Notes

Holos setzt darauf, dass die Zukunft von VR in der Bildung liegt.
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Holos didn’t follow the paths of most other startups: The majority of whom start off by finding a niche problem in a particular industry and solving it (often through technology) for consumers.
Instead, Founders of Holos, Tyler Waite (COO) and Dan Borkhus (CEO), pulled a reversal and came to education by way of Virtual Reality (VR).
Waite first used a VR headset in 2014 when he purchased one of the early Oculus Rift Developer Kits from a Kickstarter Campaign. He’d already been dabbling in the startup world, meeting Borkhus for the first time when he responded to a startup team posting in a UW Facebook group in the second semester of his freshman year at UW-Madison, but from the first time he put on the headset he knew this was a game-changer.
“Ok…this is way different,” Waite remembered thinking. “This presents so many more challenges and the frontiers are wide open. It made me want to get in here and start designing things.”
Waite had experience with web and graphic design, and the prospect of taking his 2D skills and mapping it onto a truly limitless virtual environment was thoroughly enticing.
They then began spending much of their time in the UW-Madison IoT (Internet of Things) Research Center. The early iterations of what would later become Holos started work on VR applications for apartment customization, until they eventually shifted into designing a kind of home space for the headsets. Sort of like how on the Xbox or Wii there’s a virtual lobby before actually playing the game.
In late 2015, Waite, Borkhus and two others who left before Holos’ incorporation, entered the Discovery to Product (D2P) program, a full-fledged incubator housed under the umbrella of the office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education.
As part of D2P’s second cohort they received a grant for $60,000 to build an alpha version, focusing more on customer discovery and evolving a more distinct base of IP.
While Waite was still an undergraduate, they started fielding meetings with headset manufacturers out on the west coast and in China. These were hardware companies without the expertise or capital to develop their own software solutions, but the early Holos team soon found that these companies were often unwilling to jump fully into the space without glancing side to side at their competitor’s moves.
Perhaps due to the fledgling nature of the VR industry (which is still in its infancy today) or maybe the unwillingness of San Francisco tech executives to entrust major funding to undergraduates in a space ruled by Facebook’s Oculus Rift (acquired in 2014 for $2 billion) and Taiwanese behemoth HTC, Waite saw the scene out in the Bay Area to be overly political and found little benefit in those early meetings — besides for an elevated awareness of the way the game is played.
As Holos became more of a known quantity in the VR world, the question of location reared its head: Could a startup with enough ambition to model their arc after Apple, in an industry with major players and consumer-enthusiasts even more skewed toward the coasts than even most software-focused industries, remain in a developing but still obviously limited entrepreneurial hub like Madison?
Waite sees Holos’ disassociation from the rest of the VR world as a major boon.
“Companies that raised like five to seven million ended up shutting down two years ago already, because their speed was just too fast,” Waite said. He attributed their flameout to Silicon Value’s unofficial ethos of faster, better, bigger…NOW.
“Being over [in Madison] and our journey of having like three or four years for experimentation helped us survive that first wave and continue to build something valuable,” Waite said.
Experimentation might be an understatement. The team went through myriad use-cases and pivots in their journey through the Madison startup ecosystem, which they have made utterly thorough use of (D2P, gBETA, Madworks and StartingBlock Madison are just some of the resources and programs Holos used to make it to their current stage).
Moving from the early days in the IoT lab playing around with the idea of apartment customization, to their virtual lobby, they eventually found a bit of a foothold in the enterprise collaboration space.
They worked to develop a platform for teams (marketed toward businesses) to have a 3D space to collaborate virtually, write on whiteboards, pull up files, pictures and the like. They ran into a problem with the technology, as the multiplayer features their concept required were not yet fully formed.
“If we were pitching an investor it’s like: ‘here’s what we will sell, we just need money to get to that point,’ but they don’t generally like that,” Waite explained, citing a certain conservatism investors have about putting money into an idea that requires technological breakthroughs in order to come to fruition.
Soon after, the Holos team found through customer exploration that educators and leaders in the education industry were among those most loudly clamoring for VR solutions but had very little as far as companies building products for their needs.
Education has always been an industry sitting on the cutting edge of technology. This may seem counterintuitive, it certainly was to me, however in spite of the reluctance of educators to embrace meaningful change in areas like multiple intelligence theory or other individualist approaches, technology has often found early-adopters in classrooms and teacher’s lounges across the country.
In 1977, Apple brought the original Apple II to market. By the end of the line’s run in 1993, somewhere between five and six million of the home computers had been sold.
Much of its success was actually due to mass volume sales to educational institutions, as well as a sizeable donation of the product to the California school’s system. This donation, in large part, was precipitated by a 25 percent tax credit given to institutions willing to donate computers to public and private schools. Apple Co-Founder Steve Jobs essentially summoned this tax credit from thin air, lobbying the California legislature and winning, allowing Jobs to put an Apple computer at the fingertips of a generation of future customers.
According to Waite, VR is in a similar stage to early personal computing and the way forward is through the classroom.
In one end product Waite sees coming down the pipeline for Holos, teachers would be building out the specifics of their lesson plan, incorporating environments like the Roman Coliseum and 3D renderings of ancient statues. They would be able to build and upload these things into their lessons for use in their own classrooms and eventually share and borrow from a “robust library of content”.
Waite explained that in order to scale, Holos can’t be the bottleneck as the sole originator of new experiences, so their goal is to foster and supplement their users creating and building content.
He talked about building on the way the internet democratized information and says Holos is going to help usher in this next paradigm.
“This next phase is about democratizing that experience. It’s one thing to get knowledge but it’s a whole other thing experiencing it. It gives the students more agency to learn these things through direct experience,” Waite said.
The education industry isn’t the only technological maven scoping out the VR scene. Quite possibly mirroring the early internet’s military upbringing, the Air Force has become a key player and funder of Holos’ rise.
Just as the team had set off to work on their six-month runway to produce software for their education pilot program, they noticed a few emails advertising the Techstars’ Air Force Accelerator. They eventually applied, in spite of their initial reservations of adding a second market segment to their already tightly scheduled development schedule.
Though Holos was not admitted into the accelerator program, they were encouraged to apply for SBIR funding. They received a $50,000 Phase I grant to pursue customer discovery with the Air Force for three months.
One of the use-cases they eventually reached was to enable Air Force personnel to create immersive learning experiences to facilitate the maintenance and repair of the F-35 .
Last week, Holos was accepted into Phase II, which will grant Holos $750,000 for 15 months of runway.
Originally Holos was going to be the name of the product, and the company would be called Turing VR, after the legendary English mathematician and computer scientist.
One of Turing’s most pervasive contributions to science and philosophy was the Turing Test. The test was created in 1950 as a way to determine whether a machine has reached a sufficiently advanced level of processing to be considered ‘thinking’ on par with that of a human. If a machine can fool a human judge into believing it to be a human via a text-only channel, it is said to have passed the Turing Test.
Borkhus saw major parallels to the work they’ve been exploring in VR — mainly in the blurring of lines between reality and the machine-generated environment.
But to avoid the confusing dichotomy between the naming of company and product, they went with Holos, a combination of ‘whole’ and ‘operating system’.
Walking into a low-key building on the East side of Madison, you pass a tattoo parlor, both photography and sculptor studios until you reach the back office that houses Holos’ six full time employees and two interns.
Their open plan office space is decked out with knick-knacks: Legos sit in a jar on the conference table pushed far into one corner nook, one of those toy geometric balls that expand when you toss it up high in the air (It’s called a Hoberman sphere, I Googled it) sits handy on a shelf, the walls are covered in paintings and shelves replete with enough vaguely artsy trappings that you might understandably double check if you actually did walk into one of the studios next door.
The center of the office is wide open to facilitate free use of the VR headsets that sit around the office awaiting use for the test of the latest design.
The morning that I dropped in to Holos HQ, Waite showed me one of their educational programs which was in development. First, he draped the VR set over his eyes and around his head, tapping the air in front of him like Robert Downey Jr. in Iron Man, doing god-knows-what but seeming like he knew just the right imaginary buttons to press.
When Waite told me about their early project to build a lobby type space for the VR sets, he made an off-handed comment that stuck out as telling to me:
“We wanted people to be able to get cozy in their virtual environment.”
It’s no surprise he sees VR from a different perspective than a novice like me and most of the public. I should hope that after years pitching investors on his various VR projects, he would have an evolved understanding.
But still, cozy?
When I saw him wearing the headset, fiddling with the virtual instruments in front of him like it was the most natural thing in the world, all the while fielding questions from a coworker about how to best respond to an Email from a partner, it certainly seemed like he was fully at home in this completely artificially constructed world.
In all likelihood, Waite’s comfort in the virtual domain will become the norm. The same way it blew people’s minds in the 70’s to have a personal computer at their disposal, it seems insane that we could all one day be using VR headsets for everyday minutiae, and feel totally accustomed to the experience.
But there’s no doubt the VR revolution is under way. Whether it’s Holos or one of their competitors, a new tech giant will all but certainly emerge from the VR software world and enter the realm of the Apples and Facebooks of the world.


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