The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - We couldn’t afford an Oculus so we built one (Interview)

Episode Date: February 23, 2018

Max Coutté joined the show to share his journey of learning the math and programming required to build an open source Oculus headset for $100. Max is 16 and lives in a small village in France. And one day he and his friends decided to built an Oculus headset because they couldn't afford one. This show takes you through Max's journey, how his teacher (aka Sensei) made all the difference, and how the chief architect at Oculus, Atman Binstock, advised him to make it all open source.

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All right, welcome back, everybody. This is The Change Log, and I'm your host, Adam Stachowiak. On today's show, Jared and I are talking with Max Coutet. Max is 16 and lives in a small village in France. And one day, he and his friends decided to build an Oculus because they couldn't afford one. And this show takes you through Max's journey of learning the math

and the programming required to do such a thing. How his teacher, also known as Sensei, made all the difference. And how the chief architect at Oculus, Atman Binstock, advised him to make it all open source. So Max, we're pretty excited because you live in a small village in France. I'm going to tell some of your story for you. And you say that you're the only teenager. You've got a teacher who you call Sensei and a buddy that you pulled into this.

And this is this open source project around VR. And the headline here is we couldn't afford an Oculus. We built one. That's the that's the tip of this whole story. How did this begin? What's the backstory? OK, the fact that I'm really into computer science is a bit new, because when I was young, I was more into art and music.

And when I went to middle school, I completely fell in love with mathematics. I was just so fascinated about it at the end of each course of mathematics I was going to talk with my teacher Jérôme Diodonné and I was always asking him for more because he was that kind of teacher that really makes you feel so passionate about the subject he teach and every single course of math that he was giving was a crazy experience because he was opening me each time some kind even some kind of really basic things about math. He was doing it in a way that expresses math.

You can feel that he's really passionate about math. And I think after one year learning math with him, even sometimes I was not going in French course or stuff like that. And I was going in his course of math instead of going to the other one. And after one year, I think, he started teaching me about computer science. Wow. So it began with math. Yeah. A passion for math, a teacher who was willing to invest in you.

Then what was your entrance into computer science? I don't know if it's like the common path, but I asked him a question about, I think it was the evolution and growing of a couple of rabbits. And what happens if you start adding some constant and some variable to this population of rabbits? And he just told me, OK, I will show you something. You can do this using this with a sheet. Just go to Google Sheet and you can do this this way and you can see how the population is growing and change the variables and basic stuff. And then he told me,

but there is another way to do it that is better because you are not limited by the number of Ks and you can edit it more easily. And I think you will like it. Just tomorrow, go to my class and I will show you. Wow.

And I say, okay. And I was like super excited. And he said, look, this is called Python. And he started showing me how Python works. And I remember that we wrote this little code about evolution and growing of population and having fun with some variables to add and adding other species and rules for all species interact with each other.

And then he told me, you know what? Next week, come on Monday in my classroom. And the next week, I came and there were other students. I remember it was

Gabriel and Jonas. These are your buddies now. These are your partners in this project. Yeah. Basically, those two guys were the author to... Because, you know, in France, there's some kind of... Like a classmate?

Yeah. Does this word exist in English? Like a classmate? Like somebody you go to class with? No. Did you say assessment? No. I mean that some kind of... It's not public, but there is some kind of list

where you can see who have the best grades in math and stuff like that. Okay. But it's not public. But every student knows who is the best in math and stuff like that. Okay. But it's not public, but every student knows who is the best in math and who is the best in French. How do they know

if it's not public? How do you find out? Because when teachers give back their work, everyone is asking, hey, which grades do you have have and there is this kind of feelings that everyone knows that this guy is the math guy this guy is the french guy

so you get a reputation yeah exactly and me gabrielle and jonas jonas that's fun because Jonas was the Latin guy because he was studying Latin. The French guy because he was like better than everyone in French. The math guy because in his class he was the best in math. And basically same for Gabriel. But by the way, the funny thing is that my middle school was a really little one, but that was the first

time that I met them. So you basically, your buddies are top of the class and interested in mathematics, and your teacher, Jerome, as my anglicized way of saying it uh which you call him sensei i can see why he gets you guys going in math and then he basically kind of tricks you

into computer science with spreadsheets right like he he basically shows you a spreadsheet which is interesting because spreadsheets and you know i guessed in the in the corporate world excel is very much a gateway drug for many people definitely into programming but many of those people have to live in excel and in spreadsheets and feel the constraints for years until somebody opens their eyes and says, did you know if you use Python for instance, or, you know, insert scripting language here,

for instance, you can do, you know, these things that you've been banging your head against in Excel. And that leads people into, into programming. But for you, it happened almost immediately because he teased you with Excel.

And then he said, come back on Monday and I'll show you, I'll show you something amazing and what a great teacher I think it's the teacher that has the most impact in my life well if you're out there and you're a teacher and you're listening to this you can see probably

through the rest of this call the impact you can have on somebody's life if you invest so keep doing that yeah yeah and i met them um and like wikik what is the expression we hit it off you guys hit it off yeah yeah and we fast become best friends, and each weekend we started working on little things, and soon Sensei said, okay, I can teach you the basics about C. I just heard about this robotic contest. Do you want to apply? And because of this,

Sensei created some kind of robotic club and we started competing in robotic contests. So that was when you were 13 years old, correct? And now you're 16. So you've been doing computer science by way of this robotics club for about three yeah yeah that was an amazing an amazing time because we started with really basic things like Arduino and those kind of projects are really fun because you can fast start working on really fun stuff and like

that, and like improve them really fast. And basically we ended up building some really fun robots and drones and stuff like that. And this is basically how we started really working a lot together. It's interesting. So you had some time to kind of get to know one another as friends, but then also as peers, you know, in terms of your skill set around math and computer science and programming and working with hardware and creating software. You've had some time

to kind of experiment and get to know one another and then eventually this vr thing came around what how far down the line is that like when did you start to experiment with the with what we're currently talking about which is relative um it was approximately one years ago. To be exact, the story is that two years ago, we started working for one of the biggest robotic contests in France. And we made this project which was some kind of release like when i when i say that people are like whoa this is crazy but it wasn't it was just a really simple operating system that was connected to really basics hardware that you can use to control your house device like for instance it was like a little box with a pin for a serial communication and you can just plug servo motors and some solar panel and use the servo motor to control solar panel. And with the little operating system,

implement fast some script to control the solar panel or stuff like that. It was a little project, but it was really fun to make. And we've done some contests, and after doing it, we were like, okay, so this project was really fun. But now we need to find another project. And I think it was the wrong way to approach this.

Just sitting and say we have to find something else. So we and doing this, we started to have some really bad idea. Like, hey, we can build some kind of drones that we will control with this and then this. And some kind of fun brainstorm where you can have some crazy and really bad idea and we decided that we will watch again sword that online which is one of my favorite anime did you have watched this anime say the name again sword art online no I've never heard of it. Tell us. It's an anime where the main character, Kirito, is using a VR headset and he's plunged into a roleplay video game. So, a world within a world.

And we saw it and we were like, oh, we need to build our own virtual world and spend time after school in this virtual world and creating some kind of VR experience of World of Warcraft where we could spend hours and hours. Life imitates art. You see art, you experience it it art being sword art online right you you consume this art yeah which is this this show and then you it compels you to then say i want to do something similar to that and so vr is a next step for you so it's an example of life imitating art yeah that's interesting how like you know they're looking for the next

idea and it's like hey here's our favorite anime and in this anime the main character is experiencing his world or his or her world via VR and you know whatever the storyline is they're like hey we should create a VR world let's do it right like how often do you do that Jared like do you just like I've never done that I've never done that whatever the storyline is, they're like, hey, we should create a VR world. Let's do it. Right.

Like how often do you do that, Jared? Like do you just like give it to your friends? I've never done that. I've never done that. See, I live vicariously through people like Max because I'm sitting here. My takeaway so far is I should go back to school and have a bunch of free time. That would be awesome. That's my current takeaway.

Be curious. Yes. That's my current takeaway. Be curious. Yes, but the hiccup here with your idea of let's live in a VR world, Max, is you guys could not afford an Oculus, right? That's the punchline there. Yeah, exactly. Because we just sit down and say, okay, so what we need to do is buy an Oculus and learn Unity and start creating horror games. But the first step was just impossible.

And I remember I was like, okay, so how can we find this money to buy an Oculus? And Gabriel said, well, maybe it could be easy to build the VR headset or so. And I said, yes, that will be easier. Which, yes, that will be easier

to build the headset. Which, in fact, wasn't true. But it was a lot more fun. How much is an Oculus cost? It's like 600 euros. Okay. Something like that.

I'm not sure because the price went down recently. So it's about, for US dollars, it's about 750 bucks, US dollars. 600 euros is around that much. So you guys thought that building your own would be easier than somehow scratching together 600 euros? Yeah.

Because he said that and I was like, yeah, it's just a screen and some components and yeah, we's just a screen and some components and yeah, we can do that next week. At this time, we had no idea about how VR works and we just asked ourselves,

okay, so we will build the headset ourselves. So what is the most fundamental thing about a VR headset? And the most fundamental thing about a VR headset is that it tracks your movement and your position. And knowing that, we just said, okay, so we need a component that will help us knowing the position and the movement of the player and it turns out that the most efficient component to do that was using a magnetometer an accelerometer and a gyroscope so we buried them and we started try them and say okay so this is all this component works this is all this one and

and after I think when we can playing with them we just said to sensei okay so we have this component we are able to get acceleration and absolute position using melitometer. And now we want to use this to have the position of the player. So how can we do that? So this is the original teacher going back to like, hey, we've gotten so far. We've kind of hit a bottleneck on how to actually know where the person is in the world and now you're back to math finding out algorithms that that help you figure out what what the person's placement is or and whatnot is that right yeah and we say that and he say okay so i will teach you about antiderivatives. And so we started learning about antiderivatives and acceleration and proper acceleration and

then a bit about quaternion and we started going each time a little deeper about those concepts in math. And I think we spent like two months learning about this math concept and dig into them and do some exercise and really just focus on the math side and then we said okay so this is how it works so now let's find some good open source library to do that because it seems that it's something that is like, it's something that I've already been done a lot of time and we'll program it in Python. We create some funny things with antiderivatives and stuff like that to have the position. And we even create like some quaternion to other

angles and a lot of funny algorithms. But then we started implementing this and that was the first part, implementing those algorithms, which was not as hard as learning the math concepts. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Linode. Everything we do here at Changelog is hosted on Linode cloud servers. Pick a plan, pick a distro, and pick a location, and in minutes, deploy your Linode cloud server. Duel-worthy hardware, native SSD cloud storage, and pick a location and in minutes deploy your leno cloud server drool worthy hardware native ssd cloud storage 40 gigabit network intel e5 processors simple easy control panel vms for

full control running docker containers encrypted disks or vpns 99.9 uptime guaranteed 24 7 customer support 10 data centers three regions anywhere in the world they've got you covered they also have cloud.leno.com which is an open source single page application find that at github.com slash leno slash manager plans start with one gig of ram for five bucks a month or high memory plans at 16 gigs head to leno.com slash changelog. Get four months free with their basic server. $20 in hosting credit. Once again, lino.com slash changelog. So Max, the first step in building this thing was to figure out how to manage all the math required to detect location and distance and the physics and all that. And so it's pretty cool your teacher is basically using this vr headset project as a laboratory to teach you all kinds of math concepts even ones that i haven't heard of before

like quaternion which apparently he's an expert in um and i'm just i'm just now finding it on wikipedia saying hmm but it actually interesting yes he's an expert and you're just finding it out right um so that's pretty cool. Tell us how you then, and what was interesting to me about that was what you found out as you would go and learn the math, apply it to the code is that that was actually easier to implement and to get done than you thought it was going to be, which is always great when, you know, the light bulb moments happen. Tell us the next step once you get past those difficult concepts. You have some things working in the code. Where did you go from there to get

to a finished product? Yeah, it teaches those math concepts in a way that is really useful. You give a course, then we do some exercise to be sure that we really understand the concept and then we try to code everything that we think that we understand just to be sure that we really master the concept. And we've done this with the first component, first accelerometer and after having playing with it and implementing some little thing we switch from a component that is all the calculation and send us the quaternion. So to be honest

we could have directly buy this component and use it with some documentation and build the headset without knowing anything about the math concept behind, but we felt like we need to understand the math black boxes inside of this component. And I really feel like it was necessary to understand this math. And if you don't know about the math concept, you can build the headset, you can improve it, you can even do better than us, you can improve

it in a way that we won't think about. But we learned the mass concept just because it was a pleasure and the component that we bought the mpu he basically it does all the calculation for us because in fact um that will be a little bit hard to explain with this language barrier, but I will try. What an accelerometer does is that it only detects acceleration. And what is acceleration? If you took a graph and you look at position and time, and you draw the function of position and time, and you search for the derivative function of position by time,

you have what is called the speed. And if you look for the derivative function of speed, you have the acceleration. And to go back to the position, you have to do two antiderivatives on the acceleration to have the position. And doing that, there is some drift happening because of how antiderivative works and all of this, those two derivatives, it took a lot of calculation. So there is inside of the component a part that is specialized only to do that and the headset, the core headset, only asks the component for the result of this computation and the component sends us the quaternion and basically we send them to the game.

So on your readme, which we should include this image in our show notes, is a nice picture of all the components laid out there on a table and yeah the one that you're talking about that does the accelerometer is the uh the mpu correct yeah exactly okay so you learn all the math to do that and you understand how to calculate acceleration but in in the end of the day, am I hearing you right, that this MPU is basically giving you those readings for free? Yeah.

The MPU sends us the angle in quaternion, and what we learn is how to do this. But the MPU already does this. Okay, so that's nice. Maybe just to throw that in there too, we'll go over cost later, but that's a dollar based on your components list, is that the MPU is a dollar?

Yeah. So that's a lot of functionality for a dollar. Yeah, exactly. If I could get that for a dollar, why wouldn't you? Yes. This is intense math, too. This is not like Sensei is a master, of course, but it's not easy math. Easily packaged math, though.

You can package it up and sell it for a dollar. That's called leverage right there. That is. Great. So keep going now. Get us to a working deal because we want to go through the components list and the pricing. We want to hear the story about,

was it Jonas that got some discount products by talking to some manufacturers and stuff? So keep going down this path. Get us to where you guys finally hit pay dirt or finally had success. So after having done this, we started working on the game rendering parts. We've done this in Unity, because the actual SDK is only compatible with Unity.

But we will release one for Unreal soon. for and we all soon and after some times working on the headset and I've been creating the first prototype we discovered that we called help democratize VR we had a lot of fun but what we've done wasn't useless and it could help some other people to democratize vr and the thing is that like every other technology the two main aspects to democratize vr i think are are price and content for example if you look at the mouth the democratization of mouth is due to those two things. The price of mouse, I think it went from $300 in Xerox Lab to something like $15 in Apple's one. So that is for the price aspect. And the other aspect for democratizing something is the content.

And for the mouse, it's the fact that it becomes feasible to create GUI application to use the mouse inside of them. And for VR, it's a bit the same the first step for the democratization of VR is the price and I think we could help on this because or it sets is a lot more affordable than an Oculus. And for the content, we try to create some kind of easy SDK

for let developers create their game easily. Let's start with the component prices, since you said the first part of this democratization is price, right? Yeah. So let's talk about what you've come up with um because uh the pitch on the you know in this in the description of the project is build your own vr headset for 100 bucks which as we said before and oculus uh in u.s dollars is about750 at the time of recording. Let's talk about the individual components because you do list them out and we can add them up and we can see where the price all comes in because $100 is quite a lot cheaper than $750.

Yeah. What all do you need? What are the different parts and how much do they cost? Yeah. The first one is the Arduino Duo, which is basically the core of the headset. The Arduino Duo is a bit expensive. It's like $10 for a Chinese clone.

But we chose this one because when we decided to put the project open source, we wanted to have a component that was easy to use and easy to understand for a lot of people and arduino as this like most of the people know about arduino and they are comfortable with this so even if an arduino is a bit expensive, it was some kind of obvious choice to make the headset more easy to build. It's not only expensive, it's also currently sold out.

If you go to Arduino's website, $37.40 currently sold out. Yeah, but we don't buy the official one because they are too expensive. So the knock-offs are you saying is about $10? Yeah, for a Chinese clone. Chinese clone, $10. Okay, so there's $10.

What else goes into this? And then there is the MPU, which is $1 on eBay. And then I just noticed that the link in the GitHub is the wrong one, but there is the screen, which is the most expensive part. And the issue with this part is that the price vary a lot and do some shopping yeah yeah yeah and is it the 5.5 because of the housing hardware that you've chosen to like if you wanted to do a 7 inch screen you could do a 7 inch if you

could manage that but you're specking a 5.5 based on your kit yeah the funny thing is that some people on the fellowship created some kind of server on discord which we called the fellowship of openVR and some people the thing

I always say is that it's like the fellowship of the ring but without Sauron but with Sensei. You guys are full of the references. I like that. So the Fellowship of the OpenVR. This is a Discord group that you have going?

Yeah. I think it's linked down at the very bottom of this readme too. And it does say that. Chat with me and the Fellowship. So if you want to hang out with max and the fellowship check out the discord link at the bottom of the readme some people bought some 4k screen which are a lot more expensive than 2k screen but they were like yeah but i can choose the spec of my headset. And some people buy a screen with lower resolution,

and some find some middle spec screen for like $15. And you have to do some shopping. It's a bit hard to find find the screen that you want. Have you found a difference in the resolution playing a part in the quality of the experience? Is it less than 2K or even a 4K screen? Does it make the difference since your eyes are so close to the screen? I haven't tested a 4K screen, but the comparison between full HD and 2K, I think, and this is why I recommend this screen, that a 2K screen is...

I'm sorry, I'm searching the American expression for it. Like when something of the right price it's what's that word affordable yeah but I was searching for

another one I have the French expression but not the American one say it in French let's hear how it sounds in French

yeah in French we say cela vaut le coup ok I think that means perfect price that's how I translate that the perfect price best bang for your buck that's what I would say

there you go Jared so 2k screen yeah so 2k is a bit more expensive but this price comes with a better resolution and this better resolution make the experience really better and the final component is the least what i can see here is is fresnel lenses yeah and i just noticed that, once again, Fresnel lenses are, the one that we recommend is $3, but you can find a cheaper one. The reason why we recommend this one is that this is the one that we bought,

and we are absolutely sure that there is no issue with them. And those are built in Europe, I think. So the time traveled for them is really different than if you bought them from Hong Kong. But you can find some Fresnel lenses for $1. So I'm doing the math over here on the low end and on the high end just following along and if you go arduino do and go high end and you go with the most expensive available 2k screen on aliexpress you're only hitting about 150 high end low end if you go Chinese clone and you find the cheaper one on AliExpress

you're looking at like maybe $55 US so even cheaper than you guys are advertising if you can get the best deals yeah but those kind of deals are we just want to be sure that we don't want to sell it

too much sure I get it. I get it. I'm just pointing out that maybe it's even better than we think it is. What he's saying is too is it's accessible. There's a lot of people out there who's like, I just want to tinker and I don't want to tinker and spend $1,000 on

tinkering. I just want to spend maybe $100 or $200 or whatever in euros. I think that's pretty interesting is that you can have some fun, tinker a little bit, play with some open source, and it doesn't have to cost you a ton of money.

It's something you can do with kids. In the case of Sensei, a student, you can have some fun with this and it's accessible to people. So on the second side of your democratization of VR, you mentioned content. So you said you think you can help with price, and we know here we have a list of parts and instructions, and you can put it together yourself, and it will cost you anywhere from $50 to $150 US. What about the content side? How are you bringing that to more people yeah um actually we will release soon a big update about

relative and the core of relative but the current version came with fast vr which is an sdk for that help you create VR games really easily. And the SDK is really easy to understand and to customize. And I'm not sure that it will increase the number of VR games, but I truly hope that somehow some developers will be interested in the fact that this SDK is fully open source and it will in some way help to create VR content. But actually, the most interesting thing about Relative is that it's compatible with Relative games. And soon, we will release the update that will make Relative fully compatible with SteamVR. And what it means is that you will be able to play some Oculus or HTC games with it. Awesome. Which could help a lot because if there is no content that is relative compatible, it's okay.

You just launch the little software and then you can run some SteamVR games. And if you're a developer and you don't want to use Steam steam vr technology but you want your games to run on relative you can compile your games to be native compatible with relative very cool so if i'm understanding this correctly fast vr is your open source sdk that works with Relative to create VR games in Unity. Yeah, exactly.

So that will help people to create content for it, right? Yeah, I hope. You hope, right? In addition to that, you're modifying Relative so that it will work with SteamVR. Yeah, exactly.

Is that via some sort of emulation? How is it that you're accomplishing that? In fact, thanks to the fellowship, because they help a lot, what we do is that there is a very cool project that is OSVR, that is an open HDK for VR headset. And we find OSVR can be connected to SteamVR

thanks to some plugin. And we just find a way to connect relative to OSVR. And by connecting relative to OSVR and connecting OSVR to SteamVR, it works. MARK MANDELAINE- Looking to learn more about the Cloud or Google Cloud Platform? MELANIE WARRICK- But you don't know where to begin? MARK MANDELAINE- Check out the Google Cloud

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on your favorite podcast app. MARK MANDELMANN- The reason why we're having this conversation, Max, is because, one, it's a cool subject and your story is super cool. But on the flip side, you've open sourced everything. And through this journey, you know, you've got to level up your math skills, make some new friends, play with some cool new tech, potentially even say it's bleeding edge tech, and in a lot of ways innovate. But then you've also gotten to meet people from the Oculus team. And I believe it was Atman, is that how you say his name? From the Oculus team? Atman Binster.

Yeah. From Oculus. Chief Architect. The Chief Architect, yeah. I mean, that's a big title. And that person said, hey, nice to meet you. Cool thing. You should open source it. Can you kind of wind that out into the real story?

What was that like? How did you get to meet that person? Yeah. In fact, the real story is a bit more complicated. Okay. It always is. So the real story is that I became obsessed with democratizing VR. And I was wondering what is the best way to do that. And one of the things I thought was to create a Kickstarter and setting up a company. And I was like, so I'm 16.

I have no idea of how to launch a company. So I emailed Oussama Amar, which is the co-founder of The Family, which is an investment firm in Europe, which is the European equivalent of Y Combinator. And I just sent a mail saying, hey, I'm 16, I've built my own VR headset with my best friends and my math teacher

can we meet? and he responded in less than one minute he just responded yes see you in Paris what? and I was like

wow wow and this day was funny because I've chosen three people two billionaires and the co-founder of these investment firms This day was funny because I've chosen three people, two billionaires and the co-founder of these investment firms. I've sent them a mail, just like, who knows what can happen. I will just send them this and I risk nothing.

And they respond. All three of them? Yeah, but only one of them accepted to meet me. And he just said, yes, meet me in Paris. Well, how do you know where in Paris to meet and when and how? It was in the local of the family Paris. Okay. And I just went there with my father. It was in the local of the family Paris. Okay.

And I just went there with my father. And we arrived and we say, hi, I have a meeting with, I think he's one of the CEO of the company. And they say, okay. And how old are you? i'm 16 and i just go back from high school and they were like wait we we'll look at his shrivel and we don't see anything with you what is your name and i said i'm maxim know, he said yes to the mail. And they were like, no, no, we don't have anything plain. And I was like, oh, what happened? And then Oussama Ammar arrived and he saw me and he said, hey, are you the high school guy? And I said, yes.

And he said, come on. And he came, he said hello to my father, hello to me. And we started talking. Wow. That's so cool. And we just sat and I told him the full story about Sensei and my friends. And he listened really carefully to the story. And he told me,

listen Max, I know it can seem to be a good idea to start a company but I've done the same when I was 16 and that was not a good idea to start a company at this age. And I really want to help you, but I don't think that it's a good idea to set up a company.

But what we can do is that I can brought you to Silicon Valley and I can introduce you to some people that will give you good advice about what to do with this technology. And I was like, awesome yes and what he do is that he started invited me every weekend so we can talk about the project and he was giving me some advice and he was convinced convincing me that creating a company wasn't a good idea. And I remember the first lunch with him, I was like so excited. And he told me about his story and I was really impressed. And he told me, did you have a passport?

And I said, yes. And he said, do you want to meet the CEO of Core? And I said, yeah. And he said, oh, cool. And what about like meeting CEO of Oculus? And I said, yeah, that could be fun. He said, okay, so let's say in one month, tell to your parents that I will bring you to Silicon Valley. Wow.

I was like, okay. And he met my mother. And my mother was like, who is this guy? So my mother met him and all my brother and my family. And they said, okay, you can go with him. And then we went to Silicon Valley and he introduced me to a lot of really friendly people. And it was an amazing moment.

And I understand that it wasn't a good idea to start a company and that I can help by pulling the project open source. And this is Oussama Ammar who did the introduction with Atman Beanstalk. And Atman Beanstalk gave you this advice to open source it. Yeah, but to be honest, there is three people who gave me this advice. Oussama Ammar, Atman Beanstalk, But to be honest, there is three people who gave me this advice.

Usama Ammar, Atman Beanstalk, and Dorian Carroll, which is a VP product of Amazon Mobile. And I've met him, her, in Silicon Valley with Usama. And I remember this because it was really moving he told me his story and and he start explaining me oh this code even if it's not perfect is not the same as an oculus that even if it's not as good as oculus there is obviously some people somewhere in earth that will find that this code is cool and that this code

will obviously help at least some people somewhere. Good advice. I'd say, I mean, you know, right. If it's not Oculus, obviously they've got lots of, you know, many

engineers behind that, a lot of, you know, maybe several senseis, you know, and, you know, so they've got, they've got something up on you, obviously, but it doesn't mean it's not valuable. It doesn't mean what you did isn't worth something to the world, you know? Yeah. And let me also add that I, I'm, I'm in agreement around the, the starting the company. I think you receive great advice all around because, and we don't necessarily want to focus, you know, all about your age for this conversation. Cause there's merit to what you're doing regardless of your age. But I mean, you're 16 years old, you can, you'll have your entire adult life to start companies and like go down that path. There's no need to rush into that.

And I think the, the end result of what you've accomplished is amazing and the fact that it's open and freely available and you're following this desire to democratize vr and you have this group of people in the fellowship it's so cool what you're doing and none of that would have happened at the scale it's happening that if you kept it proprietary and tried to sell it yeah absolutely and you probably would have happened at the scale it's happening at if you kept it proprietary and tried to sell it. Yeah. Absolutely. And you probably would have driven your parents crazy.

No. My father was an EP. Okay. Maybe not. So he's like, do you want to open source it? Okay, that's cool. So tell us about your sensei's thoughts and his feelings through all this. This is an amazing story of you flying to Silicon Valley and rubbing shoulders with all these important technology people and getting this advice from the chief architect at Oculus. It has to just tickle him to have inspired this turn of events in your life

that have led to such fortune in terms of your education and experience. Has he been involved all along the way? Yeah. He really tried to help us. I don't know if this word can be used, but grow. Like as a person. Yes. And not only

created those kind of perfect ecosystem for learning math he also created a tabletop role play uh club wow and we went to this club and it was really amazing to be with. By the way, Sensei was the master of the game on the tabletop game. It sounds a bit strange.

Does that mean he was the best? Does that mean he was in charge? No. You know, when you play tabletop game, there is the, I don't know the word in English, so I can try to. Yeah, MC, exactly. Okay.

The Dungeon Master. Yeah, exactly. Dungeon Master. Now, Jared, okay, so everybody listening can tell that you grew up in the 80s just because you said that. I mean, we had that game when we were kids. Dungeons and Dragons, right?

Dungeon Master. You're showing how out of touch you are because that game is still very much alive and people still very much play it. They still play it? Absolutely. Wow. Okay, I am out of touch then. I didn't know that DM didn't mean Twitter DMs or something. Or like whatever. It's overloaded.

He's Dungeon Master. Operator overload. But yeah, definitely still means Dungeon Master. Okay. Well, let me say this, Max. First of all, the next time I'm in France, I'm stopping by to hang out with you and Sensei and the whole team. Because I would love to play tabletop games with you guys.

That would be awesome. It sounds like an awesome scenario. And then secondly, I want to point out what you say in the section about open sourcing. Just to get back to the story with Atman and Benstock giving you the advice and this whirlwind tour of rubbing shoulders with bigwigs. You decide to open source it, and what you say, and I think we've all had this feeling when we go to open source something, is that you deleted all the code and you started rewriting it from scratch.

Yeah. When you decided. Tell us about that. Yeah. I remember it was on Uber with Osama Ammar in San Francisco, and I said, you know what, Usama?

I will open source everything. And he said, cool. What is the first step? Deleting all the code. And he was like, what? What are you doing? And I was like, yeah, there is some mistake in the code. And yeah, it will be easier if I do it.

And it was because the first version of the code was really woo. Yeah. Right. And the new one is still a bit rude. But it's a little bit better. And yeah, it took a little bit of time to rewrite everything from scratch. To be honest, I'm not sure if it was really worth it to do this. Because for the moment, I'm not really sure that it to do this. Because for the moment,

I'm not really sure that it has been helpful. But, you know, I hope, but I'm not sure. Well, the industry experience with a big rewrite in software development is that it's rarely ever worth the effort. Okay. Even though it always sounds like the right idea when you're in a certain circumstance that rewriting everything from scratch rarely pays off.

Every once in a while it will, but rarely it does. So in your case, maybe it was small enough project at the time and the investment in rewriting, you know, wasn't too much. I don't know how many weeks or months you spent rewriting. But yeah, we often find that the thing that we come up with the second time is either never finishes or is better but not worth the six months, 12 months that it took. Yeah.

I don't feel like it was that much needed to do that. But it was an experience. For sure, for sure. Well, we're where you're going from here you have the fellowship you have your your buddies you're still i'm assuming you're still in high school um but you have this this goal of democratizing vr and you mentioned the next step which is really getting it to run the Steam games. And that'll be a big step. But what else do you have? I mean, have you been thinking down the road and where you're going to take Relative from here?

I think there is two issues with the headset. The first one is that the headset is a bit ugly. And the second one is that it's a bit hard to set up. The second one is maybe not a big deal because for the moment, we focus on developers. And for them, I think it's easy to build the headset. But even knowing that, I want to improve the setup of the headset to make it a little bit more easy. And after doing this, what we will do is to try to improve the design of the headset and then some optimization

in the core headset for the moment the roadmap is the following we focus on steam vr compatibility then creating all the the resources to help everyone creating his own headset. We plan to shoot a video, to release a wiki, and some resources to make the build of the headset even easier. And then, if you have any suggestions, you can join the fellowship and give us some ideas. For the moment, the roadmap is short term. It's focused on SteamVR and usability to set up. On that note, I was thinking about the casing it's in. And you may have said this, but I don't see the list.

So we didn't go over it. But I'm curious, because you like to go into different routes that you've never gone before and learn new things have you considered you know maybe 3D printing your headset

rather than buying a kit or anything around printing parts the main case has been 3D printed one step ahead of you Adam there he is it seemed like it been 3D printed. One step ahead of you, Adam. There he is.

It seemed like it was 3D printed. That was always curious, like, because it's not on the list. Yeah, it's not on the list of the components? No. Oh. No. Yeah, it's on the building the hardware, I think. Yeah, there it is. It's under building the hardware.

Okay. Yeah, some people told us that they feel like the headset is a little bit tubing. So we will try to improve something on both the design. Well, look at that right there. Building the hardware. He's got all these files, I'm assuming, are in the repo for 3d printing this this uh that part too we missed that i missed that did you miss that jared i i read it but i didn't i didn't comprehend that it was part of printing the hardware no i did but i just didn't i just guess i didn't focus on it that's in my mind i was just thinking

like what's next to do here it's like oh's, let's tinker with printing our own parts. Done it. Done it. Done it. Very cool. Yeah. Anything further down the road? I mean, you mentioned short-term, which is, you know, integrating with Steam and offering

that, you know, you're young. Do you have a plan to kind of keep this vibrant for many years? Is this, you you know just a fun project you know we're i know you're taking advice from smarter people than jared and i but where do you see this going in like two years three years from now do you plan to keep working on it until it's just done or what's your plan oh uh for me it's absolutely not done and the long-term goal is to have a simple website where you can just click and buy your own diy kit like for example you buy some 3d printed parts on 3D hubs, some components, making the process. That's much

easier than even non-technical people can do it. And because the goal is democratizing VR, all the work on maintaining this project will be to always

keep updating the project as VR evolved like if something new come out came out in VR we will try to replicate it in an open source way and that is the long goal term of this project having a community that when the company is realizing something in vr we replicate it in open source and we publish it for example a lot of companies are working on a tracking that is one of the thing that we will work on. And when something new will come out, we will update the project to always try to democratize all the elementary things about VR. Very cool. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show and just kind of sharing the story. I mean, it's such an interesting story.

You have such a rich life already at a young age. I can't wait to see what you do, you know, when you're Jared Ryan's age. So exciting. So exciting. Thanks a lot for having me. That was really cool. All right. Thank you for tuning in this week. This has been another episode of the Change Log. If you enjoyed the show, if this inspired you, do us a favor. Share it with a friend. Rate us on Apple Podcasts.

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