Maxim Perumal argues VR should target creative professionals first, not the mass market. Designers and 3D artists use it as a superhuman tool for deep focus and collaboration. A design studio leader plays tabletop ping-pong in VR to reset his mind between projects.
So what do you need to do in the next few years so that you've set in stone the basics for that? Sure. Well, you can already see it coming. The first thing is, don't build it for everybody. VR is not ready for that yet. Just accept the fact that it is not going to be mainstream, and you shouldn't even try to make it mainstream at the beginning. Because most people won't get it, and it's going to take so long for those people to get it that you should just completely embrace a very small part of the population. And the part of the population that I understand the most and that I spend the most time with, and that is, I believe, the most genuinely excited to use VR every day, are essentially the creatives, the people that are writing code, people that are designing, people that are using Figma and Illustrator all day long. People, those people understand how if they were given a much more powerful tool, like you can put it on and be in a place where for 2 hours you have pure focus, you have superhuman tools, or maybe you're completely alone, or maybe you're surrounded with other creative people and see your opportunity to meet other like-minded people, but they understand, I think, the value of that, and they see it, and it's obvious to them, and it's what they do for a living. It's what they're passionate about. So they're willing to spend a lot of money to get that to be better. Some of my friends are 3D artists, and they started using VR to do 3D modeling. And when they experienced how life-changing this experience was, The only thing they kept asking me is, when are we going to see better VR headsets? Because when I put this thing on and I decide to spend the next hour and a half designing something, I feel like I have superpowers compared to being on my laptop. And those people genuinely care. Those people are builders. And those people, if incentivized correctly, will bring some of the things they build into our ecosystem. And you get this flywheel You attract creatives, and those creatives create great stuff that attracts more creatives. You know, one of the designers I'm working with, he runs this design company, and of course, he's very, very busy. And so one of the things that tends to happen when, you know, you're managing a dozen people is you get very little time to just Turn everything off and focus deeply. And the thing that he started doing is maybe once a day he's going to start playing tabletop tennis in VR or ping pong and just put on the podcast and just plays ping pong for 40, 45 minutes just in VR. And just like a moment for him to escape and sort of be alone with his thought and sort of let the moment sink in and sort of disconnect from the rest. And it's super important to him and the way he thinks and to get rest, right? And I sort of do something a little bit similar. Very often during the week, I have my little ritual where when I feel very excited, but I have a hard time sort of focusing my thoughts, or maybe I'm lacking, I'm in a moment where I feel like, oh, I need a little bit of inspiration. One of the things that I do is I grab my VR headset, I put it on, I go in this black room, completely black. I look around me, there is nothing except this gigantic display, and it plays the opening sequence of the movie Akira. And I just sit there and I'm in the complete dark and I just see in this gigantic display in front of me the movie Akira. And that's my moment to get inspired. That's my moment to refocus and be inspired and be impressed. And I do that for maybe like 25 minutes and then I put off the headset and I can go back to my daily life. That little ritual of myself, it helps me bring balance to my life. It helps me have those moments of comfort, of focus, of being with something that I'm very familiar with. And I love it.
