Hi all, it's been a while between drinks here. I still scoot around from time to time on the 2D forums, but I've been rather busy for the last two years!
Here's the story.
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In 2014 I started a job teaching Game Design. I'd been making games professionally since 2007, and decided I wanted to give something back. During my time teaching, I started an internal project at the college, based around a big need. We had students all over Australia, and most of them had no access to a classroom. They'd study from home, lose inertia, drop out.
So I made a live classroom in VR. Students could connect with an Oculus Rift, talk to other students and teachers in a beautiful environment, and study their course material.
It was a fantastic tool, and the college soon green-lit development. It was short lived, however, as the college was on the bad end of some negative (and arguably deserved) press. They shuttered the project after 3 months. I was bummed, but a seed had been planted in my brain.
The big thing I discovered was that even though we were in a beautiful 3D world, and students could learn in groups,
the learning content was still 2D. All of it, even the 3D modelling components, were displayed as PDF's or PowerPoint presentations. If we wanted to recreate our course material natively for a 3D space, that would take an impossible amount of time and resources. The problem was that the tools for sharing knowledge in 3D didn't exist.
I took a Friday off work, locked myself in my study, and started coding. By the end of the weekend, I had my prototype.
It was the very first Jig. It wasn't much to look at, but it was the beginning - I had created a tool that allowed you to make 3D instructions for anything. I quickly enlisted my older brother to put together a server to host and serve these 3D instructions, and we fleshed out a proper proof of concept. I took a week off work, and got stuck in.
My plan was to take it to Oculus Connect (the big VR conference for the Oculus platform), and show it to people. I reached out to a few companies and startup accelerators, but only one responded - Boost VC, and they wanted to meet me. I scrambled together the final parts of my prototype, working up until 3 hours before my flight in a mad attempt to get ready.
The investor told me, "it's not the best demo I've ever seen, but I like the idea". He invited me to apply for their accelerator, suggesting we were "a good fit".
I phoned my friend Numa, who had worked with me on the VR classroom at the college, and asked him:
"
I know that I need codes but I dont know the codes".
He accepted the role of CTO, and we were now a team of three.
Fast forward to January 2016. We landed in San Francisco, home of Silicon Valley, to start the most intense, gruelling, and purposeful period of my life. The outcome?
JigSpace - Create and share interactive, 3D instructions for anything.
You can see my pitch, full of Red Bull and nerves, to a room of 200 investors. Folks, I was terrified.
Fast forward another year, and here we are! Two months ago we gave a talk at Microsoft Build 2017 (
check out the video here), and also released the final part of the JigSpace platform.
The Jig Workshop.
This is the tool that lets you create Jigs. It's at the very heart of the JigSpace platform, and every single one of the 150 odd Jigs on
jig.space/explore were created with it. All the way from the simple, early Jigs (
Change a flat tyre), to our latest and most complex ones (
Manual Transmission).
Finally, this tool is available to everyone. You can download it at
jig.space/create, import models from your computer, or play around with ones in the Model Store.
The best part? It's free. Our vision is to create a world where you can ask "How does that work?", and the answer is immediately available in 3D, on the device you have with you. We can only do that with a community of people sharing what they know. In short, we're indexing humanity's knowledge in 3D.
So there you have it! Please go have a look around
our website, make a few Jigs, and break stuff. 17 years ago my dad handed me the DBC trial on a CD, and I was hooked. I'm very proud of what we've built, and I'd love to get feedback from the community that got me started.
TL;DR - I need a holiday.
Cheers,
Greenlig (aka, Zac)
JigSpace
