My Journey into Virtual Reality Development and Trip to the 2017 AR/VR Vision Summit

Hi all,

Today I want to share my recent trip to Hollywood, California with you where I attended the 2017 AR/VR Vision Vision Summit. This conference was organized by Unity, one of the leading ar/vr game engines (for those that aren't familiar with Unity, it can also be used to create many other things besides games).

Before I go into my experience at this conference, I jut want to give you a bit of background in terms of my own interest in virtual and augmented reality, which is now starting to be referred to simply as mixed reality, denoted as xr (that's one of the neat things I learned at the conference).

I'm now in the process of building my first virtual reality game for the gear vr and I'm using the Unity game engine to do it. I've dabbled here and there learning how to code by taking online tutorials, reading online documentation, building small projects, etc. None of the frameworks really gelled for me though, until I discovered the Unity game engine, which I absolutely love...almost as much as I love steemit :)

Once I got a reasonably good handle on how to use Unity, I set myself the goal of building my first vr app. I choose to build for the Gear VR simply because I already had it and it was much better than the only other VR headset I had, which was the Google Cardboard.

I started off with a huge amount of energy, exuberance and confidence and felt like I was making great progress, and I definitely was.....at first. Then...as I'm sure anyone that's ever tried to program anything before has experienced at some point or another....I felt like I started to hit brick wall after brick wall. I was so proud of myself though anytime I solved the problem that was keeping me stuck. I pride myself on being a good problem solver and that's definitely come in handy as I've been working through this project.

At a certain point I started to realize that you can only get so far on your own and what I really wanted to establish was connections with other people with similar interests that are working on their own vr projects too. In serendipitous fashion, I soon found out about the AR/VR Vision Summit and on a whim, I decided to sign up! Looking back, I'm sooooo glad I made that decision.

Meet a lot of people I did and I also gained a lot of valuable information and felt more on the cutting edge of the industry by trying out some unbelievably awesome demos and attending some really cutting edge, thought provoking sessions.

Here are some pics that I took from some of the sessions I attended.

(The above pic is where the speaker is talking about the continuum of reality and how augmented reality has a foothold in both physical and digital reality)

(I just thought this was cool has AI is predicted to completely reshape everything in a few years....should be interesting to see how this materializes)

(This was from a neat session I saw where some big wigs were pondering the future of VR advertising. Right now there isn't really a good model or established standards/best practices. What works on other mediums does not necessarily translate well for VR. Advertising on VR is a huge opportunity though once it's figured out because of how much more intimate the advertiser can get with the audience. In VR there's always talk of 'presence' and how this medium has the opportunity to create 'presence' like nothing that's come before. one of the speakers in the talk suggested that the future of VR advertising will be 'virtual rooms' that players will find as they are playing their game. These virtual rooms will have certain features in them used to enhance whatever brand is being advertised.)

(This was a neat demonstration of how it would be possible for engineers stationed on earth to examine, diagnose and give instructions for how to fix something like the Mars Rover that might be located in space. The possibilities for ar use cases are just amazing....)

(Here's another ar industrial use case where someone could put on a pair of ar goggle as they are building something or working on a machine and receive instructions through their ar lenses. Pretty neat stuff.....)

Along with attending neat sessions, I loved the demos I got to try.

(This was Mission ISS and was one of the best demos I tried. You're in the International Space Station, moving around inside, then you get to go outside and float in outer space, looking at the world out in front of you and moving around outside the space station with a jet propulsion pack strapped on. It did give me this expansive feeling of floating in space....and will probably be the closest I ever come to actually being able to float in space....so I really appreciated it.)

(These types of fully immersive demos are fun but I always seem to hit my hands against walls when I try them. I would definitely never try this unsupervised....I think I would be too much of a danger to myself....)

I also had an important chance to speak with one of the engineers who works at Oculus (the company where I will ultimately be submitting my app to for approval before it can be sold). My attendance at the conference coincided with an issue that I was having with not being able to optimize my app to consistently hit the target frame rate that it needs to in order to get approved. For those that aren't familiar with what a frame rate is...it's just how long it takes to show all the images on the screen. The frame rate has to be at a certain level to help ensure people don't get sick and things like that (I'm sure there's more to it but that's just my simplified understanding of it).

My meeting with the Oculus guy was awesome and he really helped me out so much. I only spent an hour with him but it was such great value.

I also wound up being able to start up a VR/AR Master Mind Group with a couple people based in California. We meet up on Google hanouts for an hour or so every couple weeks and share our progress and what's going on in the industry.

Overall, I really feel that my trip has helped to bolster my own vr development efforts and helped me establish some great connections in the industry. It's still early days for vr/ar/xr but it's very exciting and shows a lot of potential.

Thanks for taking the time to read this post. It's much appreciated!