Samsung’s former Design Lead Alex Chu helped bring the Gear VR headset to life and was instrumental in the design of Milk VR, Samsung’s 360 video portal. Now, Chu has left Samsung to start his own company Vicarious VR, who promise to deliver an immersive, accessible storytelling platform for everyone.
Alex Chu, who held the post of Head of Design at Samsung’s R&D division in Dallas for 3 years, was instrumental in bringing one of the first virtual reality consumer devices to life (Gear VR) and is now planning to leverage that experience to kick-start his own VR company, with the help of his co-founder, entrepreneur JM Yujuico.
The company is Vicarious VR and it’s focused on delivering a VR toolset for building immersive stories that’s intuitive and accessible and plan to paired that with a publishing platform, so you can build and share your content all within the same suite of software.
“So far so predictable” I hear you cry, but here’s the twist; you design and build your content in virtual reality. This has many advantages beside just being plain cool, it allows you to see your creations as they’d appear to others – building virtual worlds and assets within the medium of VR, avoiding creative misdirection and frustration whilst swapping between your 2D workspace and your VR world. Meanwhile the company claim that their ‘one touch’ publishing solution streamlines the job of getting your work out there in to the world.
Given Chu’s prior experience in UI/UX design in and around VR, that promise of intuitive accessibility is tantalising, but the company have yet to share their work with public or press just yet. You can however sign up to their limited ‘creator pilot program’ which kicks off some time in December.
Vicarious VR are one of the 24 VR startups pitching their ideas today at VR Launchpad alongside 50 VR companies showing their latest product demonstrations.
