#1348: The Journey from VRvana to Apple Vision Pro with co-founder Bert Nepveu

Bert Nepveu is a co-founder of VRvana, which made a enterprise mixed reality headset that was acquired by Apple in 2017 and provided a number of key innovations that have now shipped with the Apple Vision Pro. I had a chance to sit down with Nepveu to capture a comprehensive founder's journey from the beginning inspiration in 2005, the first prototype in 2013, the failed Kickstarter in 2014 after the Crescent Bay prototype at Oculus Connect 1 stole their thunder, and then their pivot into more enterprise applications of AR via mixed reality passthrough that eventually led to their acquisition by Apple that started at GDC 2017 and closed in September 2017, and then was leaked to TechCrunch in November 2017.

Nepveu was also able to talk about his experiences of working at Apple, the challenges of point-of-view correction to minimize warping for mixed reality, and how the multiple stakeholders of human interaction, industrial design, and secrecy dictated by legal departments ended up battling it out over a number of different design decisions.

Nepveu left Apple around three years ago to become a general partner of a VC firm called TripTyq Capital that is funding content creation innovations, and he didn't know if the Apple Vision Pro would ever actually ship or if he'd ever be able to talk about his many aspects of his journey with VRvana. But now that it has finally launched, he's able to speak more about his journey and why it was so emotional for him to finally get a chance to do a demo of the consumer release of the Apple Vision Pro last week.

Apple is notoriously secretive about so many technical details of their product development and business in general, and so this is a very unique and rare peak behind the scenes on a portion of the timeline for how the Apple Vision Pro came about through the lens of which parts of the VRvana mixed reality headset were able to be shipped with the Apple Vision Pro.