VR Startup showcase VR Launchpad is now less than a day away and, in addition to a lively collection of hand-picked virtual reality pioneers and entrepreneurs in attendance, Nvidia will be showing off its latest, cutting-edge VR-ready laptop at the event.
Emergent is creating ‘Mobius’, an app and platform enabling users to capture and share VR experiences using existing smartphones. From a user standpoint, Mobius seems like a fairly typical 360 degree stitching app, like Photosynth or Photo Sphere (part of Google Camera), which can output the scene in a VR-ready view. But the company has a fairly awesome twist up their sleeve: seamless video integration into still photo spheres.
VR Launchpad, the VR startup showcase, is upon us. Tomorrow the halls of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA will be filled with a diverse group of hand-picked VR startups alongside investors, media, and VR influencers. And it’s not too late to grab your ticket.
Aashna Mago talks about the first Women in VR event in San Francisco that she helped organize on September 20th, 2015. There were over 200 people who attended the event that featured 13 women luminaries who are working in virtual reality, demos from Bay area start-ups, as well as brainstorming sessions about how to get more women into VR. Aashna talks about what gets her excited about getting more women interested within VR, and adding more diversity to the virtual reality field. Aasha has had an interesting path for getting into virtual reality that’s included teaching herself programming, taking a number of strategic mentorship positions, and studying computer science at Stanford University. She aspires to become a virtual reality engineer, get more involved with education using VR, and continue to evangelize VR to new users.
Virtual reality is much more than games. It’s art, film, online chat spaces—practically anything you can think of—and they’re all growing by the day. In the rapidly expanding field of virtual architecture visualizations comes probably the most user-friendly solution I’ve seen up to this point, and it’s called Floorplan Revolution.
Noah Nelson is back with another instalment of Immersion Point and this week digs into Landmark Entertainment’s recent unveiling of their new ‘Pavilion of Me’ project, an immersive content platform designed to be the first step on the road to enticing users into the next generation of VR theme parks.
Ever had a burning desire to to play your favourite Sony PSP games console in virtual reality? No? Well, I’ll tell you why you’re wrong. PPSSPP VR is here, an emulator for Sony’s PlayStation Portable games console which brings the ability to render games in VR for your Oculus Rift DK2 – and it’s pretty awesome!
Google has been hiring full time virtual reality positions for some time, but for what appears to be the first time, the secretive Google [x] is looking for full time VR talent in the form of a Computer Graphics Engineer.
OSVR, the Open Source Virtual Reality initiative lead by Razer and Sensics, has had a busy year welcoming dozens of companies pledging support. Whilst OSVR’s flagship virtual reality hardware the Hacker Development Kit 1.3 have yet to ship to developers in numbers, the previous gen unit is out there and Mark Schramm, has taken his apart and documented the carnage for your enjoyment.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of social media giant Facebook, has become more and more vocal around the company’s virtual and augmented reality plans of late. He took to the stage at Oculus’ recent developer conference ‘Connect’ and now he’s waxing all enthusiastic about his latest experiences using Oculus’ proprietrary dedicated VR motion controllers, Touch and the sandbox recently revealed to the public Toybox.
Virtual reality market research firm Greenlight VR will share their latest data-driven insights into the consumer VR industry in a special presentation at VR Launchpad on October 20th.
Gunter S. Thompson has been hosting talk shows in virtual reality since April of 2014, and been participating in many of the early social VR experiences ranging from Minecrift, VRChat, and Riftmax Theater. He talks about some of the unique social experiences that are happening with user generated content including hover bus tours and various social games, as well as some of the regular events ranging from karaoke, meet-ups, and talk shows like Gunter’s Universe. Gunter is the events manager for VR Chat, and he talks about some of his visions for the types of events he’s looking forward to having as well as reflecting on the connections and friendships that he’s been able to cultivate over the past year and a half through social VR. There are people from all over the world that are able to connect through these Social VR experiences, and Gunter’s experience that social VR experiences have been some of the most compelling ones that he’s had and he looks forward to exploring the metaverse with his virtual friends.
You might have already seen the video of the proposal where a man bends his knee, VR headset and all, to his future fiance in the Salt Lake City-based VR theme park, The VOID. If you’re doubting the veracity or sincerity of the gesture, wonder no further. It was real (and I might have teared up a little bit too).
Mindfield Games‘ immersive and eerie first person adventure POLLEN has been Steam ‘greenlit’ in just 36 hours described as “record breaking” time by the studio. So, to celebrate, they’ve launched a brand new gameplay trailer.
