At PAX West, Reload Studios made a strong push for cultivating World War Toons as a VR eSports title. They were livestreaming a couple of shoutcasters announcing a four-on-four player capture the flag game of World War Toons, which is a free-to-play, VR first-person shooter. This was all preparation for Twitchcon this past weekend where they were on the expo floor with the same configuration, except with PlayStation VR headsets instead of Oculus Rifts.

I had a chance to catch up with Reload Studios CEO James Chung at PAX West where we talk about motion sickness with VR first-person shooters with different VR comfort options, their integrations with the Virtuix Omni, their free-to-play business model, and VR eSports as well as the future of streaming in VR.

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Here was Reload Studios’ setup at PAX West:

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Cohh Carnage is a professional Twitch streamer, and I had a chance to catch up with him at PAX West after he had a chance to scout out the expo floor for games that he’s interested in streaming. As streamer, he has to cultivate a sense of presence when he plays in order to have as authentic of a reaction as he possibly can. He talks about his process and philosophy behind his streaming, and the importance of audience engagement and participation. With that in mind, he talks about some of the challenges and opportunities that streaming VR games presents to streamers. We also talk a bit about game genres, and some of the emerging VR game genres.

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Alexander Porter & James George want to democratize volumetric capture with Depthkit. Depthkit combines depth sensor devices like the Kinect or RealSense cameras with high-end digital SLR cameras. They’re able to create a 3D mesh from the captured depth sensor data, and then fuse it together with the DSLR camera footage, which becomes the texture. This is an extremely affordable approach for independent filmmakers and VR experience creators to combine commercial off-the-shelf devices for volumetric capture in immersive narratives.

I had a chance to catch up with Alex in July where he talked about how Depthkit came about through a desire to merge photographic thinking and documentary work with computer science, as well as some of the early experiments with the CLOUDS documentary and Blackout VR

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Andy Beall is the CEO of Worldviz, and has been doing VR since 1992. I had a chance to catch up with him at SIGGRAPH where he told me about the type of work that Worldviz has been doing in the VR space since 1992, including creating warehouse-scale tracking spaces that go up to 30 by 30 meters. Andy has also studying the psychological effects of VR, and the first time he tried the Oculus Rift he experienced the sensation of vection, which he had only theoretically studied before. So he shares with me what vection is, and the differences between vertical and horizontal vection and why it’s important in VR. Andy also has some pretty amazing stories of running around a warehouse wearing an Oculus Rift and jumping over virtual hurdles.

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Once a developer creates a VR experience, then the real difficult phase begins in trying to market their experience. VR is a new communication medium, and so traditional photos or videos don’t always do the experience justice. At Casual Connect, I had a chance to talk to the Vice President of inbound marketing for yellowHEAD, which is a firm that specializes in App Store Optimization. They haven’t started trying to market VR apps yet, but I wanted to see if there could be any lessons learned from the existing practices for doing app store optimization, localization, conversion optimization, and user acquisition.

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At VRLA, I had a chance to catch up with Sarah Hill, who is the CEO and Chief Storyteller for StoryUp VR. She’s been doing some VR for Good projects including giving virtual Honor Flights for WWII veterans as a part of Honor Everywhere as well as showing the plight of people in third world countries who are in the need of a wheelchair as a part of Gift of Mobility.

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Here’s the trailer for Honor Everywhere

And here’s the actual 360 video that they produced for WWII Veterans

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The story of how DODOcase started the Google Cardboard VR ecosystem within 24 hours, and became responsible for producing 20% of all of the Cardboard headsets is really quite an incredible story. I had a chance to catch up with CEO and founder Craig Dalton at GDC where he gives quite a history of Cardboard and some of the first major advertising campaigns to use it.

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uSens is working on gestural input and inside-out tracking for both AR and VR. I had a chance to catch up with uSens’ vice president of product development, Yiwen Rong, at GDC in March to talk about some of their current tracking research and larger goals driving their work. In June of 2016, uSens secured a $20 Million round of Series A Funding led by Fosun Kinzon Capital to continue their advancements of mobil AR and VR tracking, and recently released more information about their Fingo sensors in August.

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Here’s an earlier version of the demo that I saw at GDC that seamlessly goes from AR to VR. The primary object is growing in size and created a bit of change blindness effect in that I didn’t even notice the transition from AR to VR:

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Anshel Sag is an analyst for Moore Insights and Strategies where he has focused on mobile computing platforms. I had a chance to catch up with him at VRLA where talked about his content highlights there as well as why he thinks that 2017 is going to be the year of mobile VR.

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Ken Perlin is a professor of computer science at NYU, and is researching how to use VR to enhance social interactions. I had a chance to talk with him about that as well as how he’s combined his passions for math and art with his procedural textures.

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Here’s a demo video of NYU’s Holojam project:

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