How VResh turned VRotten

One of my mothers is vegan, and somehow that's related to this story, apparently.

My other mother doesn't have dietary restrictions, so they met in the middle and I ended up being vegetarian. When we went somewhere for food as a family, we needed somewhere vegan, and thus we used to go to Real Food Daily pretty often. The lasagna is pretty good, I will say.

We don't go there much anymore, seeing as me and my siblings all joined the dark side (eating meat), abandoning the vegetarian diet that we were raised with.

In the photo, you may notice the glass building on the right with the frosted windows. It's a building we would usually walk past as we arrived to and left from the restaurant. Back in 2018, those windows weren't frosted, and you could see inside. On the back wall was a blue logo that looked like it came from a Spirograph.

After enough times walking past the building, I decided to google whatever the hell "VResh" was.

It was pretty much just "what if we remade YouTube and Twitch... but with only 360º video". Seemed interesting enough. I signed up for the beta and downloaded the app.

Oh yeah... it was a Testflight beta only.

So how, you may ask, are these 360º videos taken?

The answer is that the app supported all of 2 cameras (as far as I am aware): The Insta360 One and the Insta360 Nano S. They may have supported other Insta360 cameras as well, though I don't remember those.

Both of these connect to the lightning port on your iPhone (Android users can take a fat L), and the app can take videos and livestream from them.

I believe you were able to upload existing 360 videos from any camera, but I'm pretty sure livestreams had to be done via these two cameras.

So anyway, a purchase was made.

I never had any good opportunities to take good 360 videos with it, because I'm not some stunt biker, nor do I jump off cliffs or visit pristine rainforests. But hey, I got to see what the UI for the camera view was like.

Now how exactly did you watch the videos? Well you could always be lame and use your phone's gyroscope to point around the video, but all the cool kids had these sick shades:

As if you thought pointing your phone around to aim a 360 video couldn't look any dorkier...

It's literally a Google Cardboard built as a pair of glasses. And no, you cannot see out of them normally when they are not being used by your phone. The idea is that you carry these in your pocket, and if you friend video chats you with VResh, you can pull out these glasses and see where they are in 360 degrees.

If only it were as easy as putting on a pair of glasses.

First, you need to take your phone out of its case, since it can't take anything thicker than an iPhone 6. Also, if you have a phone that's thicker than an iPhone 6 without a case, you're SoL.

Second, if the sun's too bright, you're going to need to use some shade. Thankfully, they included cover that does just that. After you put on your incredibly bulky and front-heavy glasses, you put this cover over that.

Wow! The visibility improves so much! And it only took me 2 straight minutes of finicking with it to get it just right.

As easy as putting on glasses.

These glasses clearly weren't cheap to make, and were obviously bespoke. They had a complicated ball-bearing slide-latch mechanism that feels quite nice, but also... this cannot possibly be cheap.

The packaging was nice, too.

So... how exactly did they make money doing all this? A glass office on La Cienega Blvd, bespoke glasses, and 4K 360 video hosting can't possibly be cheap.

The answer is that they got mid-7-figure seed funding and spent it all on this stuff. The problem is that there's no real market for inconvenient 360 videos, live-streaming, and video calling. There is no world where setting up and putting on these glasses takes less effort than asking your friend to flip the camera on FaceTime so you can see what they see.

It would take a level of technological advancement to the point in which everyone is wearing AR glasses all the time to bring about such a use case, at which point there is no need for cumbersome Google Cardboard knockoffs.

Realistically, the only revenue stream here would be advertisements on videos and possibly livestreams. That's not exactly a good position to be in, given how saturated the video and streaming markets are.

It would be a shame if Google added 360 video support to YouTube just as the startup was getting off the ground. Except... Youtube had had 360 video support for 3 full years prior to VResh launching. Oops.

Well they were also promoting livesteaming so maybe they were trying to make a market there? Google beat them to the punch there too. By two years. Yikes.

VResh failed because they tried to solve a problem that didn't exist in a market already saturated with large players. They turned the $10 Google Cardboard gimmick into a ~$5,000,000 company and burnt through it all giving away complicated glasses. That money clearly went somewhere, but clearly not the employees. 😬

and that's not even a one-off.

Really, such a company should never have existed in the first place. This was millions of dollars wasted on the Google Cardboard fad, all just to shut down and move to China, where they have probably still failed because it's not like Chinese people want this either.

The app was certainly cool to explore, but not $5,000,000 cool. It was doomed to fail from the start, and I feel bad for all the workers whose talents went to waste with this. It's clear to me that there was a lot of expertise put into the glasses and the app, it's just something that had no way to generate revenue or lead a market.

Oh hey, someone on eBay is selling a brand new pair of VResh glasses.
It's been on sale since 2020 💀