In January 2022, I moved to Berlin and led a team of 5 to build:

  • A VR puzzle competition connected to a real-life fishtank via submersible webcam video stream designed to teach binary reverse engineering

Why did I build this?

I moved to Berlin in the dead of winter, decided I wanted to start a company, and naturally coped by spending 10-14h/day speaking Japanese instead of going outside. As one does!

Then I saw this tweet featuring a submarine made entirely out of IKEA hardware, and something clicked.

The Japanese VR community is incredibly vibrant — VR is a wacky, zany place and they go hard. They build wildly complex, genuinely useful software. I think there might be something to growing up in a high-density visual information environment. You can learn a lot from people just by listening and being interesting back.

I flew out a cosplayer friend from Chicago (Berlin winter plane tix are super cheap) and had them fabricate the virtual and physical landscapes.

I learned how to go absolutely all-in to get a project off the ground, picked up C# reverse engineering, discovered the dangers of alternate social realities, memorized Berlin craft store layouts…. and honestly had a blast.

Some months later, I visited my Japanese friends in Tokyo for a day. Turns out there’s way more information transmitted in real life than in VR, go figure – Tokyo is gloriously overstimulating. My friends showed me around and it was wonderful – we went to an izakaya after. One of them even pivoted from a psychology undergrad into being a C# programmer! Ganbatte!