I recently traveled to southern France to cover the biggest gathering of virtual reality academics in the world, the IEEE VR & 3DUI conferences. I was able to record over 15 hours worth of interviews and talk to over 50 attendees, which was a little over 10% of the 520 attendees.
In this podcast and video, I give a brief overview of some of the highlights of the coverage that I’ll be releasing over the next 3-4 months. The video includes photos of the more than 100 academic posters that were shown as a part of the IEEE VR and 3DUI conferences.
It’s worth noting that lack of coverage coming out of the IEEE VR conference last year was part of the reason why I started the Voices of VR podcast in the first place. I celebrated my 100th podcast interview with an interview with Sébastien Kuntz, and gave a bit of backstory that’s worth repeating again:
I first discovered Sébastien’s work during the IEEE VR conference last year because he was tweeting about different presentations talking about the academic community’s response to the Facebook acquisition. Here’s a couple of examples of his tweets that captivated my attention:
#IEEEVR S. Ellis: the first HMD was invented by Galileo ! pic.twitter.com/eAO1tk6y5v
— Sebastien 'Cb' Kuntz (@SebKuntz) March 31, 2014
#IEEEVR Why did Oculus make this 2B$ breakthrough ? pic.twitter.com/NH1DpkolhS
— Sebastien 'Cb' Kuntz (@SebKuntz) March 31, 2014
I wanted to hear more from Sébastien and attendees at IEEE VR, but there weren’t any consumer VR publications covering what was happening in academia or with VR researchers. In fact, there was hardly any coverage from any publication of last year’s IEEE VR conference beyond tweets from attendees, with the most prolific being the ones from Sébastien.
Because of this lack of coverage, I decided to start my own podcast. I reached out to interview a couple of other attendees of the IEEE VR conference including Eric Hodgson and Jason Jerald. I also really wanted to hear more from Oliver “Doc_Ok” Kreylos who was a respected commenter on the /r/oculus subreddit, and also happened to be working in VR within an academic context.
So with that, I hope that you enjoy my exclusive coverage of the IEEE VR conference over the next 3-6 months.
I’ll also be attending the SVVRCon conference on May 18th and 19th, and I start to mix that into the IEEE VR coverage as well.
Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio
