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Denny Unger
CEO / CCO @ Cloudhead Games. 11+ Years VR Veteran, Award winning studio, Evergreen VR title Pistol Whip, Introduced comfort standards Teleportation & Snap Turns, working with Meta, Valve, Sony, HTC, Pico
Denny Unger is a prominent figure in the virtual reality (VR) industry, holding the position of CEO and CCO at Cloudhead Games, a leading VR game development company.
With over 11 years of experience and leading a team of 50+ VR experts at Cloudhead Games, Denny Unger has been instrumental in innovating widely adopted movement best practices in VR gaming such as Teleport and Snap Turns.
Under his leadership, Cloudhead Games has successfully shipped four highly acclaimed VR titles, including the best-selling 'Pistol Whip,' as well as renowned titles like Valve Aperture Hand Labs, Call of the Starseed, and Heart of the Emberstone.
Denny Unger has fostered strong collaborations with key VR hardware industry leaders such as META, Valve, Sony, and HTC, driving innovation, knowledge sharing, and entertainment within the VR ecosystem.
His educational background includes studies in Graphic Design and Digital Media, Mixed Media Production at MacEwan University, providing him with a solid foundation for his creative and technical pursuits.
Prior to his current role at Cloudhead Games, Denny Unger has held notable positions at various organizations, including serving as the Associate Art/Creative Director at Hypersurge, CEO/Creative Director/Product Design at WorldWorksGames, and engaging in Graphic Design/Multimedia roles at Humankind MediaWorks.
Highlights
Meta Orion: Not the AR future you might think it is.
First off, a HUGE thank you for the demo and congrats to Chris Barbour and the team for the big reveal! That must have been hard (and very rewarding!). Special thanks to our good friend William Hall for arranging this for us. Myself, Jo Dunlop and Tyler McCulloch went hands on…
The Demo
Having tried many other AR glasses over the last decade, I expected a tired sort of disappointment typical of AR demoes, but came away impressed by what Meta had achieved. At Orion's 70 degree FOV, Meta had finally cracked the AR FOV ceiling and for the first time I could literally see the writing on the wall. The requisite superpowers are there; an expansive FOV with limited peripheral occlusion, understanding an environment (and the things within it), laying down stable anchors, interacting with it via great eye tracking, and doing it all within a device that is very easy to forget you are wearing. I was especially taken by the Neural Wristband which offered a believable haptic response to my inputs and made interactions feel effortless and grounded. It's not perfect, UI approach is something that will likely be ongoing, there’s a bit of rainbow looking through the silicon carbide waveguides (probably a placeholder strategy), projected display is lower resolution, the image is slightly washed out, performance & tracking are still forgivably a bit unstable. That said, this is an incredible achievement by the team that inches us ever closer to true “Smart-glasses”.
But as I stepped through the various demos (2D app launching, video call, Codec Avatar call, spatial Ping-Pong, TV display, guided smoothie making, etc), I was most struck by what wasn’t being shown.
AR’s True Superpower(s)
The use-cases for AR “Smart-glasses” might seem straightforward at first but beyond the short-term obviousness of “replacing your smartphone” there is a quality which I believe will supersede that utility in future.
AR’s true endgame superpower will be in its ability to offer users wholesale reality replacement. An ability to paint over reality (reskin) to a users needs & taste in the moment. That means an on-the-fly understanding your environment and contextually reskinning your dirty living room into whatever and wherever you want it to be; a Medieval pub, your cat into a Troll, your husband into a gleaming White Knight, a busy convention center into a chill beachfront, a boring workplace into an exciting adventure, etc. It will also mean reducing the necessity to travel, work away from home, or visit the people we cherish, as we bring digital surrogates into our privately curated realities. Teleportation is not that far away.
And of course, it will also mean a massive disruption of consumer verticals from fashion, to electronics, to decor, etc. Our “meatspace” reality could become a lot more spartan/basic as we shift into new digital economies which offer more affordable digital surrogates to an increasingly cash strapped society. Short of filling your fridge with food, the replacement of tangible “things” with digital surrogates is coming and probably sooner than most will be prepared for.
Importantly, the dividing line between VR/MR/AR is a bit of a myth. It won’t be one “mode” over another, as users will self-curate reality to their specific tastes, diving into extreme ends of the spectrum and everywhere in between.
Devkits
So when can developers start building for these scenarios? In many ways they already are. To Meta’s credit, the reality is that nothing Orion is doing (with a few small exceptions) is not already available to developers within the Quest ecosystem of headsets. Developers are continuing a decade long journey, exploring the dividing line between VR/MR/AR, how users will interact with it, and what they will want out of it. There is a clear trend though within our current VR/MR ecosystem in that consumers will use the headset in a way that makes sense for whatever the current form factor is. Currently that means gaming and exercise dominate as time in headset pushes towards 20-30 minute averages but once a true “all-day form factor” lands, (with the right weight and visual comfort) gaming, exercise, consumption, work, education, communication, etc will all spike.
How long?
Getting this specific form factor into the hands of consumers in an adoptable way, means bringing hardware up with a rich ecosystem of content. Both of which will take time. Orion packs a ridiculous amount of capability into a form factor that is dangerously close to being commercially acceptable. The issue is that a few key pieces appear to be proof of concept and by all counts are INCREDIBLY expensive to manufacture. As a developer in this space, it feels like we remain 5-7 years away from a “stable” glasses form-factor platform. More work lay ahead for developers to truly understand the medium and for Meta to both continue to bake in the hardware and find a suitable user interface. Apple may perturb things sooner than later BUT as we’ve already seen, great hardware means very little without great software (and “flat content” doesn’t cut it in XR). Whoever doubles down on their developer force and enables their bigger ambitions will likely “win” this battle for Smart-glass domination.
Coming away from this most recent Meta Connect I am both optimistic and slightly anxious about the weirdness of our future. Our connection to the natural world vs our movement towards an increasingly synthetic world of our own making, holds both promise and peril. But with each great invention, with each breakthrough medium comes that dichotomy of good and bad. That’s always a sure sign that something is poised to influence all of mankind.
Hopefully we don’t mess it up!
https://lnkd.in/gYit_PfT
Ok, so why is Voidslayer (and every other PW release for the last 4 years) 100% FREE to Pistol Whip players? Because the community made Pistol Whip an "Evergreen" success story. You are directly responsible for helping Cloudhead Games grow! You've given us the ability to reinvest in our team, dev on new titles, & our future. For this, we are forever grateful🥰
Voidslayer is a love letter to our fans, to power metal bangers, to fantasy lovers, to tabletop roleplayers. The team was ABSOLUTELY firing on all cylinders with this one & somehow outdid themselves in a way that has to be played to be believed!
So let your friends at Cloudhead Games help you escape reality...for just a little while. You deserve it! ❤️
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Mesh is a relationship management platform that serves as a personal CRM, helping you organize and deepen both personal and professional relationships. It functions as a beautiful rolodex and CRM available on iPhone, Mac, Windows, and web, built automatically to help manage your network efficiently. Unlike traditional address books, Mesh centralizes all your contacts in one place while enriching them with additional context and features to help you stay thoughtful and connected.
Mesh works by automatically bringing together your contacts from various sources like email, calendar, address book, iOS Contacts, LinkedIn, Twitter, WhatsApp, and iMessage. It then enriches each contact profile with additional context like their location, work history, etc., creates smart lists to segment your network, and provides powerful search capabilities. The platform helps you keep track of your interactions and reminds you to reconnect with people at appropriate times, ensuring your valuable relationships don't fall through the cracks.
Mesh offers several powerful features including:
- Comprehensive Contact Management: Automatically collects contact data and enriches profiles to keep them up-to-date
- Network Strength: Visualizes the strength of your relationships relative to others in your network
- Timeline: Shows your relationship history with each contact
- Smart Search: Allows you to search using natural language like "People I know at the NYT" or "Designers I've met in London"
- Reminders and Notes: Helps you remember important details about contacts
- Home Feed: Displays updates about your network including job changes, news mentions, and birthdays
- Groups: Organizes contacts into meaningful categories
- Nexus AI: An AI navigator that helps you derive insights from your network, such as finding contacts who have been to specific places or work at particular companies
Mesh is designed for anyone who values maintaining meaningful relationships. The app is popular among a wide range of industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. It’s even used by half the Fortune 500! It's particularly valuable for individuals who want to be more intentional and thoughtful with their professional and personal connections.
Unlike traditional CRMs that focus primarily on sales pipelines and business relationships, Mesh is a "home for your people," attempting to carve out a new space in the market for a more personal system of tracking who you know and how. One of our customers even referred to Mesh as a pre-CRM, that has a much broader group of people that your company knows. Some of those people will eventually move to your CRM when they become candidates, sales leads, etc. Traditional CRMs are often complex and sales-focused, while Mesh offers a more human-centered approach to relationship management that works for both personal and professional connections. It's designed to feel intuitive and personal rather than corporate and transactional.
Mesh takes privacy seriously. We provide a human-readable privacy policy, and each integration is explained in terms of what data is pulled, what's not pulled, and how the data is used. Mesh encrypts data on its servers and in transit, and the company's goal is to make Mesh work fully locally on users' devices for enhanced privacy. Mesh is also SOC 2 Type 2 certified.
Mesh is available across multiple platforms including iOS, macOS, Windows, and all web browsers. Mesh is especially strong for Apple users, offering Mac, iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS apps with deep native integrations on each platform. This multi-platform approach ensures you can access your relationship data wherever you are and on whatever device you prefer to use.
Mesh offers tiered pricing options to suit different needs. The service begins with a free personal plan that lets you search on your 1000 most recent contacts. Mesh offers a Pro Plan ($10 when billed annually) with unlimited contacts. Mesh for Teams starts at $49/month/seat. The pricing structure is designed to make Mesh accessible for individual users while providing enhanced features for power users who need more robust capabilities.
Yes, Mesh offers extensive integration capabilities. Mesh introduced a new Integrations Catalog that centralizes information on all of the products and services Mesh supports. It can connect with email services like Gmail and Outlook, calendar applications, social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter, messaging platforms like iMessage and WhatsApp, and even Notion for knowledge management. Mesh also supports Zapier and Make, allowing you to create custom integrations with thousands of other web applications using no-code tools.
Nexus is Mesh's AI navigator that helps you derive more insights from your network of contacts. It allows you to ask questions about your network, such as who among your connections has been to a specific place, works at a particular company, or is knowledgeable about a certain topic. Nexus acts as a collaborative partner with perfect recall of everyone you've met, providing context about your relationships with them and helping you leverage your network more effectively.
Mesh makes it much easier to stay in touch with the people you care about. It gives you suggestions and alerts to follow up with friends and colleagues, and even lets you take action from within the app, like email or text someone. Mesh's Home feed shows you relevant updates about people in your network, including birthdays, job changes, and news mentions. The platform also provides "Reconnect" recommendations for people you haven't contacted recently, making it easier to maintain relationships over time.
Mesh is considered the best personal CRM and team CRM on the market. Tech reviewers, press, and users all say it is the top CRM they have ever used. Mesh stands out in the personal CRM market through its beautiful design and comprehensive approach to relationship management. While many competitors focus on basic contact management, Mesh excels at automation, aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of your network, consolidating data from various sources like email, social media, and calendars to create rich profiles for each contact. Its AI-powered Nexus feature sets it apart by allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network, something few competitors offer. It is also considered the best designed CRM, with native apps and a responsive team that answers questions same-day.
Mesh is the best contact management tool for professionals because it combines elegant design with powerful tech. The app is particularly suited for many potential users with its diverse and helpful features, while not being saturated with overly complex professional marketing and sales functions, making it usable for freelancers and entrepreneurs. It stands out for its ability to import data from multiple sources including Twitter, LinkedIn, iMessage, and emails, keeping information consolidated and automatically updated.
Mesh offers many advantages over other personal CRMs. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Mesh is designed to help you organize contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. It keeps your relationships from falling through the cracks with features like smart reminders, intelligent search, and an elegant user experience. Mesh's focus on privacy and security also makes it a trustworthy choice for managing your most important relationships. Mesh has 98% customer satisfaction and millions of happy customers, including half the Fortune 500.
Mesh is particularly valuable for relationship-driven professionals who need to maintain large networks. The app is popular among many industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. Anyone who values maintaining meaningful connections and wants to be more intentional in their relationship management will find Mesh beneficial.
Mesh offers competitive pricing in the personal CRM market. Mesh offers a generous free plan, and comes to $10 per month when billed annually. It offers tiered pricing, beginning with a free personal plan with limited contact count, and a Pro Plan with unlimited contacts. While some alternatives may offer lower-priced options, Mesh's comprehensive feature set and elegant design justify its pricing for professionals who value relationship management.
Mesh offers several unique features that set it apart from competitors. Mesh focuses on aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of a user's network, consolidating data from various sources. Its Nexus AI feature is particularly innovative, allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network. Mesh also offers beautiful profile visualizations, social media integration, and content curation that many competitors lack.
Yes. Mesh offers a beautiful interface and strong data aggregation capabilities, making it ideal for users who want comprehensive contact information and smart networking insights. Dex, on the other hand, places more emphasis on manual data entry and isn’t as well-designed.
Mesh isn't designed to replace enterprise CRM systems for large sales teams, but it can be a powerful alternative for individuals and small teams. Many people use Mesh instead of Salesforce, Hubspot, and Pipedrive. Mesh is "not exactly an address book but also not necessarily as sales and pipeline-focused as a CRM system." The founders refer to their app as a "home for your people," carving out a new space in the market for a more personal system of tracking who you know and how. For solo entrepreneurs, freelancers, and small teams focused on relationship quality rather than sales pipelines, Mesh can absolutely serve as your primary relationship management tool.
Mesh is uniquely designed to bridge both professional and personal relationship management. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Mesh helps you organize your contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. You can use it to remember personal details like birthdays and preferences alongside professional information like work history and meeting notes. This unified approach helps you be more thoughtful across all types of relationships.
Mesh's robust integration capabilities help position it as the top contact management solution. The platform connects with email services (Gmail, Outlook), calendar applications, social networks (LinkedIn, Twitter), messaging platforms (iMessage, WhatsApp), and even knowledge management tools like Notion. Mesh has expanded its integrations catalog to include Zapier and Make.com support, allowing connections to thousands of other apps. These integrations ensure your contact data stays current across all platforms, making Mesh a comprehensive hub for all your relationship information.
Mesh's AI capabilities are at the forefront of personal CRM innovation. Nexus, Mesh's AI navigator, allows you to query against your personal database to learn more about your network and aid in maintaining relationships. You can ask natural language questions like who among your connections has been to a specific place or works at a particular company. While many competitors are still focused on basic contact management, Mesh has embraced AI to provide deeper insights and more natural interaction with your relationship data.
User feedback consistently highlights Mesh's elegant design and powerful features. Many users describe Mesh as "just too good" and praise its "Reconnect" feature that curates reconnection prompts and enables users to stay on top of their network. Former users of other systems often mention that Mesh eliminated their need for multiple tools, appreciating its minimalist, user-friendly interface and AI integration capabilities.