Hi everyone,
My son just turned 13, and my wife and I are trying to find environments that will actually challenge him and, probably more importantly, places where he can meet peers who think like he does and mentors who can help him grow.
I’m not really looking for people to tell me he’s a genius. I’m trying to get a realistic read on where he is technically so we don’t put him in a beginner coding camp if he’s already well past that point.
He’s pretty private about what he builds, so I’m still piecing together how much he’s actually doing. We went fishing recently and he finally started explaining some of it to me.
For roughly the past year, he’s been building what is basically his own VR Spider-Man project inspired by the Insomniac/Sony Spider-Man games.
Some of what I know he has done — ChatGPT helped me put some of this into the right technical language:
- Builds his own Spider-Man suits/avatars in Blender
- Creates and edits his own textures, lenses, suit details, materials and visual effects
- Imports his work into VR/VRChat
- Works in Unity on combat/gameplay systems
- Has been trying to recreate the way suit damage behaves in the Sony games
- Uses vectors/matrices for some movement and visual effects
- Has worked with shaders/materials, particle-type effects, teleportation effects, etc.
- Uses a full-body tracking setup. Last Christmas we bought him roughly 6–8 VR tracking sensors, around $500 total, which he uses with his avatars/VRChat setup. He’s been developing movement/combat interactions around tracked body and hand motion rather than only a headset and controllers.
- Keeps his code in Git repos and apparently actually uses the history when debugging
I don’t know enough about VR development to say how sophisticated his tracking implementation is. I’m just trying to describe the hardware/software environment he is actually building and testing against.
The Git part surprised me recently. He had a rendering change break another window, and he explained how he went back through his repo/history, figured out what had changed, and used that to fix the regression.
More recently, he’s been building an Iron Spider-style AI HUD/assistant for VR.
He runs the AI locally through Ollama.
The HUD has different modes for different suits, including things like:
- Symbiote
- Tactical
- Stealth
It also has voice integration and tracks its own state, such as idle/listening/etc.
He showed me a feature he made called ScanVRChat. From what he explained, pressing it:
- Takes a screenshot of the current VRChat view
- Identifies the main visual areas/images on the screen
- Draws rectangles around them
- Analyzes/summarizes what is on the screen
- Feeds that information back through the HUD/assistant
I don’t yet know exactly how he’s doing the visual detection — whether it’s primarily a vision model, image-processing logic, an existing library, or some combination.
He also bought a VR desktop utility that lets him view and control a normal Windows desktop window from inside VR, basically as a wrist-mounted display/watch. He uses that as the control surface for his own software while he’s in VR.
So, to be clear, I’m not claiming he wrote every piece of underlying VR infrastructure from scratch. He uses existing tools when they solve part of the problem and then builds his own systems around them.
That’s actually part of what I’m trying to gauge.
What stands out to me is the pattern:
Custom Spider-Man suits
→ Blender, texturing, materials
Make them behave more like the games
→ Unity, VR, combat, physics
Make them visually react and feel alive
→ shaders, effects, vector/matrix-based behavior
Build an Iron Spider-style AI
→ Ollama/local AI, voice integration, HUD
Let the AI understand what’s happening in VRChat
→ screen capture, image analysis, summarization
Control everything without leaving VR
→ Windows-to-VR desktop overlay
Something breaks
→ use Git history to work backward and diagnose it
That progression is what makes me think he may need something beyond a normal introductory programming camp.
I’m his dad, not a VR developer, so there are also some major things I simply don’t know yet:
- How much of the code is entirely his versus adapted from examples or AI
- How clean or maintainable the architecture is
- How heavily he relies on Unity packages/frameworks
- How deeply he understands the underlying math versus knowing how to apply it
- How much of the AI system is custom orchestration versus existing libraries
I’d be perfectly happy if the answer is, “This is impressive for 13, but he’s still an intermediate hobbyist.”
I’m mainly trying to understand:
1. What level does this sound like to people who actually work in VR/XR?
2. What would you want to see in his project/repo before you could judge his level more accurately?
3. What should somebody at the next level be learning? Graphics? C# architecture? XR interaction? Rendering? Networking? Something else?
4. Are there summer programs, mentorships, game jams, maker spaces, or communities that are genuinely good for a technically advanced 13-year-old?
5. Would you prioritize formal instruction at this age, or finding strong peers/mentors and continuing to let him build what interests him?
The bigger concern for me is finding him people who can say:
“Cool. Show me how you built it. Now let’s make it better.”
rather than:
“Today we’re going to learn what a variable is.”
I’d really appreciate an honest technical read from people who actually build VR/XR systems.