Hi PH!
I'm Cameron and one of the cofounders of Bonsai Desk along with my brother @callumferguson. Special thanks to @katmanalac for hunting us!
TLDR
Bonsai Desk helps you build better VR experiences. We get 3D session recordings from your user's headsets and let you see replays of how people fail to use your app.
Problem
VR has the flexibility to let people build very new experiences. This is great but opens the door for the UX in VR to be much more broken than in web-apps or flatscreen-games. As the developer, it’s hard to put yourself in the shoes of your new users and make intuitive experiences. A potential solution is doing user research studies, but these cost lots of money, produce hours of video to sift through, and go stale with new updates.
Solution
We provide a Unity SDK that links in game events to 3D session recordings. Our backend processes this data and lets you see 3D replays of people in specific scenarios. Amplitude can tell you that you have a 40% drop-off in your funnel but we will show you why!
Backstory@callumferguson and I previously shipped an app on Quest (also called Bonsai Desk) and considered building something like this at the time but could not justify the time sink.
It turns out we’re not alone in wanting a 3D replay and analytics system. We’ve come across people who have already built out internal versions of this tool, are planning on building one, or attempt to solve the underlying problem via roundabout means!
Fun tech stuff
The special sauce here is 3D replays. We found a lightweight way to record and save realtime game data like the positions and rotations of game objects. This data gets sent to our backend and can be used to reconstruct session replays from any 3D experience. This is useful for all types of gaming and we're focusing on VR right now!
FullStory is underrated for uncovering UX issues and getting "inside" the user's head. I can see how useful this would be for game/3D world development.
Hey congratulations Cameron and Callum. This is such a cool product!
Customer understanding for the Metaverse is going to be a huge market. And 3D replays is a genius idea.
Good luck and go Bonsai Desk!
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