When you really need speed

The University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) School of Science and Engineering has been the first field test for 20 Gig Google Fiber internet speed. Michael Eichenseer, who oversees the UMKC AR/VR lab and has his own company, VRdojo, got to try it out at work and decided to upgrade to Google Fiber’s 5 Gig at home.

When Google Fiber first came to Kansas City, I was attending the Missouri University of Science and Technology (Missouri S&T) in Rolla. From the moment it was announced, this country boy — who grew up in southern Missouri, gaming on hand-me-down computers and dial-up era internet connections — wanted nothing more than to live somewhere with a Google Fiber connection.

After living in a handful of states as I tried my hand at a traditional career (and inevitably landing in the ever-changing world of startups), that opportunity came. When a friend offered me a part-time position as a bartender in downtown Kansas City, I was quick to say yes like any successful entrepreneur.

The idea of bartending in KC appealed to me for a few reasons. One, I'm social by nature. Even my hours spent gaming in the basement as a kid were always spent online with friends. Getting paid to be social sounded pretty cool. Also, bartending downtown meant a direct connection to movers and shakers in the city. But most of all, the part-time nature of bartending left me more time for research, writing and developing prototypes for my true focus: Virtual Reality (VR).

Anytime I wasn't bartending — or helping open the first free roam VR arcade in Kansas City — I was home working with VR. I competed in some of the first-ever VR leagues, wrote countless blog posts about the future of VR technology and prototyped my ideas for VR applications. All of this was made easier by the best internet connection I'd ever experienced.

For the past four years, I've been focused on building my company, VRdojo. My Google Fiber service has been an integral part of helping me in the development process, specifically by making my uploading and downloading of the large files I deal with daily almost instant. It even saves us money because I can host large files and servers using my internet service from my home. We're building technologies to power massive virtual worlds, and not to bore anyone with the technical side of our business, VRdojo’s calculations show through our use of residential Google Fiber connection, that it could handle tens of thousands of users connected and online at one time. That is massive!

When I'm not working on VRdojo, I'm running the AR/VR Labs at UMKC where we're currently testing a 20 Gig Google Fiber connection. So far, my students are enjoying the same benefits as my company; they’ve experienced an incredibly low-friction workflow when it comes to downloading and uploading large files involved with real-time 3D development. There is also a lot of talk around how our team can further test the 20 Gig speeds for research and potential use cases such as streaming high-fidelity VR experiences directly to devices (I mean, imagine a YouTube video except it's 3D and interactive — no download or install required).

The gamer in me that grew squeezing all I could out of a dial up internet connection has never been happier. The entrepreneur in me continues to believe we've barely scratched the surface on ultra-high bandwidth internet connections and their possibilities. I truly believe Kansas City is one of the best places for entrepreneurs, especially those building in the digital world, and a big part of that experience, for me, has been driven by my use of Google Fiber. 

Michael Eichenseer, AR/VR Coordinator, UMKC, and Founder, vRDojo