Ivan Blaustein is a co-founder of the Orange Country VR meetup, which happens to be in the same location as the headquarters for Oculus VR. Their first meet up had 180 people, and they had five meetings within their first month including a couple of game jams hackathons.
Ivan talks about fostering community through the process of getting together to create VR experiences, rather than just talking about it or demonstrating existing VR experiences. Leading up to the Immersive Education Initiative’s Immersion 2014 gathering, OCVR held a couple of educational game jams and were demonstrating the winners of those hackathons.
He talks about how the VR Classroom, VR Typing Trainer and PVRamid demos were demos that were much more compelling in VR than in 2D, topics that haven’t been well-explored in the past, and were a really polished experience for having been created within 48 hours. You can check out these and the other demos on the OCVR site here.
TOPICS
- 0:00 – Intro – co-founder of the Orange County Virtual Reality. Meetup group for VR developers near Oculus VR headquarters. Had 180 people show up to try 12 demos including a DK2 demo from Oculus. Had 5 events in the first month teaching how to create VR experiences and to foster community
- 0:56 – Dove in head first. Other events that they’ve held. Had hackathons for the past couple of weekends. Developers split into teams to develop educational experiences to have demos to show at the Immersive Education Initiative’s Immersion 2014 gathering.
- 1:35 – In partnership with UC Irvine and collaborated with them on a hackathon. VR Classroom won that VR competition. Had another group the following weekend and a couple of guest judges. Showing two top prizes from Hackathon. VR Typing Trainer and the Pyramids.
- 2:45 – VR Classroom developed by someone who never VR. Take traditional classroom and twist it on it’s head. Each classroom has a VR twist to it. History room that has a small-scale model of the Roman coliseum. Approach it, and the room walls fall down and you’re in the middle of the Roman Coliseum.
- 4:07 – VR Typing Trainer like Mavis Beacon. Can’t see your fingers and forces you to learn the keys. Has a TRON style. Fun and exciting and difficult to cheat
- 5:03 – PVRamids done in UE4. On-rails experience exploring the pyramids
- 5:55 – Design principles of educational demos – Can only be in VR and wouldn’t be as compelling in 2D. Look for things that haven’t been well-explored in the past. And to create a polished experience within 48 hours. Other Wii mote and Google Maps integrated experience didn’t have as much polish
- 7:19 – Forming community through hackathon projects. Future plans? Really amazed by the support by the community. Not the first VR meetup group, but actually getting together to make things. Talked to Smithsonian to possibly work with 3D scanned objects to see what they can do with with. Talked with Eric Greenbaum about doing a fitness game jam.
- 8:50 – First development experience at the Portland Game Jam. Having time boxed constraints to make something real in 48 hours. First time in getting hands dirty with Unity. What can get done in 48 hours. Get to see what’s possible. Any time you get together and bouncing ideas off each other is an exciting creative environment
- 10:14 – Where VR could go? Everywhere. Scared of Facebook metaverse. The positive potentials is making the world a better place and do great things, live healthier lives and learn new things.
Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio
