools and their workflows. And a lot of people from more of the XR side are feeling a little bit more friction in terms of having to abandon their workflows and maybe go with Swift. And I've heard a little bit more resistance. So I feel like once we're there at the Vision Dev Camp, it'll probably be a little bit more of a calibration of what the ground truth is from these different people from different backgrounds in terms of what their experiences are.
[00:44:12.721] Raven Zachary: The other thing that I'd like to mention is we're 15 years into the journey of the native iOS and iPhone SDK. Sometimes it's hard for us to look back and imagine starting over with a new platform that may not be as broadly applicable and diverse in its capability set on year one. Apple is where it's at today with its DevTools and its support in iOS over the course of 15 years. We may not have controller support or Bluetooth external device support year one. I don't know for certain. Apple still hasn't finalized their SDK or their OS. They still haven't announced a ship date yet, so there's lots of time for them to still make decisions. And we may see these updates happen on year two. We may see the things that XR developers need come shortly after Apple's initial focus on their own developer ecosystem. Apple would love to welcome in thousands of new XR developers, but their initial concern is going to be their existing Mac and iOS developer communities and how to satisfy their needs.
[00:45:20.670] Kent Bye: Great. And I'd love to give you an opportunity to talk about anything else that's between now and then, if there's any other plans, I know there's a discord or if there's any other things. As I think about it, I get hyped of, you know, wanting to either learn more or just get excited around what the potentials might be. So yeah, what's going to happen between now and like a week or two after whatever date Apple announces for their launch.
[00:45:44.137] Raven Zachary: Yeah. We encourage everyone who's interested to go to visiondevcamp.org sign up for the mailing list. That's in the upper right-hand corner of the page to be notified when registration opens. Also, there's an active Discord. If you use Discord, please join. If you don't know what Discord is, please go find out and join. Discord is becoming more and more a part of a developer ecosystems toolset, you know, with Slack and Teams being more commercialized by Microsoft and Salesforce. A lot of the development community has been shifting over to Discord as a primary communications tool. I'm in Discords for all sorts of things. I'm in a Discord for Japanese history. It has nothing to do with developer communities or video games, right? You're seeing this Discord become this multifaceted real-time communications tool. So I would encourage you to join our Discord. One of the things that you and I were speaking about after the podcast episode where we chatted as I was leaving Apple Park for WWDC in June, having been there for the announcement of Apple Vision Pro and Vision OS, was doing some sort of online seminar. Actually, we've been calling it Vision Colloquium. It's kind of a working title that would essentially provide an opportunity for XR developers and Apple developers to learn from one another through a series of these short Ignite-style talks followed by moderated QA. The idea would be that all topics and speakers would be focused on preparing developer communities, all these various developer communities. for the launch of Apple Vision Pro and Vision OS. And I think the idea you and I were talking about was perhaps splitting it into two tracks. Maybe it's a morning and an afternoon track during a single day, sometime between now and the launch of Apple Vision Pro where, you know, the Apple talks would really be focused on helping XR developers learn how to build and operate in the Apple developer ecosystem. So these are things that XR developers wouldn't normally know about the build process, the testing process, deploying apps on the App Store, working with Apple developer relations, all of these types of things. And you perhaps would curate a set of talks from the XR point of view about what Apple developers need to know to build for spatial computing. It'd be great to work with you on putting together speakers, and these would be topics that we think are the most relevant to educate across these developer communities. plan to do it sometime probably in January or February in advance of the launch of the device. And then you and I would moderate these two tracks and essentially recruit speakers. Hopefully we have some great speaker candidates listening to this podcast who can reach out to you or me. My email address raven at vision dev camp.org. If you are an Apple ecosystem person that wants to talk to the XR development community about what it means to be an Apple developer. And then Kent, I assume you have a preferred email address for XR speakers to contact you.
[00:48:28.323] Kent Bye: Yeah. It's just Kent at Kentbuy.com, but it gets flooded. I don't know if there's a good email. Reach out on LinkedIn.
[00:48:34.908] Raven Zachary: But yeah, I was hoping that we could have essentially these core topics that we both believe are fundamental to educating the other developer communities.
[00:48:43.831] Kent Bye: Yeah, we've, this is still in the early phases. We haven't obviously finalized anything yet, but the idea would be that. Yeah, just information that maybe all the iOS developers are already very familiar with, but could be very helpful in helping to ramp up the XR developer community. And also there's been a decade's worth of experiential design from the XR community that could help to maybe synthesize that down into some talks to help iOS developers go from 2d to 3d and start to think about some of the considerations. So. Yeah, it sounds like a fun thing, especially as I'm just talking to both of you, getting really excited and hyped up around, you know, getting a whole community together and having this gathering of all these developers together. But I guess, is there anything else that, you know, just logistically that you're thinking about between now and then?
[00:49:29.316] Raven Zachary: Well, this is definitely going to be a free event, like a Vision Dev Camp will be not for profit and hopefully as low cost as possible. The Colloquium Online, of course, would just be free to attend for anybody. And we'll try to schedule it at a time that would work across geographies and on a day of the week that people would be more apt to take a day off work or be able to take this as a learning day for their employment, probably on a Friday or something end of a week kind of a thing. Apple has been doing, as you know, a series of developer events. They have a developer center near Apple Park where they have been letting developers come and do hands-on with the device. You go through that process. It's all linked to off of developer.apple.com. There's a page there where they go through. What I'm trying to do is provide services and learning opportunities for the community that may not be ready to engage with Apple. So there's a whole bunch of devs that are kind of in that trial period where they're playing with the simulator and the dev tools and they're thinking about building things. They're not quite ready to propose to Apple that we want to go to Cupertino and spend time at the Apple Developer Center and building on the device. So what can we do to help educate that next tier of developers that are still transitioning in and thinking about opportunities, but aren't quite ready to get on Apple's radar and try to get time with Apple and provide value there to that greater community and make it part of a kind of a run-up to Vision Dev Camp and promote general kind of ecosystem communication.
[00:50:51.695] Kent Bye: And we're still obviously waiting on Apple to make the big announcement for when the date is, and that's going to dictate a lot of things, right?
[00:50:58.095] Raven Zachary: A lot of things, and there's not anything new that we have there. No one knows. Apple will announce when they're ready to announce. There's a lot of stuff in the supply chain and manufacturing and shipping that affects this. And we wait patiently. It's clear that they're in the late phases of engineering at this point and probably late phases of OS. February, March, or April, I don't know. But in the interim, Dom and I would love to connect with people in the Silicon Valley slash San Francisco Bay Area who have a venue that they would be willing to donate from Friday to Sunday. With the increase in remote workers, we suspect that there are more spaces available now than there was back then when we first ran events. We're not having to coordinate the overlap of a workday as much as we did before. Connect with sponsors who are willing to help make this not-for-profit event successful, and connect with attendees.
[00:51:56.421] Dom Sagolla: And volunteers too, if you're interested in helping out, we're happy to entertain that. I mean, it takes all types and all people to make this work. We occasionally nominate people to work the door or to help to organize the different portions of the event. Obviously, anyone who wants to volunteer their time to help anyone else would get priority. That's very important to the culture. So definitely interested in volunteers. But I think in general, we're looking for committed attendees to signal their interest and their ability to actually build something over the weekend.
[00:52:29.205] Raven Zachary: You don't have to buy a Vision Pro to attend. We are hoping that a large number of Apple Vision Pro devices will make their way to the event to make teams more productive. But a note that I would share to Apple Vision Pro owners is no one's going to ask you to do anything that you're not comfortable doing with your device. It's a personal device. It's a wearable device. You may not want to hand it to a stranger, and that's OK. No one's going to put you in a position where you're uncomfortable with a $3,500 piece of equipment. If you want to join a team and you tell your team members, I'm just not comfortable sharing this device. It's got my personal stuff and my lenses and my sweat on the band. then you can be the demo guy. You can run that and you can test for your team and you're still going to provide valuable contributions even if you're not willing to hand it to someone else.
[00:53:22.974] Kent Bye: Yeah, I'm getting excited just to be there and I still haven't decided whether or not I'd want to be on a team and develop something or just go around and talk to everybody about what they're doing and get feedback and get to check everything out. It feels like a palpable turning point moment that I'd want to just be there and witness everything. Especially if it's not conflicting with something like South by Southwest. Yeah, I guess as we start to wrap up, I'd love to hear from each of you, what you think the ultimate potential of spatial computing might be and what am I able to enable?
[00:53:54.779] Dom Sagolla: Great question. Do you want to go for it first? Maybe. Yeah, I dwell on this and I just wanted to add a little bit to what Raven was saying about the spirit of the event. I mean, there's also a class of player in this game who bring ideas. And I honestly think your question prompts me to think about those people who just have a great idea. Because one of the major eye-opening experiences I've had over the years are people who meet these events and go off to do amazing things with whatever idea. And I think Square is an example of that. I was lucky enough to invite Jack When he's going through a rough patch at Twitter, after that experience to come and just meet people at developer camp, he met the co-founding engineering team of Square at developer camp. I introduced him as a seminal moment in everyone's life on that team. Similarly, get around, similarly, test flight, similarly, so many projects that had some initial inflection point. And so I would say, look, bring your ideas, bring that spirit of invention and discovery that's behind the context of my answer here. I think there are maybe two or three classes of things that I expect to see out of this. There were some that I thought would be great like maybe exercise or, you know, walking around the world with this thing on my face that I've now discounted because I don't see it being something that you're going to want to wear and move around very much, just a little bit too ponderous and maybe too fragile and definitely too expensive. And I also think it's a little bit awkward to be walking around in public with it just as it is right now, maybe not later. The three that I found after my experience using it persist are entertainment of all kinds, certainly viewing, definitely playing, most likely also immersing yourself in a world or an experience. That's one major thing. Some thinking of sports and thinking of movies and thinking of games. The second is re-experiencing your photos and your media that you've taken. especially panoramic, but also the videos you'll be taking on your iPhone as soon as they release the functionality. That cannot be understated. That's truly something that I didn't expect. And then the third thing is what I would call like this class of ergonomic experiences, because look, you now see people with their heads down looking at this thing on their hand, right? Like that's the typical pose for a person consuming media in a mobile way. Then there's this like laptop experience, right? Or you're at a desktop. Those are the three major way. Or you're wearing your watch and you're glancing or you're listening in your ears. This new mode is you're just sort of naturally posing in so many different new ways. You could be relaxing on the couch, you could be walking around, you could be leaning against something. There's no holding anything, right? And you're getting all this valuable information and you're interacting with it. So that new class of application and the new class of experience that comes with the ease of use of this, right? Whether it's your hands, tapping, double tapping or reaching to interact with something or typing in midair or whatever it is. I expect that there'll be types of apps and types of experiences that are unlocked because of that capability. And I want to see that when I encourage people at the camp to bring new ideas, I'm expecting that class of thing to be the eye-opening, mind-blowing class of idea. Because everything else you can just kind of imagine, oh, it's going to be this cool thing. I'm going to be in a video. I'm going to see my movie come to life. I'll be able to walk around inside, you know, Avatar or whatever. But this new experience of casually, almost in a relaxed way, seeing your stuff everywhere, I think that'll be kind of very interesting. And I'm looking forward to that personally.
[00:57:40.005] Raven Zachary: Yeah, I think for me, it's a long term commitment. So I think about the first device in Apple's spatial computing category, which is Apple Vision Pro, that's coming out in Q1 of next year, 2024. We don't know what the sales figures are going to be yet. We don't know what Apple's going to manufacture for. But when you look back at iPhone, the first iPhone in 2007, just over 6 million units sold. Last year, Apple sold 225 million iPhones. That's quite an increase in 15 years. So I would just say, think of this device as the beginning of a 15 to 20-year journey. far exceed that. But what I expect will happen is that Apple will take Vision OS and put it on a variety of form factors. This one clearly is a home office travel use case based on the videos that Apple has shown for promotion at WWDC in June. What we ultimately all want is a sunglasses sized device that you can put on while you go for a walk or get on a bus or go to an event. We're not there yet. That could take 10 years. As someone who bet early on HoloLens and was way too early to the party, any estimate I would give you is going to be wrong because all of my estimates in the past have been too optimistic. So, you know, if the industry is saying five years, let's assume it's 10. But Apple clearly wants to get to a size of a device that can meet those use cases that Dom has talked about. Fitness is big. Fitness will come on this device. Walking around and engaging with the world and other humans will be big, but we're not there yet. This is really a solo device for home office and travel that will hopefully provide you something more than just the combined value of a Mac, an iPhone, an iPad, and an Apple Watch together. This is something greater than that sum that's new. And I'm excited about where that journey is going to lead us. I would love to see people show up at this event and push the limits of this technology, knowing that the limits should be pushed because the platform will evolve. And those ideas will have legs over time, even if the initial market size or the use case is more limited.
[00:59:59.023] Dom Sagolla: Word.
[00:59:59.323] Kent Bye: Awesome. Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader Ermisdorf community?
[01:00:06.172] Raven Zachary: This is a great opportunity for the XR development community to get familiar with the Apple development ecosystem. I see a lot of strong opportunities for partnering. It's a way for XR developers to understand how the Apple ecosystem works. I think there's a lot of misinformation out there in general about what it's like to be part of the Apple ecosystem. And this is a great way for the XR community and the web development community, again, to come in and understand this new ecosystem, become a member of this community and for us all to work together is something great.
[01:00:39.773] Dom Sagolla: Excellent. Yeah. I would only add that you're going to want to bring your skepticism and then kind of leave it at the door and have an as open a mind as you can have when it comes to this. And even Raven's point about there being like long legs to this. I mean, you know, I've read enough science fiction to know that, yeah, the fact of wearing something on your face, we're a long way from that being comfortable and being practical and ergonomic. but I would echo Raven and say those who do attend, leave the awkwardness and that skepticism and that disbelief at the door and just imagine this future together and take what Apple's given us as the earliest indications of a path that we can all travel together and sort of just believe. Because look, those of us who believed in what the potential of the iPhone could be in 2007 are the ones who have seen all this amazing fruit and success that that those who were busy imagining and busy committing themselves to that path had that early success and had that early opportunity. And the same opportunity exists today with this new platform. And every Google criticism is totally valid, I'm sure. But you're going to want to bet on the future, as I've always done with Apple. So I'm a believer, and I want to be there with other folks who do.
[01:01:53.469] Raven Zachary: Yeah, and I would also add that this is an opportunity for XR developers to actually help educate the Apple developer community. The true pioneers in this space have been working on other devices for the last 10 or so years. And this is a great opportunity for those XR developers to share their learnings and to help educate the Apple development ecosystem on how to do spatial computing development and design.
[01:02:16.652] Kent Bye: Yeah. And I remember this paradigm shift from going from the PC to mobile, this multi-touch paradigm shift in terms of new modes of human computer interaction and all the ways that people were playing with that at the first iPhone dev camp in 2007. And I definitely sense that there's already a paradigm shift from 2D to 3D and spatial computing that's been happening with XR devices that are already out there on the market. from all accounts that I've heard, this combination of the eye tracking and the gesture controls, and that just a level of polish that Apple waits a little bit for things to settle. And then when they do enter, they have a certain level of polish that I think is this big paradigm shifting moment that I'm excited to see where the independent developers take that because it has been independent developers that have been the source of innovation for so many different aspects in the XR community, as well as in the iOS community as well. Like you said, so many different frameworks and innovations that come out of these events. And so it feels like it's going to be a historic gathering and I'm excited to hear when it's going to be and to make my plans to be there. And just wanted to thank both of you for carrying this torch of this type of grassroots community organizing to facilitate and empower the community to come together and to provide a context for this innovation to happen. And I'm really excited to see where it goes when you bring the most number of Apple vision pro devices into one place and all these developers and this interdisciplinary collaboration that is going to be happening there. So really excited to see it all unfold. And we don't know if there's going to be a hundred or a thousand people there. And so anybody who does have leads on different potential locations, then definitely follow up because The capacity planning of this is still a lot to be decided, but if there's anyone listening to this, who has some ideas for how to handle anywhere from a hundred to a thousand people, definitely follow up. And I'm definitely looking forward to coming out to the vision dev camp. And again, Raven and Tom, thanks for taking the time to break down your journey and story and give us a little bit of a sneak peek as to what we can expect.
[01:04:13.217] Dom Sagolla: Thanks Kent. Great to see you. Can't wait to see you again in person.
[01:04:17.795] Kent Bye: So that was Raven Zachary and Dom Segola. They're the co-founders of the iPhone Dev Camp all the way back in 2007, as well as the Vision Dev Camp, which is currently slotted to happen sometime in February, March, or April of 2024. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, Well, it was just really fun to hear a little bit more about the history and evolution of this event coming out of the food camp and then bar camp and the different hackathons that are happening in the context of 2007. Twitter ended up being a pretty significant part. I think that's how I actually heard about the iPhone dev camp happened to be an area and went down to check it out. And it was just a really great gathering of all these folks who are on the bleeding edge of the latest emerging technologies. At that time, it was a mobile phone. which obviously has been a huge turning point in the history of computing. And I feel like XR is going to be a similar turning point that's already been happening for the last 10 years. So if you're a listener to this podcast, you're already very well immersed within the XR community. And it's a great opportunity to come together from the iOS developer community and the XR community and the web development community to all come together and to push what's possible with the Apple Vision Pro. I currently plan on being there. I don't know exactly when it's going to be. Hopefully it's not going to be conflicting with South by Southwest or other events that are happening there in April. But yeah, it should be really quite exciting to just be there to witness all the different developers coming forward and to see what kind of innovations that are happening. Like Raven has said in my previous interview that I did with him on The Voices of VR, that seems like Apple is really focusing initially on their existing iOS developer community as best they can to translate all of the millions of apps that they already have in their iOS ecosystem to be compatible with the Apple Vision Pro. So that's a whole rich ecosystem of applications that are there and available. And then I think as time goes on, more and more things be added to the XR development community. As we were talking in this conversation, when the iPhone dev camp first happened in 2007, there wasn't even the capability to do native app development. You had to wait until 2008 before that SDK was even announced. and so perhaps similarly in a little bit of a parallel there isn't a lot of sophisticated input options to integrate bluetooth devices or anything else for the apple vision pro so any xr experience that has a lot of sophisticated input is not going to be able to have that one-to-one translation of being ported so it's going to have to require a whole reimagining of different user interfaces and the different types of applications are going to be really well suited to fit onto the Apple Vision Pro. So lots of different innovations there that are going to happen. I'm sure there may be even some projects that come out of the Vision Dev Camp that are trying to push forward what's even possible with the types of input controls or the types of experiences that we have yet to see within the existing XR ecosystem. So like Revan said, sometime in maybe January, February, we may put together this vision colloquium to bring together both iOS developers and XR developers. If you are interested in helping to distill the knowledge of XR design and other insights to present it to folks who are just coming into XR development with iOS developers, then please do feel free to reach out at Kent at KentBuy.com or connect on LinkedIn and send a DM there. So yeah, I'm certainly really excited to see where this all goes. And you can go to the visiondevcamp.org to get more information. You can join the Discord there and get on the email list and all the latest information will be there as well. And we're waiting to see when the actual date's going to be. And then from there, it'll be trying to find a venue. So again, if you do have a venue that you know of in the Bay Area, please do reach out to raven at visiondevcamp.org. And yeah, hopefully they'll be able to find a spot that can have a flexible capacity planning to be somewhere between, I imagine, 200 to 300, maybe upwards of like 600 is the most I've ever had. I don't imagine that a hackathon would be bigger than that, but you never know. You're kind of bringing together different communities and there's going to be quite a lot of excitement for people to start to prototype and experiment with what's even possible. It does sound like Apple is going to eventually potentially have the ability to go try out a demo. And like Raven said, it'll be much better for you to go through those channels than to try to come to this event to get your first demo. But if you are a developer from the XR community and are interested in helping to participate, then certainly this is an open invitation to come and have this interdisciplinary collaboration with all these other folks from both the web developers and iOS developers, and to bring forth a lot of the XR development knowledge that a lot of folks in this community, listeners of the Voices of VR, will certainly have a lot to contribute to develop different spatial computing applications. So, that's all I have for today, and I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoyed the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a listener-supported podcast, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So if you could become a member, donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
