Pluto VR Cofounder John Vechey on the Virtual Office

So we've been hearing about virtual reality since the late '80s, but the technology still hasn't left from the pages of science fiction into our universe, at least not in the mainstream. The VR revolution seems to always be just around the corner, but some people believe that we really are on the verge of something that's going to change everyone's lives. John Vecchi, co-founder of Pluto VR, is one of those people. He's specifically interested in how VR, virtual reality, is going to change the way we communicate. John found his early success as the founder of PopCap Games. You might know them as the folks behind your favorite mobile games like Bejeweled or Plants vs. Zombies. After selling PopCap to Electronic Arts, he transitioned into virtual communications. I wanted to speak with John because he's got some big big ideas about how VR will one day be used for work. Pluto VR is building a communication platform that will allow people with VR headsets to talk to each other in a way that feels far more immersive than a phone call or a video chat. His goal is to seamlessly recreate the experience of speaking with someone face-to-face, with shared presence and context. He wants remote conversations to have more fidelity, so they can capture the nuances and subtleties of communication that humans are used to experiencing. If distributed work is going to take off, we're going to need to have really good communication tools. But how realistic is it to assume that we can have virtual offices that are lifelike and useful and replace physical ones? Are we really anywhere near this dream? John, tell us a little bit about your early career so we know how to catch up to where you are now.

So in 2000, I started a company with some friends called PopCap Games. And at the time, PopCap was like, we're gonna make some games, but instead of for gamers, which at the time was pretty much 16 to 25-year-old males, we're gonna make games that everyone can play. Our first game was a game called Bejeweled.

I love Bejeweled! Which— I played it on the Palm Pilot.

And that was like the original, like, great format for it with the touchpad stylus.

Yeah.

Bejeweled, Plants vs. Zombies, Peggle. We started as a web game company, transitioned to a downloadable game company, and then a multiplatform company, and then eventually like a mobile company. So over the course of like 14 years, There's a lot of different phases of PopCap.

Of those, which did people get most obsessed about?

Of our games, like Bejeweled and Plants vs. Zombies were our most popular, and people got obsessed about them in different ways. Like in Bejeweled 2, we put a Zen mode in, so you couldn't even lose. All you could do was just play, like it would never hit a losing condition. And there was just points that would rack up. And it was one of those things where we realized that there were people that had spent over a year's worth of hours playing that mode.

Wow. Right? Last night I told friends I was coming here to Seattle to do this interview, and Plants vs. Zombies came up, and it turns out both of them had taken like a whole Thanksgiving where they just got obsessed with it and went through like every possible level.

Yeah. And I think that's the Plants vs. Zombies story, because it was— it had a linear aspect to it that Bejeweled didn't have. Bejeweled was more like an arcade game, and Plants vs. Zombies was like an exploration and collection game. And so you'd hear stories about people like, yeah, we went on this vacation and we just beat Plants vs. Zombies. That's what we did for our vacation. That's cool.

No, I totally get it. So PopCap sold to Electronic Arts, right?

Yeah, in 2011. Like, we were around 400 people.

And was PopCap all in one office?

We had a joke at some point that, like, the sun never set on PopCap. So we had offices in Seattle, San Francisco, San Carlos, Vancouver, Dublin, period. I think that's it. So we had a lot of offices and all offices were pretty— they were all kind of doing a mix of regional work and game development. So it was definitely a lot of travel. Travel.

So you were multi-office.

We were multi-office, yeah.

Most of the people working there went into some office somewhere in the world every day.

One of the weird things about PopCap was one of the co-founders, Jason, who was the creative director, he was always remote.

Wow.

So we had this really weird thing where like one person was distributed, and that actually shaped our culture of game development.

Where was he?

He was up in— first in Vancouver, Canada, and then he moved to Vancouver Island. The core of what we were was always distributed. And he came down quite a bit, but in some ways it was like frustrating for him because he's like, well, I can come down and not get work done, or I can just stay up and get work done.

You've been running companies and doing highly creative and successful development with games for a long time. Why don't you introduce us to what you're working on now?

I left EA in 2014, maybe, after working there for 3 years. I knew I didn't want to make games anymore, and so I started looking around what was happening, and I went to DICE, a gaming conference, and saw Palmer Luckey talk., and he talked about like what virtual reality was doing and how it was closer than anyone realized.

And say who Palmer was.

Oh, Palmer was the founder of Oculus. It's a VR headset and it was bought by Facebook. And I saw this presentation and I was like, wow, this, this could be really world-changing.

That's been a good presentation.

There's a lot of passion behind it. And it was, and it was like, I wonder if any of this is real. But it was, it was, it was real enough to at least be like, hey, I wonder if there's something there. And so I started just going around town being like, hey, like, let's say I want to do this type of thing or that type of thing in VR. Does anyone know anyone I should talk to? How would I do that? Right? I wasn't an expert in VR. And I met two co-founders, Jared and Forest, who had this startup called Impossible Object. I head up north into the, like, this far Seattle suburbs into this studio they had where they had this high-end professional motion capture setup and then an Oculus development kit. And their first words were like, "Take your pants off and put this suit on." And so— so I had to, like, put this motion capture suit on, and I had experienced a bunch of different experiments that they had done. Where I could, like, walk around the room. I could look at my own body. I could manipulate things with my hands, things that weren't possible with the current consumer VR hardware. And so I was like, that was amazing. What are you doing with this? Like, what's your plan? And they were like, well, we're not thinking that anyone's going to buy this, you know, $40,000 motion capture system, but we think this is where VR is going. So we're trying to learn as much as we can about the future 5 years from now. Instead of trying to think about how to develop for the world right now, which is going to rapidly change.

And those are your co-founders of Pluto?

Yep. And then with another person that I was friends with.

So how do you go from this kind of mixed reality thing to thinking about work and how people collaborate together using these technologies?

I had come from games and I didn't want to make games. Jonathan, one of the other co-founders, came from animation.

Why don't you want to make games?

I was just done with it. You know, you do something for, you do something for 14 years or, and you just want a break maybe.

And so one of your co-founders also was done with games.

Well, he had been in animation, so he came from Disney Animation for 14 years.

Wow.

Yeah. So his career was interesting because he started with Lion King and ended with Frozen and he's like, and everything in between was very different than either of those extremes. Like it was like, it was like a long walk down and then a long walk back up.

Interesting.

And so like, I think I was in there being like, well, I really don't want to get into VR and then start a game company. So for us, what was important about coming together was that there was something that existed above us and above any kind of, like, decision-making power structure, even ownership structure. Our purpose was to help humanity transcend physical location. So that was important. And that we could align ourselves around that was the second thing. And then the third thing, well, what was it? And so really we felt that the power of what was happening with virtual reality at the time wasn't just that, like, you could go to a place, but that you could go to a place with someone else.

Hmm.

It wasn't just like, cool, I can, you know, essentially like take a drug and space out. It was more of that, like, well, what can we do together? And we took it even farther of like, what if right now we're so tied to our physical location, right? Like just today alone, I had— I got up, I went to an office, then I went to go have a meeting in one part of town. I came back to the office to have lunch, went over here, right? Like I've already done like more trips than I would care to do. And, you know, it's nice to be in a car for a little bit. It's nice to be on a bus for a little bit, but "It's not really serving my life. I could have been more present working on something, reading, or just sitting out in the sun." Help humanity transcend physical location. And we spent a lot of time on each word.

Help humanity, as opposed to robots.

I think you take— you can actually break it down, like, literally one word at a time. Like, "help." What does that mean? It's like, to aid, to be a part of, to make something possible that wasn't possible, or make it easier for other people. So I think that the help part really, for us, stemmed to We don't need to own the solution. We just need to be part of creating something bigger than us and helping other people do something like we're in service of other people. And then humanity is like, who is it? It's humanity. It's not companies, it's not tech bros, it's not Americans. Like it's everybody. Like every choice we make, we need to think, how is this helping all of humanity? Right? Like at a global level, at a global level, at an ableness level. You know, at a gender level, really being like, hey, like, we need something that serves and can help everybody. And then transcend, right? That's like a— we spent a lot of time on that word.

That's a, that's a big word.

It is. And so it's like, for us, it's about like moving beyond, um, making something thoughtless, right? So if you think about things that have transcended something before in our society, like, you could certainly say, like, commerce has transcended physical money, I think would be a pretty fair thing to say.

What else?

Now we have credit cards and Yeah, like how much do you touch physical money, much less like prioritize your life around it? Yeah, it's pretty rare that you're like, I've really got to go to the bank to do this large financial transaction with physical currency.

Yeah, almost never. Are there technologies in the past that you feel like helped humanity transcend location that you find inspiring? Because that was actually one of my first thoughts is like from the telegram to the phone to email, you know, all these sorts of things like We are more connected than ever, and I think it's the primary thing responsible for our progress. So in theory, if your mission is successful and this new technology brings humanity closer together, it's just like upgrading the routers and Ethernet between a data center. Like, it'll get faster and better, and we'll be able to create better things.

So there's been this history of communication of making the physical limitations smaller to communicate over longer distance. And then at the same time, there's like a higher quality of communication. And so you think about like the telegram to the telephone to the mobile telephone, but then you pretty much like get to like audio chat and then you get like add some video and we'll talk about video in a second. But then you're like, then that's it. And then it's in person. But there's like this giant gulf between what it means to be in person and what it means to use video chat or talk on the telephone. There's all this information you get from in-person that you don't get from those other mediums. And like, that information is what's fundamental to what we're trying to do. And it's fundamental to our purpose, right? Because you can't just say like, we're making a better video chat. Great. Humanity's transcended physical location. You've got to do something that like we can't even imagine right now. The closest we can get is like a high-def video of you. But you're never like watching a video being like, I feel like I'm in the same space as you.

So what is Pluto today?

What Pluto is today is the starts of a new form of communication. We call it shared presence and this idea that you can share your presence with someone and feel present. And so we have an alpha version of iOS client right now that we're working on. And so iOS to iOS, one-to-one.

But that has to be a flat screen, right?

Yes, yes, it has to be a flat screen, but it doesn't have to feel like a flat screen.

What does that mean? Like, mind blown.

Imagine, it's like, imagine if you were looking through a portal.

So I would be holding up my iPhone, and then on the screen I'd see you sitting in a chair across from me. And you—

and instead of it feeling like I'm looking at a— you're looking at a video of me, you're feeling like you're looking like— like, I think like a magic portal, right? So it's just a portal in space, and you're just like, oh yeah, I— like, I'm holding my hands up like a little rectangle. I'm still looking at you. And if it just happens to be that we're in the same physical space and I'm doing this, but what happens if it's like, oh, it's like a magical portal, and it's like you can be anywhere?

So for our listeners, John was just holding up his fingers kind of right in front of his eyes. Now, if my phone were there though, the camera would only be showing you, like, my eyebrow and one eye.

Correct.

So it seems like we normally position these things for the sake of the person on the other side.

Right. And so what happens is when you've got— when you're communicating with shared presence in, like, Pluto's product, there's a mutualism—

To position it so you see my face. I need to hold it further away, right?

Yeah. So you can't just do a small segment of it. And it's one of those things where it's like there's things that you can do on video chat that you can't use Pluto for. Pluto's really bad for walking, right? Because just imagine, like, you're walking backwards and I'm walking forwards and we're still trying to talk. Like, it doesn't— that's not how walking communication works, right? Like, so, like, FaceTime, for example, or video chat is, like, really, really good for that type of communication. But if you're, like, in a long-distance relationship and you really want to connect with someone, Pluto's way better, right? You know, you set the device up on, like, a stand or on the table or something, and it's like that portal, and you can just really look at each other. You can— it's like we're talking, like, real human things. Like, you feel more present.

So what am I seeing on the screen?

You're seeing something that could look like video but doesn't feel like video.

What does that mean?

One of the challenges that we've learned over the past— over the past 4 years of Pluto is it's really hard to describe what we're doing in a way that is satisfying.

But better to experience.

But when you experience it, you're like, "Aha." So you have—

you're working on a beta iOS app. Yeah. You have something on Steam.

Alpha. So yeah, so let's— yeah, it's, it's, it's alpha software.

Alpha. And you got something on Steam, right?

Yep. So a year ago we released an alpha on Steam and that's the VR client. And so that's like more of like an avatar-based human representation. But, you know, you have your full screen view. And so it's great for like 10-person conversations supernaturally. You have a body language because when you're using the motion controllers and you've got your head movements, like you feel like, oh, that's a person. So. There's this weird mental thing where if we're in VR and you look just like you and you're moving around, we were talking and then you left, you changed your human representation to be nothing at all like you and you came back. My mind would so quickly pick up that it's you because of my— the way I move, the way you move, the way you time your movements with your voice. It wouldn't take longer than a couple of minutes for my mind to replace what I was seeing visually with the feeling of you.

So how this enhances what we would get on over a Zoom call, for example, is we have a sense of location. We'd have some way where I'm getting like a higher bandwidth sense of your presence than I would on just a 2D, you know, kind of camera-based video call. Yeah. And anything else that people should be thinking about?

I mean, that's the fundamentals right now. So we actually think there's 3 key elements to the communication service we're building. One is the shared presence, right? So that's like when you're in a conversation, what's the quality? The other two elements are shared context. So in real life, you have all kinds of information to know when and how to engage in a conversation and what's appropriate or not. Like, we're all in the same physical office building. You treat it differently than if you randomly run into a coworker in a coffee shop, which is different than if your coworker randomly showed up at your house. Right. So like, there's all this context you have about physical location that give you insight and control over when and how to engage.

Am I in this Pluto virtual room all day and you kind of come and knock on the door, or do we kind of schedule it like a call?

Or it's— it's right now it works like a call. But I think that like when I talk about context is like there might be like, oh, drop in. If I'm in the work hours, like John can just drop in and be like, hey, what you doing? Right. It could also be like, oh, we schedule a call and as soon as we're both available for that call, we just automatically see each other.

Hmm.

So let's just, let's just take you on a 3-person call, right? So fundamentally in video chat, you can see each other's video, can hear each other's audio. There's no sense of space for audio and there's no sense of space for video. There's no correlation between what someone's looking at and what you think they're looking at. On Pluto, on a 3-person video chat, you would hear everyone spatially. So where their mouths were was where the sound would come from.

And so then everyone would turn in that direction.

I mean, that was appropriate.

Like, you know, then I would need a camera wherever I'm turning to, right?

I, that's, and that's the thing. So certainly right now we've done a 3-person experiment and on an iPad Pro, it works, right? So when you get a smaller screen, it's harder, but like in an iPad Pro, you have the depth cues on a 3-person conversation so that you see, so you see enough so that when you look at me, the other person, the third person knows that you're looking at me.

So let's say we're a 3-person meeting. Myself and, you know, let's call Joe over there is talking and Joe says something and then I look at you like, can you believe this crap? That would be a very strong signal, right? To everyone.

Right. And Joe would see that. But today, if we're all on a Zoom, you can't do that.

Correct. I have to send a back chat or something.

Right. That's a perfect example. Right. And that's something you get in real life that you don't get in video chat right now. We believe in the medium term, right? In the next like 3 years, there's going to be this moment, like the iPhone moment, where there's going to be a piece of spatial computing hardware.

What's spatial computing?

So spatial computing at the fundamental level is when computing understands the physical 3-dimensional world. It's also when it can display things to humans in a way that's more natural to the 3-dimensional world that we experience.

So we perceive it in 3D as well.

We'll perceive it in 3D, right? So that can be virtual reality where you put goggles over your eyes and all you're seeing are pixels. You think they're 3D, You can move around and, and use your hands with a controller. Um, and then you've got like HoloLens or Magic Leap, which are like mixed reality devices. And those are ones where like you have like a lens over your eyes and you're mostly seeing the physical world, but then it can project digital objects as if they're mixed with the physical world.

Hmm.

And then if you think about mobile computing in 2000, it wasn't one device. Mobile computing was your GPS, your Game Boy, your PDA, your cellular phone. And then over the course of time, there was this time with where the iPhone came out, started to coalesce. Yeah, this is, this is one thing.

And so you feel like spatial computing is going through a similar coalescence?

I think it's going to happen a very similar way where you're going to see all these different things that don't seem related to each other, or they seem like they're competing with each other. And then at some point, someone's going to release a piece of hardware that has some attributes, like it's going to be wearable, it's going to be always on or always with you. So it's either you can, you know, always walk around with these glasses or you just, they're easy to pull off and put on kind of like the phone. You're not technically always using it, but it's always kind of on. It's really accessible to start it. It's going to be able to do kind of a virtual reality mode and a mixed reality mode. That inflection point is somewhere in the future. Call it 2 to 4 years, if you will.

So how does Pluto use spatial computing?

Starting with our purpose, it's like help humanity transcend physical location. What we're kind of doing is strategically is looking at the different areas of spatial computing and then asking ourselves, how can we best transcend physical location in that form of spatial computing. So we're looking at virtual reality and we're saying, like, how can we do that in just VR? And then we're looking at, like, augmented reality, like on the iPhone X. What is transcending physical location as a communications product look like there? And then we're going to do the same on mixed reality, like the Magic Leap or the HoloLens. And then what we're doing is saying, okay, those all have different strengths and different weaknesses, but we need to make sure that it's creating one communication service. And so that you could essentially, like, say, like, We'll be ready for the inflection point hardware when we can have all of these different devices that seem very different at a, at a, at an experience level, but they all interoperate and they can all create the same communication experience no matter which ones you're on in any direction. So you could be on an iPhone talking to someone in virtual reality and you should feel like I'm physically present with them. You should also feel that from an iPhone to an iPhone or an iPhone to a HoloLens.

So help me understand the problem that's being solved. One of the reasons I like Zoom is they have what I call the Brady Bunch view, right? You can see a bunch of small videos all next to each other. So I'm on a meeting with 6 of my colleagues. We're all on video. We have good headsets. The audio is good. It's like a, I think, a really good experience. We're communicating, we're talking. It's not perfect. You know, people are looking at their camera, which isn't necessarily aligned with where the people are, or, you know, you never know. What's the problem there that we need to improve on?

So if you could instantly be in the same room with some— with that— those group of people for that same conversation and instantly not be in the room with that same group of people, would you choose that over Zoom? So you're gonna have an hour-long meeting.

What would be the advantage of being in the room?

The quality of communication that you can have in the room, the body cues, the visual cues, the pace of the conversation, the empathetic experience you can get in person is very different than you can get even on the best that video chat can provide. Right. And it's because video chat, you don't— it's like you don't have a video. That's not a human-centered concept. It's a very computer-centered concept. And so it isn't how you experience people. And so if you had those same 6 people and they were just all holograms around the room and they were indistinguishable from them in the physical world.

So there must be something location-wise, right? Because I feel like video gets you maybe 80% of the way there. You can hear inflections in voice way better than text. We can all agree that, right? You can see someone's kind of mood. You can kind of get some idea of how present they are there. So is there something about where we're located relative to each other as opposed to this flat plane that makes it better?

Yeah. So there's where you're located, right? There's how you experience each other. So right now, you know, we've got these microphones in front of us and these headphones on. We don't actually have positional audio. So if you close your eyes and you hear my voice, where is it coming from?— you can't really point to it. It's like a nebulous—

It's not coming from both sides of me.

Yeah. Yeah. But if we didn't have the setup of the podcast, you could point to me.

Yeah.

Yeah. You could point to— and if I moved around the room with your eyes closed, you could point to me. So in video chat, right, like you don't really have that choice. But on Pluto, for example, that's a choice that you do have. How are you physically related to each other in space? Like it's a core part of connecting with people is that spatial awareness.

One of the nice things, you know, we talked about screen sharing, but one of the nice things about some of these is that they're multimodal. So we're sharing links, we're chatting as well as, you know, having the kind of— there's different layers that the communication's happening on, including some of these back channels.

We don't believe that like you're going to run the Pluto app and then you're going to be in the Pluto app all day. We think that's like ludicrous. It's like you're going to be running hundreds of applications. And so it does happen like that where you're on the call and you drop a little note to your Slack channel when you're in a person meeting and then maybe get a response back. It might be lower in person, but you're still— you're still— it's still a common thing.

I don't know if this is the ultimate thing, but it seems like people are just going to use this to check Facebook while they're on meetings, which would break presence.

And so a lot of like what's important about presence, shared presence, is, is like an integrity to the interactions, right? It's like the my eyes are where my eyes are. You see where my eyes are looking. And so we'd probably say right now with everything that we know, with all the experiments and research we've done, is that it's okay to do that. But we have to— we'd want to signal that, that your attention was elsewhere. You might not want to share with me what you're doing, but in real life, you know, like, if you're checking Facebook while we're talking, I have some signals. We might want to retain those because it makes better communication.

I think that's the downside of conference calls today. There's probably a point when conference calls were good, maybe when the internet was boring, right? VR is always right around the corner. I remember playing a Virtual Boy. Did you ever do that? Yeah, but it's still not mainstream yet. But how many people have, like, all the headsets? Millions?

Yeah, definitely tens of millions.

Maybe tens?

Yeah.

So like— But not 100 yet?

No, probably not 100.

And active usage is probably a lot lower?

It's definitely a lot lower.

I mean, I think I own one, but I don't—

Yeah, like SteamVR, for example, which is probably the— for PC VR is the number one channel, has probably 50,000, 100,000 DAU. So daily active users that who use VR and do something in VR. So I don't know, that's not an exact number, but it's, you know, they'll have like 10,000, 20,000 peak simultaneous users. So it could be a couple hundred thousand daily users, right? So we're still doing a lot of learning about like, what does it mean to transcend physical location? How do we do things? What technologies enable our use case? We don't have that many ways to communicate. And what we're doing is saying, what's the matter with that?

Like, we seem to be getting along pretty well.

That's an interesting take on the world, Matt. One could say there's a little bit more war and suffering and destruction and than we maybe need.

So you're not part of the Steven Pinker camp? Things are maybe better than they've ever been?

Not necessarily, no. I think that, like, there are ways that things are better, and then there are ways that it's easy, especially in a Western country, especially as, like, a white dude, to be like, "Ah, things are great. Things are so much better than they've ever been," and to be missing, like, how bad things are for people and how that's a societal choice we make, not, like, a limit of constraints, so.

And you think that this is caused by our mediums?

I think— I mean, I don't know what— I don't know. I don't think it's caused by that, but I do think that communication mediums are tools, and like all tools, you know, they cut both ways. And, and I'm definitely not of the, like, technology for technology's sake is an answer to our woes. It's like, hey, it's just more tools. You need to take a look at social networking. It's provided a lot of good and it's provided a lot of bad. What we have to do as a society, we have to somehow make sure that, like, the technology we're making is serving humanity.

I've heard A lot of nonprofits actually starting to do VR experiences, 'cause they say that people can really experience in a visual sense, much in the same way you and I went to Ethiopia to experience some of what was going on there. They can get that thing without having to fly halfway across the world. That also worries me, though, because we've gotten very good at sort of inciting human emotions. Yeah. And, you know, we're not rational beings. And so if I was hooked up to this, you know, Pluto 10 years from now, amazing system. You know, what is the advertising in that that detects my exact mood and tailors a message exactly to that?

Yeah, I mean, that's a good question. I mean, that's part of the reason why we're really focused on communication. And so, like, we're not trying to create the metaverse.

Say what the metaverse is.

Oh, so the metaverse is the idea that, like, there's a universe that has— it's all digital, and you go into this world, and in this world you can do anything. So if you think about, like, Snow Crash, that started that. I think that coined the term metaverse, which is a novel by Neil Stevenson. Thank you, Neil Stevenson. You take a look at, like, Ready Player One. So in those cases, they're metaverses, right? Like, in each case they're like, oh, you know, the people are plugging into these worlds, right?

And in Ready Player One, he has like a 360 treadmill so he can walk, a suit, and the suit exercises him, right? Yeah.

And then lift weights with it.

Yeah.

And he puts goggles on his face.

Goggles on. And so he can essentially have total freedom of movement and is moving around in this virtual world.

You anything, go anywhere, like the vacation planet, surf a 50-foot monster wave in Hawaii. You can ski down the pyramids, you can climb Mount Everest with Batman. So much so that like all, almost all of his life is existing in that virtual world, such that that is more of his world than the, the physical world where he's living in a, in a stack of trailer parks.

Which some people might define their internet experiences as today, like their friends or connections already transcend their physical space.

Oh yeah. I mean, I have like one of my closest friends is someone I play this board game with online, and I've never met him. He lives in France, but we play this game like, you know, a couple of times a month, and we always spend half the time talking as we do playing.

Mm-hmm.

Right. And so it's like he's just as much of my friend as someone else is.

You've said you felt like we're 2 or 3 years away. What gives you that kind of confidence? 'Cause you're not a guy who says those things lightly.

There's movements happening and it's starting with like OpenXR, which is an open standards body participation in that. And then like they've got the provisional specification that they just announced at a game developers conference. And so things like that are now saying like, hey, what if as an application developer you could just do a spatial application and that could run anywhere, right? So concepts like that, like right now if we wanna make an application, you wanna make like an iPhone Air application, it's completely different than doing like an Oculus Rift application. Which is different than a Magic Leap application. But with OpenXR spec, it's really exciting because as that gets adopted and more runtime supported, you'll just be able to make a spatial application. It'll be able to work anywhere.

So tell me a little bit about Pluto, the company, just as we start to wrap up. Like, how many people is it today?

We're about 20 people.

20 people. And how do you work together? Do you have some sort of futuristic— do you all wear VR headsets all day, or what's the— Yes.

So all of our standups are in VR.

Say what a standup is.

Oh, standup is where like they, you know, every day all the engineers get into VR. Actually, they're often sitting. And then they just go around the room and say, do a check-in. Here's what I did yesterday and here's what I'm getting done today. And there's some like live troubleshooting of issues if need be.

So everyone's in the same time zone or do you have people all over the world?

Right now everyone at this moment's in the same time zone.

So that helps a lot.

Yeah, we're still very co-located because we've done is made the choice to have an in-person culture and then we're now slowly eroding at that to create a more distributed layer on top of that that uses Pluto.

—so the Pluto office somewhere that everyone goes into every day.

Yeah, we have a Pluto office. But then like I spent 30 days working from Venice Beach, California, and specifically because we're like, hey, we're about to launch the iOS version. We need to use it a lot. And, and so I'm like, great.

I mean, you took one for the team in Venice Beach.

What was cool is it seemed like that. But then I'm like, wow, I'm more connected with people probably because I'm talking to them more. But we could really maintain connections so much so that we had 2 employees start while I was gone and I had 2 meetings with one, 3 meetings with the other. And there's this moment where you're like, wow, like, I feel like I'm with you. When I saw them in person, it wasn't like, nice to meet you. It was like, oh, we've been hanging out.

So do you imagine a day someday where no one goes into the office at Pluto?

Yeah. So we're actually actively working on kind of the Pluto 2.0 phase, and that is one where we will be office optional. So we do have a need for an office because we do have a lot of kind of cutting-edge new hardware. I bet we have like a laboratory type thing, and that does require physical space, but we are moving towards a world where what it means to be a full-time Pluto isn't tied to where you're physically located. So it's really kind of like— call it this year is the year of like, how do we live our purpose? Uh, we're at the forefront of that, not at the back end of that.

20 years from now, what percentage of jobs do you think will be distributed?

Oh, I think it's going to be like 80%, 90%. I think it's going to be a huge percentage.

Thank you again. Yeah, and I really appreciate you coming by. Looking forward to seeing more Pluto in the future. Thanks for having me. That was Jon Vecchi. You can find him on Twitter @JonVecchi, and that's J-O-H-N V-E-C-C-H-E-Y. And check out PlutoVR at PlutoVR.com. It's Pluto like the planet. When I was playing around with my janky Virtual Boy headset in 1995, I never could have imagined that one day there would be hundreds of millions of people using virtual reality. But that future is already here, so it feels pretty safe to assume that a lot of us will do work in VR very soon. Distributed employees work best with a wide range of communication technologies, but there's something special about face-to-face communication in 3D space. Here's to folks like John who are trying to bring that experience to people who are communicating across oceans and beyond. Thank you so much for joining us.