At 15, Maxim Perumal and two friends built DIY VR headsets and a multiplayer world with identical avatars. They instantly recognized each other anyway, just from height differences showing in VR. That moment made him realize how physical cues shape perception in virtual space.
First thing I want to ask you, what the most impactful VR experience that you've had in your life was?
Oh, the most impactful VR experience. I think that would be one of my very first VR experiences. So I was probably 15 years old at the time. I was building this VR headset, right? And I built it myself. And my 2 best friends at the time were my math professor and this other friend of mine who was also doing math with me all the time and programming. And I built 3 VR headsets, one for each of us, right? And I was trying to build this multiplayer experience, this sort of virtual world. I was doing this in Unity. And I wasn't really good at it, and I was kind of— I kind of rushed it. And so I had no time to implement an avatar system. So we all had the exact same avatar, right? And then we actually go in and test it. And a few of us put on the headset, we're in separate rooms, we put it on, we're in this virtual world, and my math professor just points at something and says something out loud. And me and my friend, we just sort of turned around, look at him, and just start talking, and just as if everything was normal, right? And then we took off the headset, and we realized that during this entire experience, we knew exactly who was who, just based on the fact that our real-life height was reflected in the VR world. So even though we had the same avatar, Just sort of instinctively, we knew who was who, just based on that difference in height. And I think that's the moment when I realized that in VR, I can— this is a sandbox to dive deep into so many of the mechanisms of how we humans perceive the world around us and the people around us. And I could just— that's the moment I realized I could spend the rest of my life just doing this, basically. Yeah.
Wow. Okay. So just by the height? Yeah.
The height was enough for the brain to just guess without even us having to think about it, to guess who was who. Before he even started talking, just by pointing something, we just knew it was him.
So directly, immediately, you were like, yep, that's, that's them. There was something within your brain that was immediately connected. That's really interesting.
