Product Management Confabulation
What Product Managers are talking about.
When Trace’s future co-founders Greg Tran, Martin Smith and Sean Couture joined Magic Leap in Spring/Summer 2015, it was about as hot as startups come. After years of secrecy, the augmented reality company captured Silicon Valley’s imagination with in-device footage, before capping the year with an $827 million raise. The story of the intervening years […]
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If this had been announced exactly a week prior, it would have been easy to mistake for some corporate April Foolery. Dyson, however, assures us that augmented reality vacuuming is real and coming in June — slightly belated for spring cleaning, sadly. When it launches over the summer, CleanTrace will be available for the Dyson […]
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Shader aims to challenge industry heavyweights like Snap’s AR development platform Lens Studio and TikTok’s Effect House, with its no-code AR creation tool that generates custom effects, 2D masks, and lenses in minutes — rather than spending hours to create a single AR filter, which requires engineering and design skills. The startup built its platform […]
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In the week when gadget lovers around the world are enchanted by Vision Pro, a young, brave startup is trying to carve out a space for its augmented reality device that features a form factor starkly different from Apple’s device. Today, Singapore-based Brilliant Labs announced its new product, Frame, a pair of lightweight AR glasses […]
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Yet another virtual tabletop (VTT) tool has joined the fray, giving Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder and tabletop role-playing gamers alike a new augmented reality experience.
Mirrorscape, a mixed reality and gaming development company, announced the open beta launch of its app, letting users experience their favorite tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) in AR.
The new VTT app launches at a time when many players are shifting away from the typical pen-and-paper play and transitioning to digital gaming — whether by creating character sheets on D&D Beyond, hopping on Discord/Zoom to play with long-distance friends or using services like Roll20.
Mirrorscape aims to shake up traditional tabletop as well as VTT gaming with its technology, allowing users to enhance their game session with AR, build 3D maps, roll digital dice, chat with fellow party members and more all on one platform.
The app is available to download for free on the App Store and Google Play Store. A PC version is launching in the coming months.
Similar to other companies in the same space (Ardent Roleplay, Spatial and Tilt Five), Mirrorscape’s most significant feature is its building capabilities. The customizable platform provides game masters (GMs) with a toolset for creating an animated world of their dark and twisted dreams, from dimly lit dungeons to small villages overrun by orcs.
At launch, Mirrorscape provides access to around 50 already-built maps, which can be purchased in the store section within the build tab. Individual digital items, such as miniature figures and terrain, range from 99 cents to $4.99.
The app includes a free starter kit, including approximately a dozen or so free maps, a few basic structures like cavern walls, cobblestone floors and doorways, along with five free minis, including a dwarf, a barbarian and a huntress. Hero Forge users can link their digital mini for free.
In addition to Hero Forge, the company partners with major game publishers and model manufacturers Wizards of the Coast (D&D 5E), Paizo (Pathfinder and Starfinder), Reaper, Fat Dragon, Dwarven Forge and many others.
Mirrorscape offers two types of playing modes. Players can either view the map in AR mode — where they point and look through their phone cameras to explore the landscape — or 3D mode, which takes place in virtual rooms such as “Forge’s Tavern,” featuring a cozy fireplace and mugs of mead, and “The Hall of Heroes,” a candlelit room that pays tribute to fallen adventurers.
There are only two virtual rooms available at launch, but the company plans to launch more in the near future, Eric McIntire, the company’s brand manager, told TechCrunch.
Both versions come with POV mode, where party members can click on an eye icon to look at the world from their characters’ perspective.
Image Credits: Mirrorscape
After testing the app, we found that 3D mode was the most difficult to navigate, especially when zooming in and out or trying to look at the map from a different angle. It’s recommended that users turn off “Center Pivot” in the top right menu to avoid a frustrating experience.
The AR mode is the most ideal for more interactive experiences. For instance, if a dungeon master wants to create an engaging atmosphere to pair with augmented reality, they can tell their players to go outside and turn on POV mode so it feels like they’re walking through an actual cavern. (Similar to Pokémon Go, where players can look through their cameras and discover a Roselia in their very own garden.)
“Imagine all the players actually meet up in person and go outside,” McIntire said, painting one possible scenario. “[The GM] can watch from inside as they walk around his dungeon, and he narrates in their headsets, ‘You start to smell burning sulfur, death and decay.’ And they walk around the corner and see zombies that he’s got moving towards them.”
Another interesting tool that GMs may appreciate is the ability to conceal certain spaces on the map. For instance, if they want to hide a room where a monster is waiting for its moment to strike, the GM can tap on an area and watch it disappear. Co-founder and COO Donald Bland mentioned to us that, eventually, users would be able to scan a physical, handwritten map with their camera, which would then upload as a 3D version on Mirrorscape.
Other features include a journal option to keep track of dice rolls and a messaging feature. The company is working on bringing effects to the app, such as lightning bolts for when a sorcerer casts a spell.
However, Mirrorscape lacks one important element. The app currently doesn’t offer a character sheet feature for D&D players to refer back to their ability scores, proficiencies, equipment and so forth. Many players use their phones or desktops to look at their sheets, so to have to constantly switch tabs would probably take them out of the immersive experience that Mirrorscape is designed for.
McIntire mentioned that a character sheet option is a “work in progress.”
For now, iOS device users can mirror share their screen to a compatible smart TV or Mac and use a separate device to view the character sheet. Android devices can also mirror their screen to the TV. Players using an iPad can opt for the multitasking feature, but this option might be distracting as the separate tab would partially block the screen.
Mirrorscape isn’t solely designed for private game sessions; it’s a tool for Twitch streamers as well. Soon, content creators will be able to share a QR code with viewers for them to scan, download the app and be immersed in the same digital world as their favorite streamers.
“When [viewers] look at their living room tables, the pieces are moving digitally on their living room table as the players are moving them physically. So, you could actually experience that 3D physical build as though it’s happening in front of you,” McIntire explained.
McIntire loosely calls this “presentation mode,” which can have thousands of people join a single session, in turn helping creators boost their engagement and following.
For reference, the Mirrorscape team played a test session on Twitch, which can be viewed on YouTube.
Donald Bland (left) and Grant Anderson
The company was co-founded in 2020 by Grant Anderson (Mirrorscape CEO) and Donald Bland (COO), veteran D&D players who met while working at Sony. The duo has a combined extensive background in technology and entertainment, particularly virtual reality and 3D production.
“Augmented reality was just starting to emerge and was perfect for tabletop gaming,” Anderson told us, who first came up with the idea for Mirrorscape. “I wanted to create something that really gives you that feeling of playing with your friends, and AR was the technology that could do that,” he added.
Mirrorscape appeared on Kickstarter in 2022 and raised nearly $500,000. The company also had a $2 million seed round led by TenOneTen Ventures and Ethos VC.
It has since grown to about 7,000 beta users, the company said.
The company is in the process of developing Mirrorscape for compatibility with AR glasses and headsets, so gamers can play around with hand- and eye-tracking tracking, further enhancing high tech TTRPG sessions. For example, Mirrorscape leverages Qualcomm Technologies’ Snapdragon Spaces program, which enables smart glass wearers to automatically detect tabletop surfaces and manipulate game pieces. The company also notes that its platform is running on Lenovo’s AR glasses prototype.
The company hopes to make the platform available on VR headsets in the near future.
Although virtual tabletop games will never truly replace traditional TTRPGs, there’s potential for them to become a trend as AR and VR technology continue to evolve. On top of that, GMs curious about the high tech side of TTRPG play might love not having to hand-draw maps and painstakingly paint their own minis.
It’s hard to believe that it was only 11 years ago that VR captured the zeitgeist. In April 2012, Oculus hit Kickstarter with the Oculus Rift developer kit, and the tech world whipped itself into a “this is the future” frenzy. Facebook slapped a $2 billion check on the table and acquired the company in 2014.
But today, as it stands, VR is all but dead.
VR — as in, a system for being exclusively in virtual reality — barely exists as a concept anymore. Even the cheapest mainstream headset out there, the Meta Quest 2, has a passthrough feature, meaning it’s got AR capabilities. The Quest 3 adds higher-definition passthrough in full color. And, $3,500 price tag aside, Apple’s Vision Pro takes the concept so far that it doesn’t even really use the VR nomenclature anymore.
That’s because VR is missing the one crucial thing that could’ve taken it from “cool toy” to “must-have device”: a killer app. Even as the market has matured, VR is still struggling to find a reason to exist.
In 2015, TechCrunch published an article that speculated that the market could hit $150 billion of revenue by 2020. Here we are, nearing 2024, and it looks like the market sits at around $32 billion — a fifth of what the breathless analysts were guessing.
As though you didn’t think that you already had enough to do, now you have to get ready for the metaverse. Look, over at Facebook they are investing millions of dollars into creating virtual worlds for visitors to come to and interact with each other in. If Facebook thinks that this is going to be a big deal, then they are probably on to something. Product managers need to start to take the time getting use to what the metaverse is and how it is going to impact their customers.
So here’s something that product managers need to start to understand about the metaverse: your avatar’s attractiveness is a thing. In the metaverse the digital world transforms the real one in ways that are fun, freaky and at times frightening. So how can product managers get a glimpse of this metaverse thing? Simple – all you have to do is to strap a virtual-reality headset to your face. Right now there’s no real consensus on its technical definition, but broadly, the metaverse is viewed as being the next phase of the internet, where things jump out of our two-dimensional screens to occupy space in our three-dimensional world—or at least a parallel one.
The reason that the metaverse has become such a thing is because Facebook changed its name to Meta to reflect its growth beyond its namesake social-media platform. At the same time Mark Zuckerberg previewed his vision of how we’ll work, hang out, work out, shop and more as legless avatars. This can all be done by using Quest 2 headsets from his company. Not to be outdone, a week later, Microsoft did something similar, showing how we’ll all float around a virtual PowerPoint presentation. Product managers at those companies and others say it will take years and billions of dollars to build this digital universe. However, there are currently apps and spaces in VR that can give us a glimpse.
When you enter into the metaverse, it will be a life changing experience. You’ll quickly realize that it is better than a boring Zoom meeting. It will feel like other people are really sitting across from you, making direct eye contact. There are apps that provides a virtual conference room for meetings. This allows you to invite contacts to your private space via the web. If they have a Quest 2 headset, they can join in the 3-D space as an avatar. If not, they will join via video call and just watch your avatar. What’s interesting about the metaverse today is that although the avatars in different apps are very different, they will share one common trait: no legs.Both Meta and Microsoft want to provide the underlying platforms that will support the metaverse, letting us log into one account, build one avatar, then float across all our games, workout apps, meetings and more. Meta and Microsoft, the two companies sidelined in the mobile iOS-vs.-Android race, are looking to build the next iOS or Android for the metaverse. Then of course there is the hardware. Back in the day VR helmets required room sensors and spacewalk-like tethers to some overheated super PC. The self-powered Quest 2 is, by comparison, a breakthrough. Right now if you spend just an hour in it and you’ll face app crashes, performance slowdowns and battery drain. Product managers need to understand that the future is still far off.
We need to understand that virtual reality is an escape from the real world. Alternatively augmented reality brings digital objects into our real world, like holograms. The AR glasses that are required for us to see those holograms naturally, instead of as obviously superimposed digital sprites, are going to take five to 10 years of hardware evolution. Product managers are very interested in augmented reality because it’s grounded in the world that we share. It is believed that it can do a better job of integrating computing into the world than the way we are using computing today.
In the metaverse, you can pair your real Windows or Mac laptop to the headset so that your computer desktop appears on your virtual screen. What this allows is for you to be in a virtual meeting and take notes on your actual laptop. Once again, you’ll be typing on a real keyboard that you can’t see because of the VR headset. This means that you’ll end up with a lot of spelling errors. This kind of sums it up. Finding ways to blend the realverse and metaverse does makes sense, but in the meantime we’re going to deal with a whole lot of spelling errors!
Right now product managers spend their time trying to reach out to customers and let them know about their products. However, it is starting to look as though the future is going to be different. The metaverse is preparing to arrive and when it does, we’re all going to be interacting in a different way. Product managers need to understand what the metaverse is and we need to understand how it is going to affect our customers.
The metaverse has become a thing because Facebook and their CEO have decided to invest a great deal of money into it. Microsoft is also working on creating their version of a metaverse. Spending time in the metaverse will change how you view it. While you are there, it feels like you are really interacting with other people. Both Meta and Microsoft want to be the companies that create the hardware and the software that we use to create and interact with the metaverse. In addition to the metaverse, there is also augmented reality that combines what we can see with a virtual world. Currently the virtual world and the real world don’t always interface all that smoothly.
Product managers always have to be preparing to be successful in a changed world. Right now a number of companies are starting to invest heavily into a new way of interacting called the metaverse. It is still unclear as to if this will be successful. However, a lot of people appear willing to give it a try. We’re going to have to keep our eyes on this evolving way of interacting and then try to determine what it might mean for our products.
– Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
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Question For You: Do you think that product managers will be able to sell their products better in the metaverse?
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The Accidental Product Manager Blog is updated.Nobody ever wants to go to the hospital. However, if we do find ourselves there, we would like to think that the doctors know exactly what is wrong with us and that they have a way to fix us. However, let’s face it – the human body is really, really complex and often doctors are just guessing at what ails us. Product managers believe that that they may have an opportunity to fix this problem. They are taking a look at all of the patient records that exist and are trying to determine if they can be used to improve how patients are cared for.
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