INTRO: A little over a hundred years ago, the light switch was invented in the sleepy suburb of Lynbrook, New York. If this fact isn’t enough to convince you of...
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At this moment of uncertainty, with tensions rising and accusations flying and an evil orange stooge puppet running for president, the people of Russia rather nobly invited VR Playhouse to come visit their country. They invited us to come talk about virtual reality at a tech conference but we like to think maybe also to broker a new kind of understanding between our country and theirs. So we sent Dylan. He’s harmless and, if you squint, he could maybe look a little Russian. And Dylan, as he is want to do, spent a day chronicling his adventures: 9am: It’s morning in Moscow and I’m rolling out of the Marriott Novy Arbat with my fellow non-Russian invitees, on our way to the Open Innovations Forum. We’re an eclectic mix of “entrepreneurs” and “experts,” ferried to Russia to speak on the various stages and panels that the forum offers over the course…
Days 2 and 3 were all about the demo. We planned to go big at the VR Fest event on Sunday, bringing with us an HTC Vive, complete with some new sample content we banged out in a week; an Oculus showing “The Surrogate,” a narrative piece we helped develop that combines CG with 360 video; and, of course, a Gear stocked with a bunch of our work from the last year and a half. Now that means two computers, two monitors, 3 headsets, a tracking system, cables galore, our big flashy sign and so on and so forth. And we took all this on a plane, which automatically means something or somethings is bound to be screwed up when you arrive at your final destination. So Saturday became a day of troubleshooting. We went to the friendly neighborhood Best Buy twice. Various members of the VR Playhouse team banged…