Sonny-DhillonSunny Dhillon is a principal and co-founder of Signia Venture Partners as well as a lifelong gamer. Signia has been an investor in mobile games, and so he knows what to look for in terms of a solid team and distinct art style that resonates with gamers. Signia was one of the 16 investors who invested $13.5M into 8i, a 3D volumetric capture startup, and Sunny says that he’s looking for other content creation tools to invest in.

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The first VR investment that Sunny has made is 8i, which made up of a solid team of digital effects artists from Industrial Light & Magic, WETA Digital and Digital Domain. 8i is working on digital lightfield capture tools using commercial off-the-shelf cameras. They’re aim is to bring more humanity into VR by creating user generation tools for people to put be able to put themselves into immersive VR experiences.

Sunny reflects many of the sentiments of Google Venture’s Joe Kraus in that he sees that 2016 is going to be a year of survival for the early movers within the virtual reality gaming space. He sees that the business models of advertising are still evolving the overall market is far from being completely sustainable. So Sunny is cautiously optimistic and he’s taking a slow and measured approach in that he doesn’t intend on investing into too much VR content in 2016. He first wants to see more market penetration and adoption with this first round of consumer virtual reality HMDs.

Signia Venture Partners has made investments into mobile gaming companies including Artillery Games and Super Evil Megacorp, who developed Vainglory. When he’s evaluating potential gaming companies to invest in, Sunny said that he’s looking for a solid team with a proven track record of creating quality games that have been successful on other platforms.

Sunny’s personal experiences in VR has told him that having higher fidelity of photorealistic experiences have increased his level of immersion, and that’s part of the reason why he’s so excited to invest into a company like 8i. At one point, Sunny told me, “I’ve focused a couple of times here on the photorealism because I think that that’s necessary for immersion.”

I had to disagree with this specific point because of how the presence research that Mel Slater has done indicates that photorealism only accounts for the place illusion, which is only half of the equation for creating presence with the other half being the plausibility illusion.

I think that one of the most important podcasts I’ve done so far is with the presence researcher Richard Skarbez who has been following on Mel Slater’s work on these two components of presence. Richard told me that he sees the uncanny valley as being n-dimensional meaning that the higher fidelity of visuals that you have, then you will need to have higher fidelity on all of the other dimensions of your experience in order to match what our expectations our bodies have with photorealistic visuals.

I’ve personally observed that the experiences that actually dial down the visual fidelity and instead put more focus on creating a coherent and plausible world can actually create a more immersive experience than a photorealistic one where I feel like a ghost with no agency. I’m a big advocate for saying that the plausibility illusion is the other half of the presence equation, and that it’s a mistake to focus on visual fidelity while ignoring creating a dynamic, interactive, coherent and believable virtual world.

The best example of a VR experience that created both a sense of place and sense of plausibility was Oculus’ Toybox Demo. For those developers who have experienced it, it’s consistently one of the peak levels of immersion and presence in a VR experience. There was also a level of social and emotional presence, but I very much noticed how the visual fidelity of Toybox was very stylized and non-photorealistic. It’d be an interesting research question to compare and contrast the levels of immersion and presence in a Toybox Demo that was both photorealistic, and more stylized like what was shown at Oculus Connect 2.

That all said, the issue of how high of visual fidelity that people prefer could very well be a personal preference. And we will need companies like 8i and investors like Sunny to continue to create the technology that might be able to overcome this uncanny valley. It’s a debate that I’ve had with other photogrammetry companies like xxArray’s Alexx Henry, and ultimately the market will decide what types of VR experiences resonate the most with users and what the components are that maximize the level of presence that we’re able to achieve within VR.

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joe-krausJoe Kraus is a general partner at Google Ventures, and he was on a panel at the Virtual Reality Intelligence conference in San Francisco talking about VC investment trends in virtual reality. Joe predicts that 2016 will be a “perceptual year of despair” for virtual reality where the market won’t really start to take off in a big way until 2017. He says that for VR start-ups, the key will be to conserve cash and survive 2016 until 2017 when the VR market will start to really take off. Joe talks about some of the VR investments that Google Ventures has made, and some of his predictions for the future of VR and AR.

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Each year, Google Ventures has a total of about $300 million to invest into early-stage companies, and Joe Kraus has been looking into virtual reality for the past 14 months. Google Ventures has already made investments into Jaunt VR for cinematic capture and distribution of VR experiences, the social VR companies of High Fidelity and AltSpaceVR, the casual gaming company of Resolution Games started by Candy Crush designer Tommy Palm, as well as Emergent VR life capture and sharing with friends. Google’s investment into Magic Leap came from the corporate headquarters rather than Google Ventures.

Joe says that even though the desktop market is going to be the first out of the gate with gamers, he sees that the long-term mobile market is going to be more lucrative than desktop VR because the total cost of ownership is going to be a lot more manageable.

This stage of VR reminds Joe of the early days of the world wide web back in 1993 where the market was willed into existence, and there was a lot of collaboration in order to initiate the virtual reality market. Joe mentions the quote from Michael Abrash saying that this time in VR is going to be seen as the “good old days,” and that the technology and experiences are going to continue to improve.

Looking back to the lessons of the mobile app ecosystem, Joe suggests that perhaps the best investment strategy for the iOS app ecosystem was to go to sleep for three years and then start investing. Even though some of the early companies has good exits, the big winners didn’t emerge until after the initial wave of companies and applications. That said, Joe still believes that it’s really important to be investing into VR now because there is a learning curve for what works and doesn’t work in VR as it evolves and it’s really important to be involved now.

Joe sees that some of the key drivers for VR adoption include gaming for desktop VR, adult entertainment for mobile VR, and 360 videos and photos which will drive user-generated content as that medium finally can be fully appreciated with these fully-immersive VR HMDs.

Joe says that just as the user-generated content has been a horizontal feature within the web experience, social will also be a key part of most of the VR experiences. Google Ventures has made investments into two different social VR companies, and he sees High Fidelity as being more about building experiences in VR while AltSpace VR is more about engagement and doing things within a virtual environment.

When deciding what to invest in, Joe says that venture capitalists look for a magical combination of the team, market, and product and ultimately a viable business plan. The problem with VR right now is that there is no market yet, and so it’s a promise of big market. So they’re looking for a breakthrough product with an audience to get sustained audience and sustained behavior that has the possibility of having a defensible business model with a team who can actually do it. It’s a risky time to be investing in VR, and so Google Ventures mitigates their risk by syndicating their deals with other VCs and they also tend to write smaller checks.

Joe sees that Google Cardboard has a really important contribution to the VR ecosystem because you need a range of solutions ranging from expensive and high performant solutions to more affordable and accessible solutions like Cardboard. VR is an experiential platform, and you have to give people a taste of VR in order for people to really understand it.

One of the biggest mistakes that Joe sees VR entrepreneurs make is that they mistake novelty for value. The medium of VR is so new that people are likely to get a lot of strong reactions to the shock and novelty of VR, and it’s easy to mistake that for something that’s going to create something of sustained value.

In the future, Joe sees that virtual reality is taking us down a path towards augmented reality, and that they both have a role. Ultimately, Joe wants a contact lens that’s possible to do full transparency and selective occlusion to do remote telepresence with AR, and he also wants lights-out VR to be able to completely transport himself into a virtual environment. He recognizes that the laws of physics may prevent this vision of coming true, but that we’ll be able to get pretty close with glasses or something akin to wearable ski goggles.

Joe predicts that we’ll be able to experience the full spectrum of VR to reality to AR within the next 10-15 years, and he’s confident that this will happen because of the consumer demand for storytelling to experience wonder and escapism. He imagines a time where you’ll be able to transport yourself to anywhere on the planet to see what’s happening in real-time. It would be hard for people in 1993 to imagine all of world’s knowledge being accessible from your pocket, and we were able to achieve that within just 15 years. So Joe is confident that within the next 15 years we’ll be able to be transported to anywhere on the planet with AR or VR.

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Darrick-MorrisonDarrick Morrison is a the founder and CEO of Prizmiq, which is working as e-commerce tools to scan products with photogrammetry techniques, and then embed them within a shopping cart experience. Darrick comes from an ecommerce background, and he has found that seeing a 3D rendered product has been able to increase conversions and reduce returns. He sees that virtual reality has a huge potential to disrupt a lot of the brick and mortar retail stores by being able to better replicate the proportion and scale of products within a virtual reality experience. He also foresees that augmented reality experiences will start to be a much bigger part of adding a layer of marketing experience, but providing purely digital fashion items. He sees that VR and AR has the potential to unlock the creative potentials of our imagination, and has a visionary perspective for how VR and AR could help our culture mature as we’re heading towards a potential transhumanist singularity.

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Matthew-TerndrupMatthew Terndrup is a virtual reality journalist and content creator who’s interested in exploring how the combination of psychedelics & virtual reality can help the process of self-discovery. Matt traces the influence that psychedelics have had in helping to shape key technological innovators including the inventor of the mouse Douglas Engelbart as well as Steve Jobs. Matt has been investigating the history of VR and psychedelics, and has found that there are indeed some interesting connections. He talks about some of the VR experiments by psychonauts Terrence McKenna and Timothy Leary, as well as some of the potentials for using psychedelics for creative inspiration and the amplification of psychedelic experiences.

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Domna-BanakouDomna Banakou is a Ph.D. student studying with Mel Slater at the Event Lab in Barcelona, Spain. She’s been researching different aspects of the virtual body ownership illusion in order to investigate the short-term and long-term impacts of embodying virtual avatars which have different qualities than your physical body. Specifically, she found that embodying the avatar with childlike proportions can result in an overestimation of the sizes of virtual objects. She also has found that it’s possible to create the illusion of attributing things that appear to be coming from your avatar, but that you hadn’t actually said. There are a number of potential implications for how the virtual body ownership illusion through VR can alter our sense of self and identity, and Mel Slater’s Event Lab is on the forefront of investigating these questions.

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The virtual body ownership illusion occurs can be induced when the limb tracking within a virtual reality experience is accurate enough. Mel Slater has said that for most people who haven’t experience virtual reality, 100% of the time that when we’ve looked down to see our body, then it’s been our body. So it’s surprisingly easy to trick or fool the mind into believing that a virtual avatar is your body.

Domna Banakou has been researching some of the psychological implications of virtual body ownership, and found that embodying a child avatar changes our perception of sizes and can have an implicit impact on our attitudes. Here’s the abstract from here paper titled “Illusory ownership of a virtual child body causes overestimation of object sizes and implicit attitude changes:”

An illusory sensation of ownership over a surrogate limb or whole body can be induced through specific forms of multisensory stimulation, such as synchronous visuotactile tapping on the hidden real and visible rubber hand in the rubber hand illusion. Such methods have been used to induce ownership over a manikin and a virtual body that substitute the real body, as seen from first-person perspective, through a head-mounted display. However, the perceptual and behavioral consequences of such transformed body ownership have hardly been explored. In experiment 1, immersive virtual reality was used to embody 30 adults as a 4-y-old child (condition C), and as an adult body scaled to the same height as the child (condition A), experienced from the first-person perspective, and with virtual and real body movements synchronized. The result was a strong body-ownership illusion equally for C and A. Moreover there was an overestimation of the sizes of objects compared with a nonembodied baseline, which was significantly greater for C compared with A. An implicit association test showed that C resulted in significantly faster reaction times for the classification of self with child-like compared with adult-like attributes. Experiment 2 with an additional 16 participants extinguished the ownership illusion by using visuomotor asynchrony, with all else equal. The size-estimation and implicit association test differences between C and A were also extinguished. We conclude that there are perceptual and probably behavioral correlates of body-ownership illusions that occur as a function of the type of body in which embodiment occurs.

Donna has also found that it’s possible to trick your mind into believing that you’re saying something, when it’s actually your avatar doing the speaking. After inducing the virtual body ownership illusion through accurate limb tracking, Domna describes an experiment where they had participants watch their movements in a mirror and provided haptic feedback called “synchronous vibrotactile stimulation on the thyroid cartilage” while asynchronously moving the avatar’s lips. It was possible to cause the participants to misattribute that they had actually said these things by both explicit surveys and implicit measurements that showed their fundamental speaking frequency had shifted.

Here’s the abstract from that paper titled “Body ownership causes illusory self-attribution of speaking and influences subsequent real speaking:”

When we carry out an act we typically attribute the action to ourselves, the sense of agency. Explanations for agency include conscious prior intention to act followed by observation of the sensory consequences, brain activity that involves feed-forward prediction of the consequences combined with rapid inverse motor prediction to fine-tune the action in realtime, priming where there is e.g. a prior command to perform the act, cause (the intention to act) preceding effect (the results of the action), and with the common-sense rules of attribution of physical causality satisfied. We describe an experiment where participants falsely attributed an act to themselves under conditions that apparently cannot be explained by these theories. A life-sized virtual body (VB), seen from first person perspective in 3D stereo, as if substituting the real body, was used to induce the illusion of ownership over the VB. Half of the 44 experimental participants experienced VB movements that were synchronous with their own movements (Sync), and the other half asynchronous. The VB, seen in a mirror, spoke with corresponding lip movements, and for half this was accompanied by synchronous vibrotactile stimulation on the thyroid cartilage (Von), and the other half not. Participants experiencing Sync misattributed the speaking to themselves and also shifted the fundamental frequency of their later utterances towards the stimulus voice. Von also contributed to these results. We show that these findings can be explained by current theories of agency provided that the critical role of ownership over the VB is taken into account.

Here’s a summary of other experiments into how VR can impact the implicit attitudes, behaviors, and brings up a lot of philosophical questions about the sense of self:

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HilmarPeturssonHilmar Veigar Pétursson has a bold vision for CCP with the mission statement “To create virtual worlds more meaningful that real life.” He believes that after someone’s basic needs on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs are met, then humans will always be searching for ways to bring more meaning and self-actualization in their lives. A lot of those current methods are through consuming physical objects that require a lot of natural resources to produce. Hilmar’s long-term vision is for virtual world’s like CCP’s massively multiplayer online role-playing game of EVE Online to be able to satisfy this human search for meaning through virtual objects and experiences that are more sustainable in the long-run.

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CCP recently raised $30 million dollars to work towards Hilmar’s vision to create virtual worlds that are more meaningful than reality because it can be more sustainable for the earth in the long-run. He recognizes that it’s a grand vision, and that some of it could be seen as controversial. But he’s dedicated to working towards a grander vision where our needs for finding deeper meaning in our lives doesn’t have to come at the cost of the earth.

It may sound a little odd that CCP is working towards this larger vision by releasing two dogfight space fighting games starting with Gunjack for the Gear VR and EVE: Valkyrie for the consumer launches of the Oculus Rift and Playstation VR. But Hilmar says that they’ve spent over three years experimenting with optimizing the game design mechanics for virtual reality, and they they decided to make a self-contained experience based up previous failures. Specifically, he talks about how Dust 514 aimed to be an interface to the EVE Online world through PS3 console-based portal, but that ultimately it didn’t quite work out as well as they had hoped.

Learning from that experience, they want to discover the strengths and weaknesses of the virtual reality medium first with EVE: Valkyrie and Gunjack without trying to shoehorn it into the EVE Online world. They’ve learned not to bite off more than they can chew so that they can iterate and more organically discover how VR will be able to interface with their EVE Online virtual world.

Hilmar also talks about the game design process for EVE: Valkyrie and how they iterated over many years in order to create a game mechanic that user’s could eventually master. There’s a progression between different ships, and they’re using quite a lot of sophisticated 3D user interfaces and information that’s available in the cockpit that will take some time and practice to really master. He says that you can really appreciate and see how good you can get at the game when you play against some of the developers who have been playing it for years now.

There were a number of people who were recommending that I track down Hilmar at the Virtual Reality Intelligence conference because they really found his talk there to be really inspiring. I have to admit that I was initially skeptical about the vision to create virtual worlds and experiences that are more meaningful than reality, but I can definitely appreciate CCP’s grander vision to work towards the ultimate potential for virtual reality in helping to make the world more environmentally sustainable. And given their most recent round of funding, then CCP has a really great shot at helping to make that happen.

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RayDavisRay Davis is the Studio Manager of Epic Games Seattle, and he talks about working on Bullet Train, which is Epic’s latest VR tech demo that uses the Oculus Touch controllers and debuted at the Oculus Connect 2 gathering. I had a chance to catch up with Ray at the Seattle VR conference where he told me about the iterative design process behind Bullet Train, the evolution of the teleportation VR locomotion approach, and how they discovered the innovative bullet grab and throwing game mechanic.

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Ray Davis talks about some of the goals and motivations behind Bullet Train. Epic wanted to create an immersive VR experience that was interactive and dynamic designed for anyone to go through regardless of what their level of gaming experience might be. Lead VR engineer Nick Whiting and Creative Director Nick Donaldson collaborated on creating Bullet Train, and they wanted to explore what it means to have hand presence within a VR experience.

Ray says that there’s an art to constructing a competitive death match environment in terms of the player flows and different pickups that encourage different pathways throughout the environment. It’s not just a matter of teleporting from location to location, and Nick Donaldson took a lot of that into consideration when creating Bullet Train.

Bullet Train has definitely been the most comfortable first-person shooter experience that I’ve had in VR so far. This level of comfort is largely thanks to their teleportation mechanic in order to move between different way points that are set on a subway train and out into the station. There’s a ghosting trail that you can see after you teleport that can help you orient you to your new location. Ray says that they thought a lot about ways to design the experience so that you could have enough visual cues to maintain your orientation as you teleported between the various waypoints.

Ray says that game design process at Epic Games has always been very organic and iterative. His advice is to just make a VR experience, and then see what people want to try to do in the experience, and then implement those things if it hasn’t been implemented yet. This is how they discovered their bullet grabbing and throwing game mechanic. They noticed that people kept trying to to catch them, and so they went ahead and just added that feature. He says that their ultimate goal is to create an intuitive experience such that people forget that they’re controlling a game, and that they can get into a flow where they’re reacting with their unconscious muscle memories.

Ray says that it’s ultimately a lot of fun to develop for virtual reality when you’re the target audience, because you’re the best expert in what you find fun and engaging. Especially when they could look to their favorite Hollywood action movies, and see what they could start to recreate within their VR experience. There are a still a number of design challenges in moving something like Bullet Train from a novel tech demo into a full-fledged game, and Ray didn’t mention any specific plans for what the future of Bullet Train might be. But it wouldn’t be surprising if they were continuing to refine and develop this concept after giving more than 500 demos over the last couple of months.

There’s also a lot of these experiments in VR where these ad hoc teams at Epic are able to dogfood the Unreal Engine. And so there is a lot of feedback and improvements that are made to the engine to make it more and more well-suited to create different virtual reality experiences. Ray says that part of the culture at Epic Games is to make things, and then try to give as much away of those innovations as possible.

Finally, Ray sees that VR and AR will have a convergence and eventually replace our screen-based interfaces in monitors, laptops, tablets, and phones. He sees that VR and AR will continue to unlock a lot of actual changes with how we gather and consumer information as well as how we connect with each other.

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ben-langBen Lang says that we’ve been at Year Zero of VR for three years now, and the official release of the Gear VR today marks the first official launch of a consumer-ready virtual ready head-mounted display. Ben joins me on the podcast to talk about some of the technical details that allow the Gear VR to drive such a compelling virtual reality experience, as well as some analysis of the larger virtual reality market. There are a lot of high expectations that virtual reality will be able to grow and evolve into the ultimate potential that we all hope it can be, and so we take a look at how the smartphone market evolved over time and what we can expect to see over the next year.

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Today is the consumer launch of the Gear VR, and I talked with Ben Lang about some of the hardware that allows the Gear VR to drive such a compelling VR experience, some of the improvements that have been made over the last couple of iterations, and some of the larger issues that we’ve already started to see within Android fragmentation across versions of Android and different versions of Samsung phones. There have been various compatibility and performance bumps along the road across different hardware and software versions, but hopefully those will be minimized now that the Gear VR has moved beyond being an “Innovator Edition” and is now released as an official consumer product.

My initial reaction to the Gear VR was like many people’s: “Wow! This is a lot better than I expected it would be.” The Gear VR doesn’t have positional tracking like the Oculus Rift DK2, but yet the resolution is actually higher and there’s an imperceptible difference in terms of latency and immersion that can still happen with the untethered Gear VR HMD.

It’s actually quite amazing that the Gear VR can drive the quality of experience by being powered by a cell phone. For $99, it’s a bit of a no-brainer to get the Gear VR if you already own either a Samsung Galaxy Note5, Galaxy S6 edge+, Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 edge.

Not having to deal with any wires and the portability and ease at which you can carry the Gear VR around has proven to be an extremely convenient way to share high-quality virtual reality experiences with friends and family or at virtual reality conferences and meetups. I’ve found that the added benefit of position tracking is not worth the effort to unhook all of the wires of my desktop PC and deal with transporting it around along with a monitor.

It’s true that the Gear VR can’t yet drive the same level and fidelity of VR experiences as a PC can, but it’s certainly good enough. The simplicity and ease that it offers to be able to quickly share a VR demo is such a higher benefit than having to deal with the hassle it takes to show a DK2 experience on-the-go.

Ben and I talk about what to expect from here now that the first consumer virtual reality headset has been released. The consensus seems to be that it’s still at the very beginning of consumer VR, and the ecosystem is going to take time to develop and mature. Ben says that VR is still evolving through a three-way chicken and egg problem between VR HMD manufacturers, VR game and experience developers, and consumers.

Oculus kickstarted the hardware side of things with the Oculus Rift in 2012 and the Gear VR last year. They were the first company to provide a comprehensive SDK so that the software developers could start to create virtual reality experiences. Now developers have had three years to experiment with the medium and create the first VR games and experiences, the VR community is ready to start bringing this hardware and experiences to the public.

And because it’s already been three years, there’s a perception and anticipation for the VR ecosystem to explode into the mainstream. But Ben cautions this line of thinking by saying that it’s more likely to take more time to fully grow and develop the market and full ecosystem. There are a lot of lessons to learn from the smartphone market, and it’s not entirely accurate to look to the wildly successful iPhone launch as a template for what’s going to happen with VR. The iPhone wasn’t the first smartphone to ever launch, and there had been millions of smart phone users that had to slowly be cultivate over many years.

There’s a lot of anticipation and excitement within the VR community, and there are a lot of indie developers and start-up companies that will have to plan on how they’re going to make it through this first year of consumer VR that may end up being a smaller market that is not going to be able to completely financially sustain them just yet.

Ben says that the snowball will have to passed back and forth a number of times between the VR hardware manufacturers, VR software developers, and consumers before it is able to start to take off in any type of exponential growth curve. But with the release of the Gear VR today with a store filled with VR games and experiences, VR is finally ready to be introduced into a wider mass-consumer audience.

With that, I just wanted to congratulate the Oculus and Samsung teams, and all of the VR developers who have helped get VR to this point. It’s actually really quite amazing to think about all of the work that it’s taken to get to this point, and it’s exciting to see VR cross this chasm into mainstream and start making all of our VR dreams come true.

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Nick-OchoaNick Ochoa is a co-founder of UploadVR, and he was recently at the VRX Virtual Reality Intelligence conference hosting a panel on social VR. Nick talks about of his open questions about social VR such as what does it mean to be a social VR app, and where is social VR going when there could hundreds of applications that have a social aspect to them. He’s found some of the lightweight social VR experiences like Oculus Social Alpha to be some of the most compelling, but that there hasn’t been an experience that he feels really motivated to have with his friends yet beyond sharing some entertainment of movie experiences together. He talks about the importance of audio in social VR, as well as how avatars are used as well as whether the experience will be hosted on a private servers or be open and distributed on the open web like an approach that High Fidelity and JanusVR are taking. Finally, he sees that part of the ultimate potential of virtual empathy is to be able to cultivate experiences of empathy, and he highly recommends checking out the work of Chris Milk and VRSE in that realm.

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MattMcIlwainMatt McIlwain is a managing director at the Madrona Venture Group, which recently announced their first investment in the virtual reality space with a $4 million Series A round of funding for Envelop VR. Matt talks about why Seattle is one of the top hotbeds for augmented and virtual reality because there’s a wide variety of hardware, software, gaming, and cloud computing companies including HTC, Valve, Oculus, Facebook, Amazon AWS & Twitch, Microsoft Xbox & Hololens, and Nintendo of America. Matt talks about Madrona’s investment in Envelop VR as well as their strategy finding companies building horizontal software for AR and VR as well as other vertical commercial opportunities of new models of distribution that AR and VR enables.

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Here’s an excerpt from a post that Matt wrote that elaborates he sees Seattle as a hotbed for virtual reality, as well as Madrona’s quest to find and fund the killer VR apps.

We are also delighted to be announcing Madrona’s investment in Envelop VR in conjunction with the second annual Seattle VR conference, taking place today (10/28/15) The conference highlights the breadth and depth of virtual and augmented reality talent in greater Seattle. Microsoft is a major player in both augmented and virtual reality with HoloLens, Minecraft in VR and the XboxOne partnerships with Facebook. Facebook itself has multiple Oculus offices in Seattle and is investing in a variety of strategies across the category. Valve with its Vive/HTC partnership (and HTC North America is also in Seattle), Steam game distribution platform and leading gaming experiences. And, an extensive group of gaming industry leaders including Nintendo USA, PopCap/Electronic Arts, Amazon.com/twitch.tv and Bigfish games. These companies are the foundations upon which a next generation of smart headset ecosystem players will be built.

Seattle is already and will increasingly be seen as a powerhouse in the smart headset and virtual/augmented reality era. We are delighted to be partnering with the Envelop VR team, SEA-VR conference and future VR/AR related companies in the years ahead to help make the smart headset era as successful as the previous hardware computing eras.

The Seattle VR conference was indeed a great gathering of a lot of impressive and cutting edge VR demos, and I’ll continue to have more Voices of VR coverage from the event. Also be sure to check out Michael Glombicki’s summary of the event.

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