Tech Over Tea - VR + Cycling Is A Perfect Combo | ToasterFace Games

Episode Date: September 26, 2025

Today we have the creator of Pedel Rebel VR on the show, a VR exercise game where you speed through traffic on a bike through neon covered city.Wishlist on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2909380/Pedal_Rebel_VR/==========Support The Channel==========► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson==========Guest Links==========Website: https://pedalrebelvr.com/Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2909380/Pedal_Rebel_VR/Twitter: https://x.com/PedalRebelVRYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@pedalrebelvr==========Support The Show==========► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson=========Video Platforms==========🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBq5p-xOla8xhnrbhu8AIAg=========Audio Release=========🎵 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/149fd51c/podcast/rss🎵 Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-over-tea/id1501727953🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IfFpfzlLo7OPsEnl4gbdM🎵 Google Podcast: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNDlmZDUxYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw==🎵 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/tech-over-tea==========Social Media==========🎤 Discord:https://discord.gg/PkMRVn9🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechOverTeaShow📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techovertea/🌐 Mastodon:https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1093345==========Credits==========🎨 Channel Art:All my art has was created by Supercozmanhttps://twitter.com/Supercozmanhttps://www.instagram.com/supercozman_draws/DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation.

Good morning, good day, and good evening. I'm as always your host, Brodie Robertson. And today we are back for, we're getting close to the end of the indie game episodes, but we've still got a couple of left to do. Today we have the developer of Pedal Rebel VR on. So how about you introduce yourself? You talk about what your game is, and we'll go from there. Yeah, for sure.

Thanks for having me. Yeah, my name is Jonathan Kovart. I'm the solo dev of Pedal Rebel VR, which is, Your run-of-the-mill exercise bike street racing VR game, where you ride it on a real exercise bike, took your head to steer and get sweaty, have fun gaming. Yeah, so how long has this been a project for at this point? This has been a, you know, it's been a twinkle in my eye since about 2018 or like really when I just like started getting into VR and was running out of cool VR games to play and started experimenting with duct tape. and real world objects and adding things into VR.

It's been in development sort of since about 2019, but very, very just hobbyist, casual. This is my first commercial game. So a lot of that is just, I've had the project in mind, but I've had to work out how to do everything first. Right, right. And obviously work and live and pay rent and all that kind of stuff too. So realistically, I would say that it's been the last two years

that I've really been working on it properly and going to events and things like that. But I've had the prototype for a while. Did you have prior experience with game development or programming? Or is this just like learning from the start? Pretty much a little bit of all of that. I mean, we did a little bit of Game Maker at school, and I got really, really into that.

And me and my friends were, meanwhile, some people were making Pac-Man clones for their assignment and just re-skinning the tutorial games. Me and my friends were making networked FPS games in GameMaker with full 3D just because the computer's IT guy was pretty nifty and he'd locked everything else down. So we made an FPS land game where we were just some spheres cruising around, but we managed to get it working on the network because everything else was blocked. So we were pretty advanced game maker people.

We'd done like just a crap ton of research and that at the time. Then I went to university initially for like a multimedia degree, which had a lot of the foundational programming courses in it. Turns out programming is really hard to pass in an academic environment. So I flunked out of a bunch of classes, did all the media classes, switched to a media degree and accidentally fell into the film and television industry for about 10 years. But there was some foundational skills there for sure. But a lot of the Unity stuff is just, yeah, YouTube, tutorials, self-taught, all that kind of stuff. But, yeah, because of sort of my media background, that's sort of what enables me to kind of do a little bit of everything.

The programming stuff I definitely have to refresh on and it's probably still some of my weakest skills. But the good thing is there's so many resources out there now and especially right now, it's never been easier. So, yeah, don't get discouraged for sure. Yeah, programming, like, you can definitely see when a game... How would I put it? When the developer of a game comes from different backgrounds, where you can very easily tell if someone has a programming background, they don't have someone doing the art,

you can tell when someone has like a media art sort of background, and then the programming is a secondary thing. Obviously, when you have bigger teams, you know, work is distributed amongst people, and things tend to iron out. But if you have a basic understanding of both, you can see, oh, this interaction here is a relatively easy interaction to handle. So, and like you have like a good art style. It's like, okay, well, clearly this person came from that side.

But then you see a lot of these games where it's like very technical, very intricate mechanics. And you're like, ah, I see what this is. I see where you're coming from. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. is just different ways to approach a game and hopefully by the time you get towards release like everything feels polished everything feels good but when you see a game in that like early alpha sort of state

you can very clearly see different people's backgrounds especially in those like solo projects oh for sure and like yeah people know doubt about different things right so like and it doesn't even matter what type of game it is some people will go like oh like that game looks really cool and then you know one person will dive deep and go yeah but it does this

and it does this and it does that. And then other people are like, yeah, it looks cool and like, things like that. And it's like, what fascinates me a lot is, is kind of the tech art, um, kind of, uh, you know, game developer class, uh, skill tree, right? So the, the tech art is, is really cool because it's a, it's a nice like merge right in between both. But now with shader technology and things like that, like you can be a, a looks programmer. Like, if that makes sense, it's, it's some of that stuff. you can go so far in depth and like you see these insane shaders that you know they react to things and they change and it's this and it's that it's it's really crazy and there's so many rabbit holes to dive into um currently i'm just kind of bobbing along on the surface of all of these skills at the moment i'm trying to avoid as many rabbit holes as possible until the game is sort of in a decent state and then uh yeah hopefully one day we'll be able to have a full team a full compliment so that we can uh we can be at A bit more in depth across the board.

You bring up Shader programming there, and that's one of those areas where it's programming, and it very much is, but it is so vastly different to the regular kind of programming you're going to do. You're dealing with things on a per pixel basis. You're dealing with very complicated, like, GPU maths, and it requires a very different kind of thinking

to really understand how to do things and how to break down problems. And if you come from a traditional programming background, that's not necessarily going to help you that much in understanding how to write, even not even just like efficient GPU code, but working GPU code. For sure. And like, and you brought up problem solving and breaking down problems. And I think that's like, that's really the key thing. I think actually one of the best things that came out of my, uh, my, uh, programming degree is actually that was the name of the name of the, the first course was called problem solving and programming.

And I think I liked that approach best because it is breaking down problems, breaking it down into small little pieces, then using your knowledge to execute the first part, hand it over to the second part and so on and so on and so on. And I actually think that those are the skills that are more essential than anything else. Like for instance, like I do work in media. I do, I work on our crews that we do video work. We do like live productions and things like that. And I'll always take on someone who I can tell has good problem solving skills more than if they have a very like a specific skill set.

Like if someone says like, oh, well, I know after effects. I'll be like, oh, okay. Well, what about this? What about this? What about that? Right. That programming part of it is, you know, obviously it's essential. But being able to take a problem from any space and break it down.

and then learn the ways to solve it, you can be, you can kind of be software agnostic, you can kind of be language agnostic, you can be anything, right, as long as you kind of know what we want, know how to go through the motions, know how to learn to put that together. And yeah, I think those are really the skills that you want someone to have. It doesn't have to be specific software or anything like that, because software changes all the time, tools are changing all the time, but it's about like, can I seek out this information, can I get what I need from it, and then apply it to the problem at hand. I think those are really important skills.

Yeah, not just, you make a really good point there. Not just knowing how to break down a problem, but knowing how to seek out information, right? Because you can understand how to, oh, I know how, like let's say you want to do a wall jump, for example. You can work out, okay, these are the components that need to go into a wall jump. the information you need to store to make this happen. But if you're not entirely sure about how to actually find information for your specific syntactic sugar, like, you've definitely done the hard part.

The hard part is knowing how to break down a problem. But a lot of people don't really have those research skills and know how to find information that is going to sort of lead them in the right direction. for sure and that's that thing um whereas yeah like i obviously i'm not a not a school teacher or anything like that but um i do try to follow it closely and um i think that's one of the skills that is definitely like the most important thing to to teach is is basically how to research how to think critically how to um yeah like seek out biases and all that kind of stuff but I think the big one is about finding the right information, vetting that information,

and then executing on it, right? And that goes across all businesses. Quite a lot, like I talk to a lot of indie devs, obviously, being in the scene. And I think a lot of the time, the devs don't realize the skills that they're learning actually apply across, you know, the whole swath of other businesses and other industries. And also, you know, obviously in life as well, right? And I think that's a big thing is like knowing that these are sort of life skills that you can do. And that way you're not sort of putting yourself in a box when it comes to like hiring and anything like that.

And, you know, in a way, indie devs do need to think of themselves as business people a lot more. And they have these marketable skills. And these are where those skills can be applied. Yeah. So it's a really interesting way to look at these things. But for sure, like, I mean, I personally want to see more game developers in government in these large industries and things like that because we know how people are playing games, right?

We know how games work. We know how players will behave. We know how to manage systems and, you know, lock down certain things or create certain incentives. And that's what the economy is. That's what business is, right? It's solving problems for people for a price. It's finding a way to make it more efficient,

finding ways to optimize things. It's literally it's all gaming, right? And even if you are a good gamer and if you like these kind of technical strategy games and things like that, you could almost put that on your resume because that is what you would do in business. That is what you would do in any industry that you work in is, like I said, optimization, breaking down problems and making it work. Right, it's just a matter of understanding

the syntax they want to hear the information in because you're just like, I play 12 hours of League of Legends a day and that's not exactly going to look great in your resume No, but you could then say, you know, that's teamwork, that's coordination, that's management, right? So, yeah, you've got to find the words they want to hear. Definitely, you've got to change the wording around a little bit, but you can, yeah, I think more and more people

will start to understand these skills outside of the box that they're in. Well, shifting focus onto the game itself. I guess the first place to start, we kind of already went over basically what the game is, but why did you want to make this kind of game? What did you feel like was missing from what was there? For sure.

So, like I said, you know, we pulled out the original Oculus dev kit, a friend of mine had it, and we played it with the old Razor Hydro Control. I'm not sure if you know anything about that. That thing was crazy. It was like the hand controls we have in VR today, but they were cabled into this weird mystical orb. That was a magnet, and it used the magnetic field of this kind of central orb to do hand controls, which is just nuts, by the way.

It's such a weird technology. But we had that really early and played around in the old Tuscany demo, and played a little bit of Team Fortress 2 and stuff like that on the original dev kit and I went oh okay so this is where VR is heading this is this is really cool um it wasn't until I got to play the vibe at uni that I went oh okay room scale VR I can now move my entire body I can do all of this I twisted my knee playing Pavlov trying to duck behind cover I was accidentally punching walls I was doing some like the way I was playing super hot kind of felt like interpretive dance.

So I was like, I made a YouTube video where I played super hot to Enya. It was very, like, flowy and cool. So it was experimenting a lot with VR and really excited about this direction. But soon enough, as it comes with any technology, and especially that VR is, is primarily led by the indie developers, right? There weren't as many AAA people, and there still isn't as many AAA studios working in the VR space. Well, in the VR space from AAA Studios, you tend to get these like VR experiences, right?

It's less VR games from the big studios. It's like experience being Batman, experience being Spider-Man, and that's cool. But it's kind of like a one-and-done thing, right? It's not like a beatsever where you can keep playing that game. There's consistently more things to do. For sure. And so that's what I mean. You've got these kind of arcade-y games that are, there's sort of endless.

You can play them over and over and get a good experience out of it. Like you said, Beat Saber. Space Pirate Trainer was one of the first, like, big ones. And then, like you said, we had some Batman-y experiences. Like, now we're getting some Assassin's Creed's, your Hitman's, your Batman's. Deadpool coming next year looks really awesome. So it's starting to heat up now. But at that time, it was like you get a wave of indie games that just have these kind of mechanics in them.

A lot of games would just have one mechanic. And I'd get really, really into it. And you'd get these tiny glimpse. of what VR could be like and we're starting to get there now there was these tiny glimmers that I was like oh my God this is going to be so amazing and all of that

but then there was a bit of a a little bit of a drop off kind of after the Quest 2 came out lots of people like got really excited and then again like there wasn't too many games coming out at the time and then I also went well why are people putting their headsets down because I'm having an amazing time

in VR like this is this is the next level. The big one for me was that at the time I was doing a lot of video editing as my job. I was at my desk a lot already. And people were playing Apex. People were playing League of Legends, all that kind of stuff. But it's like, I've already just spent eight hours at my desk. I love video games and have played video games since I was, you know, tiny. But I need to move my body at some point. Right, right. So that's when I was like, I, you know, I was lucky enough to have just enough space in my room to like push everything out the way and have a big kind of VR play space and really make it physical. I was, uh, I've got really, really into

some of these, uh, like archery games where you use a bow and arrow. Um, I've got a, I've got a reel out there where, um, you play a hollow point and it's, you shoot a target and when you, once you shoot it, it then shoots back at you at the same trajectory. So you have to immediately dodge after shooting an arrow. And that got really, really physical. And I thought, oh, this game's awesome, but it just doesn't feel real enough. So I duct taped two broken hockey sticks together with some elastic, taped it to my index controllers, and I had a real bow and arrow working in VR, which was awesome. It's so much fun. Didn't knock anything over, but it looked like I nearly did. But then the next day, so, you know, like I said, I'm shooting bows, I've got all this,

whatever. Three hours in, my arm was killing me. And I'm like, oh, that's right. I have been holding this hockey stick up above my head for about an hour and a half. The next day, I couldn't lift my arm and I couldn't open doors at all. And I accidentally found out that I'd given myself like a one-armed gym session while playing a video game. I went, well, let's follow these two threads, right? Like, people are stopping playing VR because they don't have enough space in their room to play these bigger experiences. They play the same few, like, arcade-y kind of repetitive games.

Get bored with it, move on and go back to their flat-screen games, right? And we started to see stats coming up that quite a lot of Quest 2's were sitting on shelves, gathering dust. Right. So I want other people to be able to have this big VR experience like I'm having. But, you know, if the next upgrade for your gaming setup is real estate, that's not really an approachable way to get these games to people. So I wanted to shrink those big VR experiences down as much as possible. And we still hadn't found a way to get that locomotion working,

that full open world kind of experience. And then I went, wait a minute, what about an exercise bike? You're stationary, but you're moving. Your body feels like you're moving. You're getting really into it. So I'd picked one up off of the side of the road and had a bit of a go on it, did a bit of experimenting and went actually this this works really well and this is super fun and this is also a way for me to get that exercise in uh you know in my room in a safe space um while i'm

still playing games uh because there's absolutely no other way i was going to stick to a regular exercise routine or or a gym class or anything like that um i really needed a way for it to be more exciting and more interesting for me uh it started to work and i thought well you know if this if this works for me, then maybe it will work for other people as well. I think it's one of the areas where I'm kind of surprised VR hasn't expanded into. The idea of the sort of

not entirely necessary but still interesting sort of like add-ons. Like, you know, if you go back to the, if you go back to the PS, actually, no, go back to the Wii. We's a good example. Yeah. You'd have a lot of,

of attachments for the controller, like the Wii steering wheel, and you could play those games without the steering wheel, it was just using the controller itself, or they're like, a bunch of random little things like that, where it enhanced the experience, and there's just not really that in the VR space. Right now you have treadmills, basically. That's pretty much the only additional thing, but I've seen... There are quite a few accessories. There are some accessories. It's very niche. I think that's the main The main thing is it's not as out in the open as people realize. You can get golf clubs in VR.

You can get stock for your, yeah, okay. I didn't even know those existed. Yeah, there you go. There's no marketing on them. No one ever talks about them at least. Yeah, exactly. It really, it really depends. Like, there is very much, it's still a very divided thing where you've got your VR hardcores that deep dive and research everything and find out everything.

You've got a bit of a DIY thing. you've got your simulator people so like you're racing sim guys your flight sim guys they were already hardcore in the scene and spending thousands and thousands of dollars on their setup. Yeah they'll do that before VR beforehand now they're doing it in VR as well

and the setups are just insane there's quite a lot of racing guys now that swear by VR because you can like you can in a real car you can watch the apex go as you as you hit it and then you do have a bit more like you've got some accessory stuff as well. There are there are some hardcore FPS people that have stocks for their

controllers and so it feels like a real rifle and all that kind of stuff with kickback and haptic feedback vests and all that kind of stuff. It is it is more on the expensive side. It is there's small companies that are doing these getting bigger and bigger. We've got VR shoes coming out very soon. We've got all that kind of stuff. What do you mean VR shoes? What is that? VR shoes. So you the it's like a pair of robotic roller skates. that as you walk, they wheel you backwards, so you stay in place as you're walking. Oh, so it's a more small scale of the treadmills, of the like... Yeah, so you've got the slide mills, like the catwalk and the Omni,

and now there's a new one coming out with like bull bearings on the surface. And then you've got your, yeah, you've got these VR shoes. It's like a Kickstarter project this guy's working on. He's taking it out to Expos and stuff now. And then you've got your really expensive Infinodex and your, you're, user latency type spaces where you go, we call it like location based experiences, where it's a set space, it's tracking that space, you can play multiplayer like three on three shooters and that kind of stuff. So there are these kind of multi-tiered parts of VR. But yeah,

there is a whole fitness scene now as well. There is a fitness VR scene, which clearly I saw coming in about 2019. And now it's hitting up pretty big. So we've got like a similar game now to like ring fit which is called uh i think it's called fit quest um and then there's yeah you've got your beat sabers that are i call them sleeper fitness games so yeah they're not they're not designed to be a fitness game but they are um fitness games in their own right uh so you've got all that kind of stuff there are like lots of boxing uh style games and uh and you've got even like big fitness companies, like Les Mills coming in and doing like a full, like, kind of like your gym classes kind of experience in VR. You've got your dancing games and things like that.

So people go way into full body tracking. So they put trackers all over their body and then that's represented in the game. And they, some people go into VR chat and do their own like aerobics and yoga classes and things like that. So there are so many niche communities around there. But like you said, that's like, unless you're. you know unless you're looking into this stuff you don't see it it's not quite mainstream yet it's not like you you go down to your uh your big box store pick up a playstation and then uh you see all this stuff right it's not quite there yet a lot of it is all online retailers and things like that and smallish companies uh doing it um but then yeah the idea for for my game was like i didn't

want you to have to buy any um special accessories or anything like that so i found a way to get it to work with any exercise bike because VR is already price prohibitive enough already. I wanted it to be as cheap as possible. And I didn't want to lean into that fitness style thing. I didn't want to be like a Peloton or a Zwift or a Zumba or something like that. I wanted it to feel like a game for gamers, wanted it to want the game to be the motivation first and to have the fitness be like a bit of a bonus. And that's why, so we just use the existing controller that you get.

with your headset, we use a little bit of elastic slash duct tape or whatever, Velcro strap. Strap the controller to your leg and you can play on any exercise bike or cycle trainer. You can get those ones where you use your actual bike and you attach something to the back wheel and you can ride at home. So that's sort of step one. I mean, sure, I'd love to have my own giant gym facility with 10, 15 games that do all sorts of different things, but I've got to start small. I've got to start in the home.

a little bit of DIY, a little bit of like, oh yeah, I know how I can duct tape something together and strap it to my leg and see if I like it first. Grab a really cheap bike off of the street, off of marketplace, off a Craigslist or whatever and have a bit of a go first. And then if I like it, maybe I'll get into it, jump into the Discord and get hardcore about it. Like, we'll see how it goes. I can't imagine anything like this coming from one of the big companies, but I could

see some Kickstarter. So you know how there's, you can get these like attachments for your bike where it will tell your speed. Yeah, yeah, like cadence sensors. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I could very easily imagine somebody doing a Kickstarter to make something to integrate into VR. And that would make that process considerably easier and you don't have to like attach a controller to your leg then. Yeah, definitely. So that's me. Basically, this just haven't launched the page yet. You can get these cadence sensors off of Amazon. This is, this is McGahn. There's a bunch of different ones.

They're about $16 now. So they've come down in price like really, really significantly. COVID has actually been a massive game changer for all of this stuff. Like your peloton's and your, there's FitTrack and a bunch of other companies now. They all went absolutely hardcore during COVID, getting as many spin bikes out as possible because people were leaving the gyms, people were stuck at home, people were trying to do all this stuff. Nordic track is the other one, sorry. And they're selling these big, expensive exercise bikes with screens on them, and they have these online courses and subscriptions and stuff. And then

what we're starting to see is that so many people got all set up, did all this stuff at home, and like any, you know, big instabide, you know, purchase during those types of, those times, it starts to gather dust, it starts to take up space in your garage or whatever, you realize it's losing value, people start selling them, or gyms are shutting down, or all of that kind of thing. So people keep going like, oh, yeah, I don't have a bike. And then I'll just quickly scroll through Marketplace, and you'll see that there are so many bikes for so cheap now. Even brand new, like, you can get a pretty decent quality spin bike for like 150 bucks from Bunnings and things like that because, like, the wheels started turning, right? Like, people started building

these things on mass, now they're stock left over. So it actually did become way less cost prohibitive than people thought. And like legitimately, because we've been looking at this stuff, like I've picked up gym quality bikes for free off of people because they just got to get them out of their house and we just chucked it in the Budavasha. So it's, yeah, like it, the scene has changed quite a bit since I've been doing this and you can get these things really cheap. there are a few apps out there now on VR as well where you can Bluetooth that cadence sensor attach it to the to the pedal of your bike and you can do like a you can do little tours around like downtown Paris things like that you can ride through these environments whether

there be VR or like a street view kind of experience um it being street view though it's like it's not that high fidelity like it is cool that it's that it's a real place and it's a real distance and these are like real metrics and stats that you can have. So that that's cool in a way. But again, like it is just peddling. And you can do some other exercises and things like that, very ring fit style to play these games and they are very fitness based. And yeah, like, and the same thing.

Like you've got your hardcore racing driver gamers. You've got your hardcore cyclist people as well. So there's a platform called Zwift, and you can like straight up do the tour to France with other people, multiplayer, people hook up all their garment, sensors, everything to it, heart rate, cadence, you know, all of their, all of these types of crazy data things that they do and they cycle at home and they do all this stuff. And it is very hardcore and it's very full on. But again, like, because I'm not a cyclist, because I'm not into that scene, it's not as engaging to me as. just a video game would be, right? And, like, I mean, we all kind of grew up playing need for speed or burnout and all those types of games.

I'm like, well, if I can bring that casual racing experience to VR to the exercise bike and do these kind of short, really high energy things, then, like, not only are you going to have, like, this rush and, like, this feeling of, like, of this kind of, you know, really rebellious kind of act. And it's going to get your heart rate up and you're going to get workout. But also, I can really shorten how much workout you really need to do, right? It's almost that kind of high intensity interval training that people do. Like, there's a business called F-45, which is basically like, all right, you can get your entire, you know, gym workout done in 45 minutes.

If we just do these like stations, you just go, go, go, go, go for 45 minutes and then stop and rest. And you do that maybe once, twice a week or whatever. And there is real research into seeing that you can get a significant amount of better. benefit out of a short amount of exercise so long as it's regular. And so, yeah, I'm trying to kind of harness that and weaponize it as like, you know, there's mobile games that hit you off all the time and they're like, yeah, hit your streak, do your weekly bonus, here's you this, here's the challenge, is this like constantly getting these little notifications.

Well, I thought if I can just do that, but as a game and as something that is short, that is sweet that you're just going to do it, eventually that will start to become a habit and you'll start to like you'll start to it eventually right but again i just just personally none of that stuff has worked for me none of that fitness branded stuff has has ever captured me um i've never been able to stick to a gym membership or afford one um i've never been able to stick to regular exercise if it's not some kind of social sport where you know you've got people saying oh you're coming this saturday or whatever and you've got those other kind of social influences that are that are getting you off your ass to do it and you know my it's probably an ADHD thing it's probably that kind of thing where

it's just it's not in my not in my routine it's not in the the front of mind right sure but if you get it into your route it if you manage to get it in there then it's like it's stuck in there yeah but if it's a video game or something like that where i'm seeing that high score i'm seeing that that that skill level and that mastery like that's that's why we play these games right is um so i thought if I can combine those two powers, didn't want to go fitness branding, even though I probably could have and probably could have made way more money doing it that way, get some investor on board and do it that way. Really want it to be a video game first, get the benefit and the experience out of it. Second, and if I can create enough content to keep you coming back and start getting these

incentives in place, start a bit of a community on Discord, then, yeah, we might be able to get that movement happening and realistically I think it is gamers that need this this push more than anyone else right we you know we need an experience we need something to sort of get us off the couch just just that little bit right I felt like I could just make something that gives you that little bit of push just that a little bit of an experience but I can give you something that you can't get anywhere else right one of my pet peeves when VR was was really starting out and you've got your Google cardboard and you've got these like mobile VR experiences

that started out. They were so bad, really, really low-fied VR experiences. The worst thing was that so many of the apps were roller coasters and people were like, oh, cool, it's like a roller coaster in VR and they just violently made people sick. It's probably the worst thing you can do in VR. That was my first VR experience. DevKit 2.

Exactly. And we're still, and we're still, hung over from that like that there is still this industry-wide hangover of people going oh i've tried vr i didn't like it and i said you haven't tried my via and so we actually did uh the first south by southwest sydney event uh big tech space big expo area um we were right next to like amazon a w s like telstra like all of these like telcos and uh internet people intel had like a human size drone and all this stuff there is insane And in the little corner there was this like VR, uh, tech, uh, area. Um, and they, they're calling it

XR and it was sort of, it was sort of like half 360 film festival kind of feel. Like VR and VR XR AR, um, they're still trying to work out what, what they are. They don't know what they are yet. And at that stage, it was a lot of just like kind of artsy film experiences. And, um, we were right at the entrance of the of the xR showcase area and at first i'm like oh like because because we weren't in the gaming like the indie game area so we weren't just getting indie people we were getting tech people we were getting um just people from all all over like um south by southwest sydney is a music film tech event um and they had like indie showcase area as well um so we were getting people from all walks of life coming through and and checking it out and at first i was like

Oh, if you've never done VR before, maybe go check something else out first because I don't want to kind of, you know, I don't want you to have a bad taste in your mouth or a bad experience or anything like that. But pretty quickly, people were having seated experiences and were coming back and saying, actually, that made me a bit sick or whatever, because it is that that dissonance between your visual spectrum seeing motion and your body and your inner ear saying, oh, I'm not moving though. And you do get that kind of car sick, sea sick kind of experience if you're not used to it. And it just takes a little while for you to try to separate that in your brain because it is a new technology, right? And then pretty quickly, I actually flipped my strategy and actually, guys, if you've never done VR before, come do this first. Because I have accidentally hacked the system a little bit. you being on an exercise bike hanging on being solid like you have contact with the ground while you're playing and your legs are moving once you start moving in the game your body remembers what

it's like to ride a bike doesn't matter how long ago you've ever ridden a bike before and your body just go straight into bike mode right and people don't get motion sickness um and funnily enough like i slowly started till like turning the uh the intensity up on the game as I've been demoing it and by the time we got to South by South West Sydney I had jumps, I had dips and I had some turns and stuff in the game so that, and you could fall off the track

and if you fell off the track you would fall and then you would respawn back up and you would drop back in and I accidentally did achieve the VR roller coaster experience which isn't something I intended to do but because of the bike and because of that physical contact

you have to this device it sells everything else and your entire body is engaged you're in there and we actually just at AvCon the other week I'm not sure if you heard you might have heard but we had this woman come on

and she was screaming and she couldn't believe it and she was having a roller coaster experience in VR on an exercise bike that I picked up off the street which is just kind of insane I was going to say the bike you have

it's falling apart It is, yes. It's had, so what, we'd be at nearly 3,000 people who have demoed my game at these events over the last like few years now. And it's a little bit of a compromise. Like I have lots of different spin bikes now. But that one in particular is, it's light, which means it's easy to carry in and out of venues. Sure, sure. It's black and red. It looks cool. We've added some cool LED lights and stuff to it. But yeah, it's seen better days. That was actually its last. tarah. We've retired that bike now. The other issue is that because we get so many different people coming in and trying, you would have seen that we had an exercise bike style bike, like a small one for kids, and then we had a spin bike style one for the more adults and things like that. So spin bikes, the pedals are hard attached to the flywheel. Once the flywheel starts moving, the pedals will keep moving whether your feet are on them or not. So I could have brought in a much more sturdier, much more heavier bike.

right um but then there's just way more weight behind those petals yeah so i've got a five kilo wheel here which is awesome and if you know it if you've done spin class before or anything like that um you get used to it and you're in it and that wheel does help you keep moving right like it builds up momentum and then it helps you maintain that and you can kind of ease off your energy a little bit and and maintain that movement whereas an exercise bike if you stop it stops yeah yeah it's just a magnetic or um or a mechanical resistance so we use the we use the we use the exercise bikes for the kids and we use the spin bikes for the adults spin bike just looks cooler and just attracts more people just because I put flashing lights on the

on the wheel and things like that it's just a lot more of a cool experience but I was hesitant to bring one of my bigger bikes because of the weight of the wheel and a lot of people aren't used to that and they they and the problem is the game is actually too engaging right like I keep telling people don't pedal fast because you're going to build up speed in the game that's an intentional design aspect of it where I want It's, I sort of just want to get you into like a Zen zone kind of state, almost like the Tetris effect. And then the game then becomes, I'm looking at where I'm going to dodge next. I'm looking at where my next path is.

And you actually completely forget about everything below the waist. And you just forget that you're peddling at all, right? And the music is dynamic. So the faster you go, the better the music gets. So all of those things is there to kind of distract you from the game. But that that also means that people get so engaged in the, in the, in the, the game they want to go fast straight away because they've seen someone else play that they get a bit carried away and then they've feet slip off and it you know turns into a whole thing um but yeah

you can go as hard as you're like at home it was just like this is kind of my safe expo uh experience um but yeah so there's different different ways that you can go about it with the different bikes and stuff um that's sort of my compromise is that it was yeah but that that bike is retired it's it's getting real squeaky now um and yeah but it's it's it's it's It's super, super fun. And like I said, I kind of accidentally achieved that roller coaster experience in VR that no one else has actually managed to pull off yet

without really expensive equipment. I was thinking before, one thing that somebody could do if they wanted to have some fun. Hooking into the speed of the game and attaching that to a fan. So the fast you go, the faster... Yeah.

Yeah, and having a speed of the game. fan can actually help you a lot with that VR sickness that we were talking about before. Quite a lot of people on Reddit and things like that talk about how they put a one of those pedestal fans or something on in VR. It also helps orient you, depending on which way you're facing and things like that. So there are a lot of these little hacks now that, that we've worked out over the years of doing VR. A lot of people used to ask me about sweat in the headset it before. People were very worried about that initially, that like, oh, I'm going to get the device all sweaty and things like that. And it's like, well, actually, you're going to do that

anyway. No matter what game you're playing, like, you will sweat and it does pour out of you when you're really engaged. In summer in Australia, you get it. Yes, and that's the thing, too. I do tend to play a lot more VR in winter to warm up rather than cool down. But what's really cool now, the technology has come so far. I mean, I've got my, my Quest 3 here. here and you'll actually see that I play it without the facial interface now more often than not. So I take this thing off completely. Because the new lenses have got such a good sweet spot, I actually use this headset without the facial interface. So the headset is actually like a little bit far away from my face the whole time. If you get the head strap all strapped in

properly and position correctly, I actually have a gap here and it allows me then also to see a little bit of my peripheries, especially because there's a lot of mixed reality games now that are really awesome. So then it gives you a little bit more of that sense, like, oh, at least I can kind of see where things are. I'm not going to bump into stuff. I'm not going to keep the cat or punch my kid, like I've seen on the internet. And so that also helps a lot as well, and it lets them air in. You can get facial interfaces with fans, you can get headstraps with fans, all that now, or mesh-style ones as well. So there are a lot of, like, accessories out there now that alleviate all that kind of thing because there is genuinely an entire community now

that are using VR for fitness. And there are influences out there that are trained personal trainers and nutritionists and all that kind of stuff, using VR as a bit of a way to get more people into healthier habits and lifestyles. And people are genuinely creating communities around this stuff, which I think is amazing. Like I said, I think gamers and people, with desk jobs and things like that need it the most because, you know, our work life balance now is, is a bit out of whack. And especially like I've, I've kind of pivoted from saying that this is a fitness tool, that this is for like weight loss and all that kind of thing. I've actually pivoted slightly that there's a lot of research out there that just that kind

of exercise, regular exercise, doesn't have to be super intense or anything like that. It just has to be regular short sessions. It does so much more for, for your mental health and your physical health in terms of like, yeah, just digestion and detoxing and all that kind of stuff. Like, I'm not a, I'm not a big fitness person. Like, I don't have the, don't have the healthiest lifestyle by any means. But I am reaping the benefits of that kind of regular exercise. It just helped you de-stress. It just helps, like, you get that stuff out of, out of your, out of your body. And there is a lot of research out there that, like, if you have a high caloric diet or, you know, it's hard for you to, like, avoid protein.

processed foods and things like that nowadays, high sugar, high salt, just that little bit of exercise does kind of give those calories somewhat something to do. Because if they're not doing anything, if they're not repairing, if they're not running through your body and doing stuff to, you know, to help you repair and recover from exercise, it turns into a lot of inflammation and it turns into a lot of like basically stress response that your body sort of does just go like, well, we've got to do something with this energy. We've got to put it somewhere. And it will almost kind of look for problems to solve if there are no problems to solve and it can actually just kind of affect your mood and things like that. So I am sort of

just using it more as like a release of sorts, right? Like a lot of people, like if they play organized sport, they describe like they're just like needing to do something, needing to play and having that itch of it because they're just, they're in a bad mood or things like that or they need to get that stress out. And so I'm using it in that kind of regard more than anything else now. It's not about that like, oh, you're going to lose 10 pounds. Or, you know, if you keep playing over and over, things like that, it is just that feeling of like getting your heart rate up, getting your, getting your breathing going. And then you get to sort of relax afterwards as well, right? Unfortunately, like some of my, some of my friends have like stand-up

jobs, like whether it's retail or or things like that or, you know, trade type stuff. So when They come home, they want to down on the couch and just sort of, and chill. So, like, that's hard to get someone like that who already has a very active lifestyle to them be like, whoa, why don't you play games standing up or whatever. But a lot of us now have desk jobs and we're stuck at our, we're stuck at our computers. We're stuck at, you know, we're doing meetings or whatever on Zoom and all that kind of stuff. So I think for the desk job people, for the gamers that, again, like I said, you sat down all day for work, you come home, you do want to mentally

put that, you know, get that change, get that out of your head. You want to just escape and get into something else and maybe not think about the world too much or things like that. Like gaming is this amazing escape where you can be immersed into this world.

VR does that better than anything else. And if you can then turn that into a full body experience, like I said, 10, 15, 20 minutes like a couple of times a week, Um, it is, it is a pretty amazing, uh, outlet. Um, I just recently played through, uh, the new Batman game. So, Arkham, uh, oh God, what is it called? Arkham Shadow. Uh, it's on, it's on the quest, it's on Quest, it's on Quest 3 only, uh, at the moment, which, you know, all, all well and good. Um, fully standalone game,

which like, I highly recommend, uh, playing VR wirelessly because, uh, wires and stuff are very frustrating. Um, but it's so easy to do that now. Um, But I just played through the entire Batman game. And for a point of comparison, I played that for about two and a half hours. My watch told me I burnt the same amount of calories as my ice hockey game a couple of days prior, which is kind of insane because you're constantly like punching bad guys. You've got to punch them in a right sequence, everything like that. And you probably can do a little bit of wee waggle or whatever.

But in VR, for the most part, you have to go through the motions properly. And come on, you're Batman. Like, I was going full energy, you know what I mean? I was, I was like, it was probably maybe 14 degrees down here in my, in my studio at the time. I'm in my, I'm in my shorts, shirt off properly, like Batman, sweating it out. Only punched my fridge once. And legitimately, I was, I was having a great time and I got a, I got a great workout out of it. And again, it just never felt like a workout.

Like, when I was doing those archery games and I was playing Gorn. in my room and smashing stuff and things like that. It's, it, my motivation was coming from my gamer side, not a fitness side. Like my, my gamer brain was like, one more level. Let's go. Come on. I can beat that guy. I can beat this boss fight.

I was really, when I was playing Batman, I was like, I'm putting this on hard mode. I don't want to play this game on normal. I don't care how long this boss fight takes me to finish it. I'm finishing it on hard mode. And it was brutal. One boss fight I got stuck on for about three hours. um and i just didn't stop and i over it over and over and like it was legitimately an awesome workout it's a really cool batman game as well um so it's it's that thing like i think if you've

if you've got a bit of a desk job and you're a gamer um bit of stand up gaming adding it into your routine is awesome and it doesn't cost that much anymore you i've been picking up uh quest two's on marketplace like second hand really really cheap get a bit of alcohol wipes and it's as good as new. Quest 3S was on sale recently. There'll probably be another sale towards the end of the year and you get Horizon Plus subscription with it for three months. If you've

got someone who already has a VR headset, they can send you a code and recommend you and you both get $47 Australian to spend on the store, which means you can already get a couple of the best games straight off the bat. And like I said, you get three months of Horizon and it's about a thousand, it's about

$1,200 worth of games you can then play for three months. um just completely included in the price of the headset so we we got it on sale on amazon i think it was about four hundred three hundred and fifty dollars they're about four fifty normally um but we got about five hundred and twenty two dollars worth of value out of it um which was really awesome because we use the code and everything um and it's legitimately a really good experience the the quest three s is legitimately the best VR experience you're going to get for your money at that price point.

The Quest 3 is pretty much exactly the same. It just has slightly better lenses. And you can play these incredible mixed reality games as well. One of the games I actually spend the most time in in VR is a game called Miracle Pool. I grew up playing 8 Ball and Pool and Snooker a lot as a kid. And in Mixed Reality, it's literally only the pool table is VR. Everything else is the camera. from the headset. You can see your entire house. I just clear the kitchen table off and now it's a

pool table. I can walk up to the fridge, grab a drink. I have YouTube on my TV. I go sit on the couch when it's someone else's turn and I'm sitting there playing pool for hours just in my kitchen. It's awesome. There's all of these crazy mixed reality games. And that also means that you're not, you're not in that like completely immersed VR world. If that makes you feel a little bit like whether it's claustrophobic or like worried you're going to, you don't know where you are, where your obstacles around your house and stuff are. And there's some really cool games now that actually bring the objects in your house into the game.

If you're not super paranoid about like B&E and people trying to come and rob you and break into your house, there is a zombie game called Drop Dead the Cabin. They have a, it's called Home Invasion mode and you can straight up, it will scan your room It'll detect doors, windows, your cupboards, your bed, your couch, whatever. Scan it all automatically. Put that into the VR world. And when you click go, the windows and doors are boarded up and there's zombies outside. And they will break into your house slowly.

You've got guns. You've got to protect yourself. They will break into your house and you've got to shoot them. You've got to kill them. There's kitty, like, you know, less scary versions of that as well. There's a few different games that play that way. There's one where it's a submarine, and then there's leaks in your walls, and you have to patch up the leaks, otherwise your room fills up with water and things like that. There's some crazy experiences, and it's just, it's good fun.

Even if you're just standing up and playing a few of these games, it's really awesome. Have you done much VR yourself? Basically, I did some when I was at uni, when I was doing my VR class. I've done a little bit, like, when I go to cons, but I don't have a headset myself. Looks like you've got plenty of space back there, mate. I could probably... My bed extends out a little bit here, but I probably could make it work.

I could do it in the... You've got two by two that's like perfectly fine for most experiences. The living room is basically empty, so it's like a big space there. I could do that. There you go. All right, I might have to come drop off a headset. You can give some stuff a go, right? Besides that,

um... Like, my first experience with VR was the Oculus Devkit 2. one of the guys that worked at my high school had a dev kit to brought it in to show the tech kids and put on the you know of course put on the the roller coaster demo we played a couple

of the little things but yeah I haven't had like a proper home VR experience for the most part it's been at cons which are obviously not the best environment especially for games where they require you hearing things and you've got a lot

of things going on at the con and you've got a limited time, you can do it. So it's not the, it's not the perfect environment to test something. For sure. So I would, I would recommend, yeah, maybe we get you and a couple of friends together and we go to zero latency or something like that and give that a quick go. There's a couple of arcades in Adelaide that have got, so, like, large spaces. You can try out some of this stuff all in one go.

I did a lot of work for VR zone as well, which is like just outside of the city. and they've got racing simulators with the full motion and everything as well like pretty pretty expensive setups with like the the Pymax Crystal which is like an 8K VR headset it's insane

you need like proper proper graphics card to run that so you've got everything from that all the way down to just stand alone that kind of environment multiplayer gaming they've got treadmills and everything as well so that that would be sort of a good way to get started but again like it's that

thing of like yeah you can get get one in the home try out a few different games there's some super super casual games that are really just fun like same deal just that kind of zone out have a bit of a go there's a really cool game called puzzling places and it's like a um they've taken these volumetric scans of like might be a castle in scotland or a villa in France and they turn it into a jigsaw puzzle in 3d so you're using your hands to pick up pieces put them together and kind of spin around this like 3D model in VR and it's just super chill and you're just kind of in this little world doing this little jigsaw puzzle um there's a really cool tetris style game it's like that's in 3d you got to put these tetris pieces into this model um called cubism that game's really awesome um but yeah there's there's

lots of these just really cool experiences and then there are fully fledged proper proper um campaign games right um like asgard's wrath two um came out with the when the quest three came out and is a giant game i'm like probably not even halfway through it very kind of similar i'd put it somewhere between sky rim and like uh sort of like your god of war style game um because you've got you can throw the throw your axe and pull it back and all that kind of stuff um so it's like combat heavy but it's like open world there's mounts uh that game's really cool like i said batman is now sort of like the launch title with the headsets now incredible game

and like Batman is pretty good as well like they've done a really good mix of kind of like it's sort of teleport sort of slide thumbstick movement so sort of when you're starting getting into VR I'd recommend

more like your beat sabers you're super hot things like that because all your real world movement is one to one within the game right you're not using the thumbstick to move around that's when people tend to get a little bit of motion sickness. So usually you start with like a teleport type of mechanic, which kind of blink and you're there.

And that sort of alleviates that motion sickness because you're just standing there grounded. And then you start getting into your sliding mechanics and you're flying and all that kind of crazy stuff. So Batman does a really good job of that because when you want to attack an enemy, you just punch forward and you sort of like warp there almost like in Doom as well. And so that does a really good job of bringing you into it. And the story is actually genuinely really good. they do a really cool, like, alternate take on,

on, like, kind of early Batman, which is really, really, really cool game. But, yeah, there's so much out there now. And, like, one of the big ones is, like, there's this game, and it's straight up just mini golf. It's, it's, walkabout minigolf is just great. But even, like, even years ago, it was funny that my friend, like, also works in VR

and is doing this amazing rehab platform for people with brain injury in VR and just launching very soon. and is getting some amazing results out of people that have had brain injury or stroke and things like that. But he does all of his corporate meetings in minigolf in VR. Literally, like, you'd be talking to, like, investors and other, like, heads of companies and things like that, like, while playing mini golf in VR, because it's just more engaging than a Zoom call. Right, right. Because all of your hand gestures and your movement and everything like that is all in there.

So, genuinely, quite a lot of people use VR as a platform just to socialize. because it is just, it's more engaging than a Zoom call or a video call. You're there and it has this, this sense of presence. I've got, I've got all these anecdotes and stories of sort of like that thing of like, oh, sorry, like I sort of feel like I've encroached on some, uh, some conversation or some other like thing. Um, you almost get that kind of personal space feeling as well in VR, which is kind of interesting.

Um, but yeah, there's these, these crazy, uh, social spaces out there as well. One that I did recently, I was on the Rough Talk VR podcast VR Showcase earlier in the year, which is a really, really, really cute VR community. They're not hardcore, hardcore, but they're very, like, they're very tight-knit VR community, and they love everything VR. The podcast is awesome, and they're super positive all the time and just talking about all these games, and they just love it. And it's a father and son podcast and they just use VR as a way to hang out all the time because they both have like, they both have jobs.

They're busy a lot. They live in the same town, but quite a lot of the time it's like, oh, I'm not going to come over and, you know, play board games or whatever. So they just do that in VR. And they hang out all the time, which I just think is a really cool dynamic. So I hung out in their community a little bit and they put me on to resonite. Resonite is a social space VR platform Quite a lot of people have heard of VR chat And it's sort of just a place where you go

And you get to put on any avatar that you like You can be a superhero You can be a character from almost any IP You can be an anime character You can pay for someone to make you an avatar And your exact spec or whatever And create your own MC or whatever or whatever.

Resonite is that on steroids. It's free. It's made by this very small team, even like just basically a solo thing. But what's crazy about it is you're basically in unity. Like you're in VR, you're in this space, but everything, you have access to everything. Like you can actually create the game while you're in the game

and you can create worlds and spaces for yourself. and like basically you could create a nightclub and then invite people to your nightclub and you've made everything and you've made secret entrances and all this kind of stuff but you can literally pick up objects open up the toolbox and you can see all of its all of its attributes and parameters and everything and modify it and change it and like hack things in the game it's absolutely insane it's crazy hardcore it's it's PCVR only at the moment but it's like it's that next level of sort of like we would kind of you know coming in for a landing kind of talking about what we did at the very start of the conversation, but it's, it's programming, but you're kind of in a physical space and you're using your hands and you're building and you're placing things in a way more engaging way than you would be on a desktop with a mouse and keyboard. And like for me, especially, right, like I'm working in Unity. I'm sat at my desk here. I've got my camera there. I do a lot of my development on Twitch, showing people and talking about my game as I'm making it. But I'm constantly having to put my headset on and off and

practice and try and do things and it's really kind of annoying and frustrating having like a flat interface to work on my game and then having to go into 3D to experience it where resonide is like it's all native you're in the experience while you're building it it's um that's that's where all of this is heading it's really crazy and exciting stuff like 3D modeling in 3D with your hands like sort of feeling like half sculpting half designing you can walk around your models the scale and everything is all one to one. That kind of stuff is just feeling amazing. And like I just, I see that where we're finally getting a computing platform now through

VR that is now going to get us away from our desks again, which I think is really cool, right? So instead of us all sitting here with a Zoom call and 10 people and you're sitting there doing your meeting, typing up your notes, you could be standing up walking around, you could be, you know, engaging, you could be drawing on a whiteboard in the same room as that. that team and interacting like you would be if you were in the office together. But then you can make games in that same kind of space, right? So instead of you, you know, sitting here, tweaking your mouse, hurting your wrists and all that kind of stuff, you can actually be up moving, painting the, painting the level design of your

world, right? And experiencing that world in 3D as you're building it. So it's just going to be a way better way to work, a way better way to build, make and experience games. It's coming. Like, there's, there's a lot of, there's a lot of kind of drama politics to do with the VR industry at the moment. There's a lot of money's been injected and a lot of promises have been made. Right.

And like, there's sort of a bit of, uh, people are kind of like, come on. Like, it's been 10 years now. Where's, where's my this? Where's my that? Um, it's coming. We're getting there. It is a little bit slower than, than we thought. Um, some of the headsets of, you know, realistically headsets should be more expensive than

they are. But Meadow were really pushing to get the industry going and put billions and billions of dollars into this and lost more money than any company has ever had before, which is just insane. But what that means is still currently we're benefiting from that getting these headsets at a really cheap price. The tech is just getting insane. We can already peek around the corner now and we're going to be having VR headsets to the shape of glasses sooner than we think, but not. Not just around the corner. They have built this technology already, and it does exist and it does work. Unfortunately, just to build that kind of ideal headset that we're all thinking of,

just to build one of one, to build one unit, it was like $10,000 worth of materials. A lot cheaper than I was thought. Yeah, but that was $10,000 per unit. Right, but even so, like that's further along the... I think most people probably expect. I think a lot of you would probably guess like 100,000 or even more than that. Exactly. But that's the thing.

It was $10,000 per unit because it's like this crazy laser etched silica carbide material, right? It's nuts. So it's basically this, but it looks like a thick pair of glasses, which is insane. That's not coming to market. What we're assuming the meta is going to announce this year is the new version of those Rayband Glasses that we've got. cameras in them that have got microphones in them and this time it will probably have a small screen in it and you'll be getting your text notifications and your turn-by-turn navigation and things

like that your AI you know back and forth you can talk to your AI with your voice and you'll see text or you'll hear audio from that assistant you can you can ask questions things like that and potentially we don't know yet but potentially real world subtitles like live translation of people's speaking other languages around you, which is kind of nuts. This has been like, there's apps for this and it's been promised for a while. And if that, if that actually happens, that'll be genuinely impressive. Oh, totally. So what, what Meta and other companies are starting to kind of do is you've got your,

your smart glasses, your cameras and your microphones over here. You've got your high-end VR headsets over here. And they're kind of working their way into the middle, right? So we're slowly going to get into the middle. and so it will start out with like a small screen kind of in one lens of your glasses it'll be a very very small space it'll slowly get wider and wider and wider

as the technology gets better and simultaneously headsets will get better and better and get smaller and have more sensors and things like that so currently it's like the the price is really high for that really high fidelity experience that's coming down as the industry keeps using it and then the glasses are going to get smarter and smarter

as we go but I think like one of the main things is that you can't just, even if we had the technology tomorrow and we launched it, it would feel a little bit like the Apple Watch 1 or the Vision Pro in terms of people will buy it, they'll spend so much money on, they go,

oh wow, it's amazing, uh-uh, and then within like three weeks, they're like, well, now what? What else is on it? What else can it do? What else is there, right? People were dreaming of AR and pumping all this money into AR, which is augmented reality with cameras. You can add digital things into the real world.

But there's no software because we didn't have the technology. So developers weren't able to build the technology. So what we're seeing is that the VR technology and the mixed reality technology is going to build the software. And then once the software is all working, hopefully the hardware will have caught up by then. And then we'll have our kind of dream, AR. And of course, like everybody's thinking already, we'll have real Pokemon Go. that'll be real Pokemon Go no phone

it'll be your glasses the Pokemon will be in the real world you have to run around and get them and I'm assuming you'll have a well it'll already have hand tracking and you'll have a wrist mounted device that you can then throw the poker balls and things like that

that's pretty much where we're heading with AI being where it is right now I'll go out on a limb and I'll say 10 years We're 10 years into VR now Maybe 10 years

Maybe 8 Just keep your eyes on it Because there's going to be some really cool stuff along the way But I say 10 years We have Pokemon Go 2 Or 5 or whatever it is Or the new Pokemon Go It'll be full AR

We'll be walking around the house We'll all have really toned calves And everything because we're going to be hunting for Pokemon in the rural world with our smart glasses it's going to be sick and even though people are seeing everything around them they're still going to walk in front of cars

yeah potentially but they'll have but the head the glasses will actually notify you and tell you and stop stop going to help some people yeah it's true well maybe we'll have exoskeletons as well that's funny

but like yeah man it's it's really cool tech and that's kind of what I think is good is that like we've got all this technology, it's, we're in a bit of a swing on a pendulum at the moment, right? Like, I mean, probably don't want to get into politics at the moment, but we're seeing like some, some stuff happening in the, in social media and with legislation and governments and things like that, because of, you know, the promise of this technology was to bring us all together. Um, but

then the, the incentives for this technology, a game getting back to game, game mechanics as politics, as legislation, as business model. Um, the, um, the, the, the incentives for this technology is, the, you know, the meta of doing these types of social media things, the meta was advertising, the meta was targeted advertising, data collection, data analysis, and then using that to make more and more money. We're now starting to see that back swing now because of all of these mental health effects and all that kind of thing. My optimistic view, which, you know, because it's 11 o'clock and I've got an energy drink, I'm being optimistic today. My optimistic view is we're going to start swinging back the other direction now.

Now that the technology exists, we're going to swing back the other way. We're going to start making the technology work for us now instead of us working for the technology. We're going to start swinging backwards. We're going to start bringing in these social things, start bringing us closer together, start finding better ways of us to like manage our health and all those types of things. It's going to start making us a lot happier. It's going to get us away from our desks a bit more. We're going to be communicating in a more natural way more and more rather than interacting with text rather than emailing back and forth and miscommunication and getting stressed out

and, you know, office politics and all that kind of stuff, I feel like if instead of me sitting there and writing this email and sending it to Brenda and Brenda being like, all this kind of stuff, sorry Brenda. And instead we're going to be like, oh, we'll pop into a world, we'll be there, we'll be in front of each other, we'll be communicating more naturally, we'll pop in. We'll solve the problem right in front of us because we'll be looking at it properly. We'll be on the same page the entire time. We're interacting.

It's more sociable. It's more natural. The technology is going to start coming back in towards like, no, I'm a flesh and blood human body, which is basically a shaved monkey. And monkeys interact with physical objects. They interact with their bodies. We have body language. We communicate much better when we're in the same room face to face. All of that stuff is coming.

the crazy Kodak avatars, all that kind of stuff where they 3D scan you and then you're in there and your facial expressions and everything are all translated across the ether. We'll be living in a location agnostic world where you can interact with anyone, work with anyone. I met a music producer, DJ in VR chat who exclusively hires musicians through VR chat to play in his VR nightclubs

and that was a legitimate business and he was making money that way and like I think it does sound a little bit dystopian, a little bit cyberpunk which is why Petal Rebel VR is a cyberpunk based world but we will be sort of getting

to that snow crash kind of economy where we will be probably exchanging digital currency for digital services and that will be working working with people across the Metaverse, not Metaverse TM, but inside a Metaverse on the internet. Be working with people in a more sociable way. And hopefully our bodies, our backs, our necks will all thank us for it.

Because our health will be in a better spot. And we'll be just, yeah, having a fun experience. I do think the idea... What do you think? You went on like... I wasn't sure when you were going to stop talking games. I just wanted to see where you're going to go with that one. Regarding that the Metaverse point, you mentioned at the end,

I think the problem that happened there is it was being developed by people who were trying to replace the real world, not trying to make a game. Because we've had Metaverses for the past 30 years. They're called MMOs, right? And what they were trying to do is basically just take real life and put it into VR

and that's not appealing to most people because for most people they're okay with Zoom calls they're not great but like it's good enough and then gamers have games so you're not going to appeal to the gamers either so it's like it wasn't appealing really to anyone but I do

agree that that idea of digital worlds of places where people can meet online that actually create these new experiences there is definitely a lot of value there and I think a lot of people are trying to be more social than they have been, especially, like, COVID did massive damage to people being social. And I don't know if you've noticed this, but I've spotted a bunch of board

game stores opening up. I never expected to see more board game stores. I thought that was like, kind of dying. And then suddenly it's like, oh, there's just five new stores out of nowhere. I guess people are trying to, maybe they're trying, they're they're realising. that maybe the way they were doing things before is not the best way to do things, that they were losing out on something, not meeting people, whether that be in person or through some more, I guess, connected digital space, just something better than text communication. And I hope we see improvements in this space,

because there has been this sort of increase in mental health issues since 2007, so since the launch of the iPhone, there's just like, if you look at the graphs of people with depression, it's just like, woo! And I hope that we see improvements in this space. And it seems like there are people trying to build improvements, and it seems like some people are catching onto that.

The fact that headsets... Yeah, for sure. Oh, sorry, I was going to say, the fact that headsets aren't crazy. expensive does mean that it is easier for people to get involved, but at the same time, you know, a lot of other things are going up in price. So even though, you know, it might be a $400 headset as opposed to a thousand dollar headset, that's still a pretty big barrier to entry and also the headsets right now are still quite heavy. So once,

I think once the weight problem can be solved and they don't look as goofy as they do, I think that's going to you don't like having three eyes on the front of your face for sure so the weight the weight is definitely coming down a lot and like I said

with these quality headstraps the problem is they still ship with these things and these are horrible these are not good this is bad you throw that out day one right so and yeah so the weight problem's coming down

you get a really decent head strap and you don't you don't feel them for me the main one was that the would sit on my on my cheekbones here and just sit there and I and I always hated that feeling and then some people like whether it's glasses whether it's all those types of things or sits on your forehead there's there's always like a there's always some there's always some kind of pain point and then of course Apple comes along they think they've redesigned it redone everything we don't need a top strap and then immediately they're like oh no we've got to pivot that

head strap sucks it looks cool in marketing doesn't work um so So, yeah, all those types of things for sure are being fixed and have, I would say, for the most part, being solved. Like I said, having the lens is good enough that the headset's not even sitting on your face anymore is really good because now I'm not like, put these goggles on your face and block out the whole world. Now I'm like, put this in front of your face and look into it. And once someone looks into it, they're like, oh, okay. And then the head strap comes on. I've done this thousands of times now, right? So it's a little bit easier to ease someone into it where it's like putting a screen in front of you.

face instead of like strapping goggles in, right? So we're definitely getting there in that space. I like what you said about the board game stores. Unfortunately, we're in Adelaide and business is tough. We don't have the same kind of scale. But I just came back from Brisbane two days ago. I went to Netherworld, which is an arcade bar. Insane.

Just wall, every single wall surface pretty much was covered in arcade machines. We're talking the original foreplay Ninja Turtle arcade game talking like you've got your time crisis house of the dead like all these awesome arcade experiences in a bar that sells awesome

like craft beer and like what 14 something pinball tables I've been getting way into pinball lately because it's like it's that perfect merge of like it's a video game it's arcade it's addictive as hell

but it's relatively cheap if you think about it if we're spending $120 on a AAA game that I'll never have time to play anymore chucking 10 bucks into a pinball machine that's a physical object that someone has to maintain and repair I'm totally fine with that and so like this bar is just incredible right and I wish we had something like that in Adelaide

but like you were kind of pointing out like since COVID people are now spending more money on experiences more money on shared spaces and experiences than they are, whether it's products or digital goods. I think there's been a back swing of like, no, I want something tangible.

I want something physical. And so there's lots of examples of that. I've been calling this space video games in real life. We're talking escape rooms, smash rooms, axe throwing, whether it's ice skating or whether it's all these types of things, right, where it's like, it feels like a video game. It's in real life. It's physical.

It's tangible. Meet up with a couple of friends. And I also think that like sort of your magic the gathering, your Pokemon, your Yu-Gio, your D&D, your board games, your RPG, your laping, your gel blast. All that kind of stuff. I kind of class that as video games in real life now. Looking at more like broader trends, we're seeing a drop in alcohol consumption globally. Young people aren't drinking as much alcohol. They are going out and having these more experiences.

The best part about it is you don't have to stop drinking beer because some of the alcohol-free beer now is incredible. Gin and wine still need a little bit of time in the can to taste as good as the non-alcohol variants, but they're really getting there. And so we're actually seeing this kind of healthier social life emerging, and it's booming. It's absolutely booming. These escape rooms are booming.

there's all these other ones we just had what what hijinks hotel holy moly open up in the last like you know a few years there's another one as ballers is another one where you play shuffleboard bowling all that kind of stuff some other bars in town doing all that stuff so it's really cool and I think that is a good space like we're not we're not losing that shared social space where you can meet people and and have these connections and meet up with with friends and stuff in in real life because sometimes it's just hard to find time to do that in the busy world that we have. So I think we're seeing an uptick in that, but we're seeing digital equivalence of all of these things as well. And that's sort of where I put VR, right? Like I would say VR is sort of like

going to holy moly with your friends, but there's no commute. There's no cost. You can just, hey, want to meet up. Yeah, okay, let's do it. Click a button, put your headset on. You're there, right that's sort of the solution that meta is building and these other platforms have it as well PCVR all that stuff that that's sort of there and that sort of exists now um the problem with the like sort of more like macro economy part of VR right now is that we're sort of doing this a little bit of a shift um because they're such a big player they can they can twist the industry in any direction they want at the moment sure um but samsung and a google are about to jump in and upset that which I think is actually a good thing.

But what Meta are sort of trying to do now in a way, they sort of want to be, they sort of want to be the theme park. Right. Like they sort of want to be the Disneyland. And you come to Disneyland and you meet up with your friends and you socialize there. So it used to be that you would see all your friends post photos or whatever on Facebook. That's done.

And then it was like, okay, now let's see your friends post their best day on Instagram while you're sitting there on a couch eating, you know, snacks and feeling fat and lazy because you're low energy from work or whatever. And I feel like that was that dissonance of like the fake social media world that is real but not real. It was like very, what do you call it? Polished, I guess. Yeah, and that's the thing.

Very, very, yeah, very polished, very fake, very filtered experience. where that there's where that sort of dissonance was coming in. Meta are sort of creating this theme park kind of world idea, but it's more of a platform than a game. But then you can build in there. It's all user-generated content, right? It's like your Roblox and your Minecrafts and your Fortnite. They sort of want to be a Fortnite Roblox platform

where you go, you experience the world, and you can go out and you can go play bowling, you can go play mini-golf, you can go fly hang gliders with your friends, You can go do all these different things. You can go play battle real or laser tag or disc golf and all that kind of stuff with your friends. And it's a click of a button away. And it's already using your existing social stuff, right? So you log in, you don't have to log in with your Facebook account anymore, but you have your meta friends and you click on it.

And it will send you to that world there, right? One of the most popular experiences right now is the set of the office built in a 3D world. And then you can reenact parts of the episodes and things like that. So it's kind of this cute thing. Unfortunately, it just, like, looked really bad initially, which is just funny. And so gamers, like, came out of and raged and all that kind of stuff. And, like, they sold us this idea before it was ready. All that kind of stuff, like, you know, business, business, shareholder, shareholder kind of thing.

But what's crazy is that that won't be the only Metaverse. Like I said, Resonite is already that, but it's completely open source. And there's sort of these two approaches, right? like gamers are already very aware of this before anyone else will be but it's about like do you go the cosmetic micro transaction route or do you want to live in this ready player one well i guess ready player one is still sort of the meta platform right so i'm not sure if you're familiar with snow crash but it's a book from the 90s um and it sort of described this this metaverse well it actually coined the term metaverse and it's um it's a really cool book but it's pretty bang on like we're basically hitting that moment now and I would class VR Chat Resonite as the Metaverse in Snow Crash and Meta are very much

building the Ready Player 1 Oasis style thing right so it's like all the IPs are there it's your fortnight it's going to concerts and seeing Snoop Dog or whatever and all that kind of stuff inside of the Metaverse so that's meta's doing that and they're sort of slowly pivoting away

from a game developer building a game software in some software stack like Unreal or Unity and then selling it on a marketplace to users, right? I think their view is that that fractures the people that have the game, the people that don't have the game. Right. And then that's harder to then build massive communities and it's harder to experience that. We would, they're sort of in a position now where they're saying like, we'd rather you build it in our world, in our platform. And then everybody can play it. It's all uniform. It's

um, you don't have to download the software. You don't have to buy the software separately. You're not locking people out of certain things. Do you remember when Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer got really crap because it was, if you had all the DLC or you didn't have all the DLC? Right. And it slowly, and because there

wasn't dedicated servers, it slowly fractured the multiplayer until it basically died and it just sucked. And then you had this really expensive game that you couldn't play anymore because the matchmaking suck. I guess that, I don't know if that's there, opinion, but that's sort of where I'm seeing this shift, which is interesting because then I'm sort of seeing, I think I'm picking up what they're putting down. And I think I'm seeing that they're

slowly shifting now into a more YouTube slash Amazon Unlimited deal. Right? So it's sort of like, on YouTube, it's, it's ad-supported viewership, right? So now it's, you don't need to be a TV producer. So you don't need to be, you don't need to know people. You don't need to be in the industry. You don't have to sell your show to one of these channels and then get funding and then you make money on the back end and they sell ads against it, right? YouTube is this, you know, ubiquitous democratized platform to do that. And now I upload a video, it goes to the world.

Awesome. And it's ad supported. People can pay a premium to get rid of ads. Awesome. I see that is probably where we're headed. Amazon Unlimited is a very interesting thing as well Or is it Kindle Unlimited I think it's Kindle Unlimited or whatever

But it's the same thing for books Yeah yeah, Kindle Unlimited Then it's like you upload a book And then the author gets paid per page Right? Which is kind of interesting I've got a couple of friends that have made Some very nerdy, very niche books And chucked them up on Amazon Unlimited

Kindlead and made a little bit of money Which is awesome I think that's actually a really cool the kind of YouTubeification of authors and, you know, books and novels. I think that's really cool as well. So we're sort of in this, in this weird shifting world, because I honestly think YouTube is probably one of the best things that's happened to people in a long time, giving our creators access to eyeballs and to a means of creating content and getting paid to do it.

But I think we're in a sort of fracturing of fame and fortune and success in a way where it's like you don't have to be a world famous actor now to be world famous where it was sort of like the 1% of the 1% of actors globally would be famous and everyone else would be putting in the work, putting in the same amount of work, working really hard and basically not getting anything or not getting paid at all ever and having to do it part time. I think now we're kind of shifting to sort of this this like unification of it where everyone can be sort of famous, sort of successful part time, doing something they love part time and maybe needing another job or a side hustle of some sort of as well, right? We're sort of in that space. But now it's getting more and more achievable. There's more and more people viewing this content online now directly that the audience is now sort of big enough where you can but you can make a decent living doing this stuff full time if you can build up the audience. And the good thing is these types of. of platforms, they work on genuineness. Like, you need to be genuine online, otherwise people won't. And in a weird way, AI is going to actually, I think, weaponize that even further, that people are going to shift away from robotic AI content, and people are going to seek out even more genuine content, and it'll need to be verifiably genuine, because people interact with people. It's going to be harder. I think there's going to be some growing pains there as well. But let's say theoretically, if we had this platform now where there's, say there's two platforms,

we've got this unlimited metaverse where literally I drop in and we're in the sort of like the main square area of Disneyland, right? And then you're like, oh, cool. Who wants to, who wants to jump into Titanfall land and play Titanfall, right? And you literally walk in the gates and then play Titanfall with all your friends, right? You haven't purchased Titanfall, your friends didn't have to purchase Titan Full or have ever played it before. You're out there playing Titan Full. Then you're like, oh, that was awesome. Let's go to Horizon Zero Dawnland and run from dinosaurs. And we go and we do that, right?

But, like, it might be a subscription of some sort or whatever that you play and you build. Or maybe, like, while the game is loading, there's an ad or some sort of thing, right? Or they're pushing products. I don't know. Something like that. That's sort of like your Disneyland kind of experience. And then I would say, and there will be, and there is, there'll be enough people, enough proper hardcore VR people that are like, screw that. I don't want to give those corporations my money.

I'm just going to build my experience in resonant or the equivalent or whatever resonant will be. And that will be your metaverse. So you've got your oasis and you've got your metaverse. And that will be like, all right, everything is free and open source and fully open and active, right? In Resonite, you can literally build something, hand it to someone, they can put it in their inventory, and it's theirs. They have it. It's free. It's what I would call is like no scarcity, a world with zero scarcity, right? So everything is 100% digital. There can be a million of any object. There's no scarcity. There's no limited edition. There's no loopbox, mythic rare, any of that kind of stuff. No micro transactions, completely free and open. world. And literally you can take someone else's creation, put it in your own world,

whatever. Like it might be credited or whatever, but it's there. And there will be digital currencies and you can exchange for services and things like that. But there will be a, there will be an open free version of this that will have everything in there. Might not be as cool. Might not have your, you know, official licensing IPs or anything like that. But there'll be a free and open social space. You can hang out and there'll be unlimited experiences in there and there'll be creators that have created these experiences and they'll be maybe compensated in some way then there'll be that more Disneyland style locked down platform that'll have all your big titles and stuff but I think yeah they're going to try to

move away from that kind of this piece of software is sold on a on a marketplace and you're buying that thing it'll become more of a platform type of thing the economics just aren't there yet and a game developer would still much rather build their software, sell it to you, one-time purchase, or whatever, or free-to-play with ad support with micro-transactions, DLC, whatever, because of how much money it takes to build a game, right? So the platforms are sort of trying to meet us in the middle a little bit and make a development environment that is easy, that is fast, that enables you to build stuff faster and cheaper and whatever.

Unfortunately, there's a lot of AI involved at the moment, is what they're sort of building towards. But the idea is that you can build stuff in their platform, build a world. And if people hang out there, then you'll probably get compensated for it. So it's that sort of that engagement thing as well, right? YouTube pays you because people are coming to their platform

to watch their videos, to watch their ads. And if your videos keep people on the platform, then you get compensated for that. It'll be the same kind of model, but in VR. If you build the most fun, fun house in VR, then you will get compensated because all the kids will want to come and play in your fun house, right? That's sort of where it's

heading at the moment, but we're going to feel the shift. We're already feeling the shift of investment moving away from individual games and into the platform a little bit. Right, can we see the success of platforms like Roblox, for example? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's basically what's happening

or Sony Dreams or whatever the other, like user-generated content platforms are. So it'll be a little bit of both, right? You'll have your game developers that want to build it in their way with their software because, you know, it's optimized for their thing or their game will only work in this engine and it won't work on Horizon Worlds. But then they'll probably build some other version of it

that worked in Horizon Worlds as well, and you can play that for free. If you like that, then you can come by the full experience or whatever. So there's that. And then, like I said, there's that. There is that video games in real life, tangible, physical worlds thing that I think I really like. And that's sort of, I'm in a bit of both of this, right?

I love the digital side of things. I love the ease of being able to hang out with my friends at home with no commute, no nothing. I've got friends all over the world. Love to just be able to hang out with them. Feel like we hang out in person instantly in the comfort of my own home. But I also love, yeah, going out to the arcade and playing games and doing stuff physically. Zero latency was freaking amazing and awesome because, like, you can play with your friends in real life. and it's that physical multiplayer gaming experience

that we did a game and it was basically nerds versus musicians in like an online four player death match thing super fun nerds won even though it was a physical experience so that was super cool and then personally like my dream sort of is to build the ultimate gamer gym

right so like I said I sort of started with the bow and arrow thing if that was a real bow imagine how buff we would be now if we were doing archery and then imagine there's 10 of you and you're like protecting helms deep

with your archery and all that kind of stuff like we would get ripped dude like for sure and then like so I've already got a bunch of experiences that I want to build in VR I just don't have the space and resources or anything to do that yet

but you would love to make a zero latency style thing focused around fitness stuff. Yeah, exactly. And so I'm starting with the exercise bike because you can do that at home. It's easy enough. You buy the bike. You're on the bike. You're exercising. Infinite. Awesome. Cool. Like, almost the exact same way I could do a rowing machine if you prefer rowing machines, right? Treadmill. Still a little bit dangerous. I might have to talk to a lawyer, but we could do it. We could do a treadmill for sure. Easy done. Like real treadmill. Running in VR. Do all of that kind of stuff. Easy done. Then it's the more customer.

stuff. Then it's like, all right. Well, I really love, um, sword fighting. I've always been into like, I love like nights. I love Star Wars. Love all that kind of stuff. Um, there's a, there's a game I play a lot of, which is, uh, hell die. Not hell divers. Um, uh, oh, what is it called? Hells, Hells, Hellsweet, Hellscape, Hell something. Okay. Hold on. Hell, hell. Oh, it's my stuff. Hellsweefer? No, not, is it? Hellsweefer. I don't know. And it's just first thing in a Hell split. Damn it.

Hell split. Hell split arena. It's very similar to your blade and sorcery and your other type of like very physics-based melee combat games like bone works and all of that kind of stuff. But this one genuinely has really good sword fighting mechanics, it's Unreal Engine-based. But in this one it was really cool because you would go up against big armored guys and you'd have to wear their armor down with swords and everything and it has this really fun thing. It's still, again, it's just that little glimpse of where we'll be eventually, but it's super fun.

And back in the day when I would have to set up my bloody Vive sensors physically in my house and try to build the biggest play spaces I could, unfortunately, I could only get five and a half metres apart on the original Vive. And on the pro, you could get wider than that. But again, the only upgrade I could get to my VR setup at that point was real estate. Right. So that's the problem. I needed a physically bigger space to play the game the way I wanted to play it. And I'm playing the sword fighting game with all real world footwork, right?

So I'm like using my martial arts skills that I have in real life and putting it into the game and having a freaking awesome time. Well, what if I was doing that in full plate armor? Mm-hmm. Right? Like your Goku, like, weight-based, like, workout type thing. Like, if I was carrying 25 kilos while playing that game, like, how fit am I going to get? And how, but not even like the fitness part of it. It's like the game part of it.

I'm going to feel like a heavy paladin or whatever, right? And I'm going to move like one because I'm genuinely carrying the weight, right? So imagine then you're playing whether it's like a squad-based, you know, siege game, where you've got your scouts that are wearing chain mail and they're like, they're quite light and nimble, or you're like, you're the big brute, like, you know, that you're the heavy and you're wearing plate armour and you're swinging a sword around that is the weight of a real sword or an axe or whatever, like, come on, that's going to feel so immersive, you're going to feel awesome, you can get real sweaty, but it's going to feel

great. So that's what I'm sort of talking about about gamer gym. You're not lifting weights, you're swinging a sword around and doing stuff, right? And the game is teaching you how to do it properly in the right form without injuring yourself and that kind of stuff. Like, that's the next level um i've got a concept where um imagine you're sort of on a you're strapped into this seesaw type thing and you put uh like 90 or 80 percent of your body weight on one side of the of this big arm and you strap yourself in and now you have to jump over buildings like superman right but as you jump it's going to you're going to slowly come back down to the ground and then you're going to need like a lot of momentum to get back up so you're going to bend down really low

you're going to push with your legs you're going to jump and it's going to take you a few seconds to hit the ground again. In VR though, you're jumping like 50 stories, right? And it's just going to feel this amazing rush of movement and everything. But in real life, you're basically doing squats. Right, right. So it's this kind of thing where it's like you use the game mechanic to make the to give the feeling and the motivation. And then the mechanics of the game or whatever is then giving your body the movement and everything that it needs. So if you can imagine a space that has all these types of experiences and you meet up with your friends and you compete in teams, you do competitions or like so what i've got with pedal rebel already is the stat system in place where

you're we're collectively trying to reach a goal right similar to hell divers um which i accidentally mentioned earlier is like a um a hell divers type experience where it's like cool like you need to do we need to like you know ride a certain distance in in pedal rebel and then we'll beat this goal and then i'll add more content and things like that so creating those gamer motivations and then you have to pay for it with physical micro transactions, sweat points or whatever we're going to call it, right? Like that's sort of that aspect of where I want to get to. But I have to do the digital only at home version first with the exercise bike and then

we'll build from there. So if we can get the next experience going and the next experience going, I'll put them all together into a really cool, awesome gym platform. And then, yeah, hopefully I have my awesome gamer battle arc. arcade gym business one day that is a really really cool goal

and I can kind of see how all of this fits together like you have a very clear passion for the future of VR you clearly you clearly hope that this is going to go well and like

look I I'm not anywhere near as attached to VR as you are but it's hard not to be excited when I see someone with this much passion about the space for sure and that's what it's like right there

are so many people out there already on YouTube and things like that one of the first guys I sent my game to on YouTube is FitProvia and like I said he's a he's an actual personal trainer

he works in the fitness industry already but sees that obviously yeah the gamers aren't as into fitness as other people and like in a way like, you know, we say gamers, I mean, almost everybody's a gamer, to some extent now. There's a lot of casual gamers out there and stuff now as well.

And vice versa, right? Like, I feel like I want to gear this to gamers first and help them get a little bit off the couch, get a little bit more activity into their day. But I've been pulling people in from the other side of the other side of things a bit more as well, right? Where it's like, okay, like, I'm already into fitness, I'm already into cycling, I'm already into this, but actually this would make me do it more. This would make me more excited about it. I mean, we had a, we had a woman that played the game at Avcon just recently.

She does horseback archery, and she loved the game. And she's like, oh my God, this is so cool, right? Or we met these girls from a female motorcycle club here in Adelaide. I cannot remember the name of their club right now. But super awesome stuff. And this is these girls that are like, look, We, you know, we like motorbikes. We want to ride together.

And we also want to kind of remove a bit of the stigma about a motorcycle club or whatever, right? It's not all gangs and drugs and whatever, right? So all these different pastimes. And I think people just, yeah, they want community. They want a cool activity that they can do together and do something fun. And so those are those ways that we can do that digitally. We can create these groups and these kind of shared moments, experiences and activities.

But then also, yeah, we can do it in a completely digital way as well, but we can add in that physicalness to it that helps us out a little bit and also adds to the fun of it. And yeah, like legitimately, it's a bit of a rush doing some of this kind of stuff. So it's super cool. For sure, like, there has to be passion in it. And that's what's really cool, I think, about the VR space as well. Like you said, like hopefully this is going to happen.

it's going to happen because if they don't do it we will and that's that's sort of where we're at like we say that the that meta is really in the industry and people keep you know writing articles VR is dead and all this kind of stuff the good thing is that they can't take it away from us now right so Parma Lucky started all of this and brought VR back

from the dead from the 1980s but we have the technology now all of the specs, all of the, all of the tech and everything, it's all online. We all, we know how to build it. If Meadow was to cut, like to turn the tap off tomorrow, there'd be 100 startups, you know, cut in its place the next day. And we already have all of these crazy different headsets and stuff, these other companies that are all building this thing, regardless of whether the tech gods want us to do it or not, right?

Um, we have these, we have these cool like open source, uh, projects. We've got these like really niche VR headsets. We already have little goggle headsets that are tiny, tiny, tiny that fit to your head. Um, they're still wired and they still use external tracking and things and things like that. But you can wear it all day and it's super comfortable, really fashionable. And, um, it's, it's hardcore and that's, that's what people like, right? Like, people like tinkering with things. People like building stuff. Um, it's going to happen regardless. Um, because, yeah, there is so much. Um, um, much passion here. And, you know, we grew up wanting this future. This is this thing that I've been saying a lot lately is that we grew up, you know, the year 2000 rolled around and we're like, oh my God, it's going to be flying cars and robots everywhere. We're going to have a robot butler and we're going to have jet packs and flying cars. And then we got a little bit older and we went, oh, that's weird. They're not here yet. And then we got a little bit older. And we went to university and then we went like, why are the jet packs and flying cars not here yet? And then we went, oh, no, wait a minute.

That's the one thing they never told us is that, yes, we will have flying cars, jet packs and robot but we're the ones that have to build it. And that's where we are now, right? So like, robot butlers are like, they're coming. They're coming now because we built them. People are, you know, there was an underground community of people fighting tiny robotic transformers in Japan. And then that technology now is working up to be.

like, well, the robots can work in the factory so we can play more video games, right? So again, that's kind of the optimistic view on the future is that, you know, we're going to build the future that we want to see. And if they don't do it, we will. It'll just take longer. And that was sort of my thing as well with VR games was that, yeah, the money wasn't there initially. There wasn't a lot of investment.

There weren't these big companies coming in and spending lots of money coming in and building the types of games that we want to play in VR. But the indie teams were doing it. It was just taking a little bit longer. It doesn't quite look as good or whatever, but it's getting there slowly. The tools are getting more powerful. It's getting faster and faster to do this stuff. It takes less and less money.

But also the audience is bigger. And so you don't need to make a million dollars off of your game. You can make a little bit and you can have just enough people to keep the business running and you can build the next thing and the next thing. So that's sort of where we're at. It's still very much an indie and passion-fuelled industry. And then eventually, you know, the bigger games will look over and go, oh, what's that over there? Like I said, we're getting Deadpool next year, which is really crazy.

There actually was a VR showcase today. At 1 a.m. this morning, there was a VR showcase that showed off sort of the best of the best, what's coming in the industry right now. And we're talking like there's a battlefield equivalent called Forefront coming out. huge, huge battles, huge vehicles, everything, big multiplayer battle sim military game. Super cool stuff, like, there's still nothing better than reloading a rifle manually in VR. It's freaking awesome.

We have our Counterstrike equivalent. We have our armor equivalent in VR. We're getting our battlefield equivalent in VR, which is awesome. and then we're getting a game called Reach that looks freaking awesome, really, really cool stuff. I don't know where you would put it if it was like a real world equivalent. Sort of like a Horizon kind of Titanfall sort of game

but very physical, lots of parkour. So I'd say, yeah, Titanfall, Apex kind of thing but it's a story-based exploration game. We're getting some cool open world stuff, some cool little kitschy indie stuff. Yeah, so So there was a couple of showcases this year, one of which that I was in, which is an upload VR showcase, which was super awesome for me. I had no idea that it was rebroadcast on IGN and game trailers, which was just incredible.

I didn't know that at the time. And so it got lots of views and everything like that. But upload VR is sort of like your Android Central or your sort of mainstream press, you know, article kind of website in VR. So they get to review all the hardware, they get to do all the really, really in-depth into the tech stuff. So that showcase didn't actually have the best sort of response from commenters and stuff on YouTube. Really positive on some of the channels and less positive on some of the other channels, depending on how into VR you are, right? But that was the one thing I didn't realize being involved in that one is that I know all the people that know what upload VR is. I know that they know where the industry's at

and they know what's coming, they know what's happening, they know where we're at. But IGN viewers don't. And so they were like, oh, VR is dead. Where's this? Where's the AAA games?

These games look like kids games or whatever. It's a little bit unfortunate because, yeah, unfortunately if you are an indie developer and you're making a game for VR right now, it's a pretty small audience in comparison to your consoles. Like, the metric out there a lot was that there was like two and a half million Quest 2s sold in X amount of time or whatever.

So unfortunately, there's more Quest 2s out there. There is anything else because it was the cheapest headset to exist because they were really pushing for mass market, right? It's running on a very old mobile chip now, so it's hard to get your game running on the Quest 2. you can't make games for the Quest 1 anymore in terms of you can't actually launch it on there anymore they've locked that off so the Quest 2 is sort of your

you know your 10 year old PC and when you make a game on Steam you want your minimum system specs to be as low as possible because you want as many gamers to be able to play it as possible if they're not a cheap toasted potato PC

that's what I hope would be the goal well I see the direction AAA games are going But that's the thing, right? And then it's, you know, we were all kids at one point when it was like, oh, Oblivion came out. And then actually my friend bought Oblivion day one. And it wouldn't run on his computer.

And he spent all his pocket money, whatever, on Oblivion. And I kind of went, can I borrow this? Because it will run on my computer, which is rough, right? And so that's why a lot of indie devs and stuff are, they're making the game run on Quest 2 and then they usually make a PCVR version which is like a little bit better things like that but unfortunately you have to try and make

your game for the widest audience possible right which then makes you choose like more stylized graphics and things like that it's not going to look like your triple A title and then that especially on the upload VR showcase that sort of hit the commenters and the viewers of that they all sort of went oh VR still looks like PlayStation 1 graphics.

That's gross or whatever, right? But that was because it was a very specific slice of the VR industry. The VR showcase is the one that just dropped last night or this morning. They do two showcases a year. That's where the bigger titles are. That's where the bigger studios are. And I think the one to look out for if you're not into VR is a studio called Flat to VR studios. Their business model is very exciting because they,

started out in the mod industry and they were doing VR mods for flat screen games like Half-Life like Doom, like Tomb Raider and all these other types of games, right? That like it wasn't actually that hard for some of these older games to just like quickly

knock out a VR layer for it and post it on SideQuest which is sort of our off platform place where you can just send experiments and mods and all that kind of stuff. So flat to VR studios are now a much more formalized business

and they're kicking out games. They're kind of like a night dive studios now. So they're doing remakes, they're doing repost, they're doing VR mods and equivalents for these games. So they're doing Postal 2 soon, flat out. They're doing the VR mod of and a couple of other games.

I only quickly checked the VR showcase this morning. I can't remember everything because I was half asleep. But they're pumping out some really cool original games and mods for games that we are already love coming to VR, right? Then we're getting our big drops, right? Then we're getting like your next level like horror shooter game coming out.

Your sci-fi horror or shooter or that kind of stuff or a puzzle game or these kinds of nice little indie things. Another one, so Moss is a really cute game where you play as like a mouse, but you're sort of this like deity. It's kind of like a Zelda experience, but it's like tiny, tiny mouse. scale is really cute well they're they're dropping like a strategy version in their universe now so there's this cool games coming um it's not as big drop as like getting a you know a from soft game or a hideo kajima game or your horizons your gears of wars or whatever not quite there yet

but we're starting to we're starting to get some of those experiences now and we're starting to get some of those developers now where they're knocking out sequels of some of their best games. They're knocking out really cool twists on the genres or pulling out these new games that are, like I said, we're getting a battlefield. We've got our Hitman, got Deadpool coming out next year. There's some really, really cool stuff coming. So the VR showcase is sort of the one you want to check out if you want to know where the big dogs are playing. And what's cool is, like I said, flat to VR are pumping out original games, but also mods of or VR ports of games, that we already know and love,

which is going to bring people into VR, which is really exciting. Actually, one of the really cool things was when Pavlov was first coming out and people were playing Pavlov, it was super open. It's like a Counterstrike style game. Right, right, right.

But if we were all member Counterstrikes, some of the best maps were all user-made, right? What was cool about Pavlov is people were porting levels from old video games into Pavlov. So you could run around inside Golden Eye or inside Hayes. low levels, but you're in the game now. You're looking around and everything's to scale and everything feels right, but it's still maybe pixely or like low poly or whatever. And I was

calling it like virtual tourism, right? Like you sort of get to live and walk around in these worlds that you love so much that you've only ever been able to see through a, through a magic window before and now you're in it. So I think flat to VR Studios is probably a really good example of like, we're going to sort of get to revisit a lot of old games that we love in a VR world and a much more immersive thing. And then we're going to slow, we're going to start to get these, these really cool titles are coming out as well. So, yeah, depends on where you go. You're going to hear these different things about where the VR industry is at. And so there's been a few things where it's like people that don't know, they kind of just check in every

now and then and go, oh, screw this. Why is this like this or whatever? A lot of people didn't like the fact that the next Batman game was VR only. A lot of people didn't like the fact that half of Alex was VR only. So we're still in that in-between space. My other big prediction, that will age this podcast, extremely quickly, my next prediction is that, and this is using a lot of information I found on the internet, we're pretty sure, as it, I'm I'm not the only guy saying this. We're pretty sure Valve is going to drop a game pretty soon. Uh-huh.

We're fairly sure they've got a headset that is going to be kick-ass. It's coming out. Yeah, the headset's been a rumor for a long time. A long, long time, yes. But, of course, a lot of its speculation, a lot of its conspiracy theory. Well, there are models that have been data mine from the Steam client. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you're aware of it for sure.

Yeah, yeah. So we're getting there. Um, if I, if I was to quickly condense like 50 hours worth of YouTube and other like kinds of really in, in depth, uh, guys that are doing all this data mining and stuff, we sort of think the plan is Valve are basically getting a steam deck, um, that sits on your face, uh, they're, they're building it, right? So they're using the AMD chip and they're going to use a Qualcomm chip to do the VR stuff. Pretty much it'll be a steam deck while a standalone VR headset with internal tracking that you can, put on your face and at any point you can have a massive screen playing all your flat screen uh steam games right you can already do this on the quest three through virtual desktop and you can already do it through game pass which is crazy actually you can use Xbox game pass use your xbox controller or the um all the handheld controllers you probably want your Xbox controller sure and you can just click on game pass and load up any game instantly and play it on a giant

screen in your v i headset which is freaking cool you can lie on your bed looking straight up doing it. You can get a deck chair, sit on your back porch and play Battlefield and crazy because it is cloud gaming. You don't have to download it. You don't have to install it. Don't have to put it on your headset. You can just click Battlefield

go over there. Actually, I want to play this now. Click that, right? So that works. That exists. We think we think Valve are going to do that in VR for your entire Steam library. Right? It's a Steam deck. You put it on your face. You've got a 20 foot screen or whatever

want to play your games on. We believe they're going to release controllers that look like this that have four face buttons on it. Meaning you don't need an extra controller. It is just an Xbox controller split in half and you have now button parity with every game in your Steam library. You play it with the existing controllers or whatever controller you like. There's rumors that they've got a fancy like 3D technology layer. I could go into it, but maybe not. But we're kind of thinking that it's not going to look like a theatre TV screen anymore. It'll be a giant screen, but it might have more depth to it. It might look a bit more 3D.

It might be potentially, it might work with every game out of the box. It might potentially turn all of your flat screen titles into a theatre experience that has almost like a window. Like you're now looking in a window to see any flat screen game playing on your. your Steam deck that you've strapped to your face, kind of like a window in there with cool like reflective lighting and everything like that and you're just in this cool vibe out game of space so you can play anywhere, right? Which is awesome because then it just makes it that, you know, you don't need to use your TV, you can play it wherever you like, whatever. And we believe they've got a game right around the corner. I would say that it's going to be a half-life style

game. I think it will be VR and non-VR dual launch. I think that will launch a game that you can play on your PC, can play on your console, and you can play it in VR, and it's just going to be a little bit better in VR and they're going to release this dope steam deck thing. It's going to be pretty

aggressively priced, but it's going to be expensive. It's going to be probably over $1,000 Australian, but probably you're going to buy it. Probably people are going to buy it. They'll probably still buy it. It's going to be sick. And that's sort of like that next level thing.

Meta aren't releasing a new headset this year. So the Quest 3 is still top of the line for another year or so. They're releasing the glasses this year potentially. And then next year, they'll probably release next year or mid-late last next year or whatever. They'll probably release a new version of the of the Quest style headset, wider field of view, hopefully some eye tracking and stuff like that as well. This could just make it really cool. But we are in a little bit of a plateau year.

That's why sometimes some people are thinking that like, oh, there's no growth this year, because it's all kind of underground and we might see some big announcements at the end of the year or early next year. So it's sort of the state of the industry. But like I said, it's got a very awesome groundswell of indie passion like we've been talking about through this year. And then on the top level things, they're looking at a more platform level marketplace economy. me. And yeah, the technology is a solved problem. It's about building it to the scale, being able to afford it. And then the more and more headsets that get built, the cheaper it gets. All that kind of fun tech stuff and a little trickle down and eventually we'll have dope glasses. So yeah, it's cool. Yeah, like I said, bright future. It's a slightly dim near future.

And then there we go. But yeah, no, it's super cool. And like you said, it's all fueled by passion. There's lots of awesome content creators out there, lots of awesome streamers that will answer all your questions that will help you out with all the tech side of things. As I said, I've been doing my game development on Twitch. It's actually really cool doing development on Twitch now. We actually have a category called Software and Game Development.

So if you go on Twitch, check out the category. That whole space is filled with indie devs, making their passion projects in real time, in front of you. It's a little bit of a distraction, like having people watching you play games and things like that. Build games. But it is a really cool. It's just, it's good for marketing. It's good to have people like involved in the creation of your project a little bit. I just watched the guy launch his game Memori on Twitch. Really cool. It's like a Celeste-like game. Super, super cool, gorgeous pixel art. It's been working on it for ages. It's on

Twitch. I don't know if the launch sale is still on or not, but I bought it like first thing on stream. Super cool. So this, it's like a really fun way to sort of engage with indie developers.

If you, you know, as you're watching them, that also helps them. You know, helps them, helps get the projects off the ground, whether it's pre-orders, whether it's donations, whatever. And yeah, like pretty much if you if you love a certain genre of

games I can scroll through Twitch you might find someone making that dream game or oh it'd be great if it was this plus this or whatever someone out there is probably making that game in their spare time outside of work things like that they only need a little bit of help funding wise or

whatever to keep the game going and like I said it's pretty much it's a runaway train if, you know, it's either they get the funding and the game comes out or they don't get the funding and it just will slowly keep getting built and it'll eventually come out. So that's sort of the case with Petal Rebel as well.

I'm, you know, I'm doing a little bit of outreach. I'm doing a little bit of like, hey, publishers, hey, government grants, things like that. Like, this would be really cool if this thing existed. You know, if that, and that's sort of the biggest thing is that like, I just can't work on it full time. So I can just work on it as much as I can between work and things like that. But every little bit helps. Every wish list helps.

That's why coming out to AvCon and things like that is a big boon, doing these VR showcases and stuff like that really helps with wish lists and traffic, stuff like that. We just recently hit over 100,000 impressions on Steam, which is pretty crazy. So that's every time my thumbnail has come up on someone's screen and they've scrolled past it or whatever. And yeah, 20,000 something actual clicks and views on my Steam page, which is freaking awesome. We're approaching 500 wish lists, which is awesome. Wish lists we sort of, we sort of look at it as like kind of 10% of wish lists would be like projected sales. That's for

normal games. Usually you want like 5,000 wish lists or something like that before you launch, things like that. VR is a little bit different because it's a much smaller niche. My game is niche niche so I'm just happy I'm just happy for anything but regardless of which I'm going to keep working on it launch it eventually I just did an open alpha um over this month it actually it's it's ongoing but I said it would end it on the 11th um but it's ongoing I just haven't updated my website yet but we've had about 70 people um on meta at least and I don't even know how many on Steam come and try the game and give some feedback and stuff like that in my Discord, which has been really cool.

And that helps out a lot. I said it was an open alpha. So it's still very early. There's still lots of really cool implementation and stuff that I want to add into the game. But I'm developing it actively with my community and with the people that like these types of games or they're suggesting different features and things like that, which is, which is, I think, is the right way to do it. You know, developing out in the open, like an open kitchen, you're watching me make the game.

You're going to hang out with me or whatever. Because I'm in Australia, I stream kind of like during the day sometimes or late at night. So I've got some people in America that, you know, they have their desk job, they're probably their IT job or whatever. Just have me on in the background during the day, you know, just chiming in here and there, hoping out with some tech staff or whatever. Because again, it's the first time me doing any of this kind of stuff. So I'm learning as I go. This is very much a learning project, which is one of the reasons why I'm solo. like because then I get to sort of learn how to do everything

then I'm not reliant on anybody for the next project and the next project or whatever right so it's slow going but the game works you can try it out you can go to pedal rebel VR.com and you can try out the alpha if you've got a quest headset we've got you can side load it on side quest which you know it's fine you can get it on you can get that alpha code on my website and you can try it out on Steam if you've got any kind of headset as well

Um, yeah, works with any headset, you attach the controller to your leg, you can jump on any exercise bike, or you can just play with the triggers, wave your arm around, do whatever you like, um, or have cadence sensor support coming eventually. Um, so that will just make it a bit easier. So you can jump on the bike, not doing anything, uh, you know, not, uh, risk of damaging your controller or anything like that eventually. Um, just got to work out all the Bluetooth tech, which is pretty, pretty hard and confusing. Um, but yeah, that's sort of the, the, goal is, like I said, get us off the couch a little bit, get our bodies moving a little, before we get to move into this cool VR future where we're standing around and, you know, having that theme park stand-up gaming experience all the time and we can get a little bit more time away from our desks and our TVs and our couches, be a little healthier. Well, since you're going to went into the outro anyway, we'll pass to our mark and it's a good place to end it there. I was sort of feeling that.

say. So you already mentioned the Alpha Steam page. Anything else you want to where can people find your Twitch? For sure.

So I'm actually Toasterface games on Twitch. I think it's Toasterface underscore games on Twitch. I stream sporadically. Uh, uh,

uh, I cannot hear you. Godem it. God damn it. Give me one second. Oh, there we go. wait hey okay it's your end yeah yeah it's slight disconnect all right we'll do that again but

probably won't edit it um yeah so i'm toasterface underscore games on twitch um like i said i'm doing live dev there uh sporadically i don't have a proper schedule at the moment um but i've got a i've got a discord there on my on my website toastface games dot com or pedalreblevr.com i've got discords for both of those. Building up a bit of community there. Yeah. And then I'm Petal Rebel VR on all socials. Got some fun reels on Instagram and TikTok showing off our expo experiences, showing off

the game there. We've got some cool trailers on YouTube, things like that. We'll be doing some more YouTube content soon, but mostly I'm just getting the game as ready as I can be. Yeah, stay tuned. There might be some cool stuff happening in Sydney towards the end of the year that I can't talk about yet, around the October mark. But pretty much we're going to try and hit as many expos as possible in the next coming up year. We'll be doing Avcon, Sage here in Adelaide. We did

TGX last year, as you can see from my shameless plugs of TGX merch. That's the Melbourne Game Expo. We'll probably be there next year, maybe Pax one day. And yeah, so physical expos, come try out the game. Or yeah, if you've got a headset, go scroll Marketplace and find a dodgy bike that's been living in someone's shed or something for 20 bucks. Go pick it up. Yeah, strap a controller at your leg and have a ride. Or if you have a bike already, you can get like bike trainers on eBay for like $20 or whatever. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you can get some of those. And like I said, there's always people buying equipment, selling equipment, you know, getting in and out of the hobby all the time. So you can usually get a discount. You

secondhand. And same deal for headsets as well. Like I said, if you're you're still not sure about it and you don't think like you're, the investment is going to be, um, is going to pay off or whatever. Grab a, grab a quest two off of the internet, um, like off a marketplace or that. People are getting

rid of them. Um, preferably with two controllers working, but you can play my game with one controller and you can play mini golf with one controller. Um, so there are a lot of headsets out there with one broken controller. Probably don't pay more than $300 for a Quest 2, I'd say about 250 is about the good mark Australian, because otherwise get a 3S

off of Amazon or whatever. At least you know it's brand new. Under warranty, you should get some cool bonuses and stuff with it as well. The 3S is a really cool, is a really good headset. We just got one. Yeah, if you're interested in all this fun VR stuff, jump into Discord, you can always ask us questions, things like that too. So, yeah, awesome. Nothing else. That's pretty much everything. Awesome. Thanks for this. It's been really fun. Um, you know, I usually go onto these types of rants on my Twitch as well, but it's fun to, uh, formalize it a little bit and have a, have a captive audience for two hours. Yeah, I wasn't sure where to, where to send you because you were perfectly happy just going down your own path.

Must be the energy drink, but I do talk a lot. Okay. So, uh, my main channel is Brodie Robertson. I do Linux videos there six-ish days a week. Sometimes I stream there as well. I will be doing the Bracky's Game Jam what the end of this month whenever that starts so I might be streaming that I don't know we'll see what happens I've got the gaming channel Brodio and Games right now I'll be playing probably through Metal Gear Solid and

Yakuza 6 so check that out if you're watching the video version of this you can find the audio version on basically every podcast platform tech over T there is an RSS feed it's on Spotify you'll find it It's out there. And the video version is on YouTube at Tech Over T. So, what do you want to say to sign us off? Yeah, how about we move our bodies a little bit while we play games?

Yeah. Yeah, I agree. Support Indies.