Metaverse One

I just left Seattle where I attended the first hackathon for virtual reality in that region. Hosted at the University of Washington's Center for Education and Research in Construction (CERC), the Seattle VR Hackathon brought together virtual reality developers and enthusiasts for a weekend of hacking and a whole lot of fun. There was a nice turnout of folks from the local VR community present including people from Samsung, the Microsoft HoloLens team, Unity3D, and Epic to name a few. Here is a nice writeup by one of the VR hacker teams that came from building firm Mortenson Construction (an AEC Hackathon alumni also).  In addition to a weekend of building cool VR demos, there were informative VR related presentations from Unity3D's Pete Moss, Epic's Nick Whiting, and Matt McIlwain from Madrona Venture Group.   A big thanks to Greg Howes, Trond Nilsen, Michael Lenzi, and Lucky Agung Pratama from Seattle's VR community for putting on this great event...

I just wrapped up a fun weekend at a Virtual Reality Hackathon here in San Francisco. Located at Galvanize's downtown campus , the event brought together the diehards of virtual reality this Memorial Day weekend. Folks came from all around to work together and create some pretty amazing VR projects.       The winners and categories were: Best Web-based VR Project Winners  1st place: Team VR Party 2nd place: Team Planet Chase Best Mobile-based VR Project Winners 1st place: Team OKVR 2nd place: Team GoPro on Steriods Best Looking VR Scene Winner 1st place: Team Mole Quest  2nd place: Team VRecover Best VR Project of Show Winner 1st place: Team Wilderness Road VR Best X3DOM VR Project Winner 1st place: Team Dog Chase Best Samsung GearVR Project Winner 1st place: Team VR Transit A big thanks to the amazing San Francisco VR community and the sponsors for making this another great hackathon. The next VR Hackat...

This past weekend was the first VR Hackathon MINI. The VR Hackathon is a community driven weekend long event focused on bringing together the brightest minds interested in virtual reality and related technologies to develop innovative hardware and software solutions, have fun, and build out the future of immersive technology. The VR Hackathon MINI is a one day hackathon for grade school students and this first one featured students from grades 5th - 8th. While the event suggested tools like Minecraft, Playingmondo, and Unity3D, students had the choice to work with whatever development tools they wanted. MINI was organized by Marianne Malmstrom (XP Galaxy) and Rurik Nackerud (XP Galaxy) with help from Mark Tronicke (Bergen Makerspace), me, and the folks from the Web3D Consortium. Participating sponsors and organizations included Autodesk, Playingmondo, and Futuristas, a group that focuses on getting more young girls into STEM programs. Students came from the following schools...

Here is a quick post to share some cool  VR Hackathon  news and info on upcoming events. 360° video of the Oct. 2014 event The MindVR team was cool enough to shoot the October 2014 event in 360° video and then post it on Vrideo , an immersive video platform. I need to dive deeper into Vrideo and its features, but at a glance it seems to be a platform for hosting and viewing 360° video that is also VR enabled. Once you start the video below, left click and hold to grab the video and move your mouse to look around. This video on mobile devices requires you turn with the device to look around. *if the above embed doesn't work  here is a link to the video . The Growing Community  With the success of the last event here in San Francisco and the growing interest by developers and designers of immersive technologies to have a weekend of creating and building, the VR Hackathon is expanding to new locations and age groups. There are events t...

Over the past few years I have been engaging a lot more with various entities in Denmark. One such group that has recently caught my attention is the Danish library system. Now I do remember coming across this report years back about the city of Aarhus Main Library's Transformation Lab and being impressed. Recently Dave Arendash, CTO at SpiralConcepts, and I were invited to present at SimLibrary, an event highlighting mixed reality technologies for libraries, held in Odense, Denmark. From the SimLibrary Website (translated from Danish):  SimLibrary is a cooperation between Odense Central Library, Aalborg, and Herning libraries with Euman A / S, and Educational Media Centers in the project cities. The SimLibrary project aims to develop libraries to a prominent place in the digital experience community with young people as drivers in a user-driven innovation process. To create virtual and physical environments that encourage young people to form relationships. ...

Charting unknown territory is definitely nothing new for the Danes. Danish companies such as Vestas , Lego , and Unity3D are conquering their industries in a way that would make their viking ancestors proud. Now entering this group is Playingmondo , a platform for creating and interacting with location based experiences. For those not familiar with location-based services , the Playingmondo app, available for iPhone and Android, uses the built-in GPS in the mobile phones to allow users to interact with digital content created around real world locations. This content can be viewed in a variety of ways including augmented reality. Already there are numerous Playingmondo playgrounds all over Denmark and in other countries, and even though a majority of the experiences are games, there are also experiences focused on health, education, tourism, and cultural heritage. The Playingmondo website is where you can join a community to find virtual playgrounds near you, meet up with your team m...

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