Convrge

» see convrge.co as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

convrge sat in the part of internet history i can read about but cannot personally remember. i never owned an oculus rift dk1 or dk2. by '15 i was working on edge ai and embedded vision in ankara, and my hardware budget went into nvidia jetson boards rather than consumer vr headsets. the social-vr space that convrge tried to define was a US-and-northern-europe early-adopter scene built around developer-kit headsets that were never widely sold in turkey.

shawn whiting and hayden lee built it. they met at virginia tech, lived in a nashville apartment, and shipped the first public version in january '15. the design choice that got convrge most of its press was the social-environments-first approach. instead of a tools sandbox like other early social vr, you logged in and arrived in a room. the headline rooms were the fireside campfire (where avatars sat and talked) and the mountaintop cinema (a dance floor that synced lighting and music to a youtube-fed soundtrack, used for scheduled multi-user dance parties).

the moment that put convrge in the press cycle was the road to vr writeup in january '15 about a virtual dance party they held with the user base. the engagement model was simple. the moment-to-moment feel of being in the same room with another person's avatar was the actual product. for what it was, the dance-floor experience was genuinely affecting for early users who described it later as the first time social vr felt social.

they moved from nashville to seattle later in '15 to recruit and scale. the consumer oculus rift launched in march '16. on february 25, '16 whiting and lee posted a note saying they had stopped working on convrge. the server stayed live for a while afterward but no new development happened. the project closed before the consumer headset that would have given it a user base actually shipped.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

the social vr scene of 2014 to 2016 was small and split between a few projects. altspacevr was the larger competitor working on a broader hangout product, and vrchat launched in early access on steam in february '17. convrge was the smaller, room-first take on the same question of what a shared vr space should feel like.

the choice to start with curated environments instead of a sandbox is what people remember about convrge. the campfire-with-conversation as a default scene set the design language for what altspacevr and later horizon worlds would lean on more heavily. the small scale of the team meant the design choices were tight, not the kind of feature buffet a venture-funded team would have shipped.

~ what it became ~

convrge as a product did not survive the consumer headset launch. the social-vr design lineage it represented continued through altspacevr (eventually bought by microsoft, eventually shut down in march '23) and vrchat (the actually successful long-tail outcome of the category). the founders moved on to other vr work. the convrge brand and url did not come back.

the small early-vr-startup pattern that convrge fits is now the dominant story of that whole era. dk-era social vr was a wave of small studios with strong opinions about presence and avatars. most of them shipped a thing and ran for a year or two on developer hype before closing when the consumer headset they were building toward arrived with bigger competitors funded for it. convrge is one of the more aesthetically remembered of those.

credit to Leonard Wohlfarth, who was there at the fireside.

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