Let’s get… Virtual? (I know, this headline sucks)

A lot of people have asked me recently how I wound up diving head first into virtual reality. As a recovering artist, engineer, architect and textbook ENFP (for better or worse), I’ve always been a major sucker for anything at the intersection of art and technology. That’s why I became a designer. I love using digital products to make emotional connections, especially when they can feel like magic.

It all began in a fairly roundabout manner. I was exploring computer vision. Trying to build systems that could understand human body language and respond to our needs before we even realized we had them. Like I said, magic; but given the topic of this story it probably goes without saying, I failed miserably.

After realizing just how ambitious my computer vision concept actually was, I spent some time designing augmented reality applications for smartphones. This felt like a more feasible application of the technology I was so excited about. However, it didn’t take long to discover that here too my work felt like something still years away from anyone but the most exuberant of early adopters. There were simply too many hard problems that needed to be addressed simultaneously. Tremendous hurdles from both a hardware and software perspective.

As I continued to narrow my field of view (pun intended), I began spending more time around folks working on virtual reality. This was a space that like many people, I had written off as a toy for hardcore gamers. Yet, the more time I spent in VR, the more I came to realize I had been foolishly characterizing an entire platform as nothing more than it’s single most obvious use case. It was like saying that mobile phones were only going to be valuable for making phone calls. What kind of crazy person would I have to be to think that?

All of a sudden, virtual reality felt like an unbelievable opportunity landing on my doorstep. It’s a sandbox for solving abridged versions of the complex problems applying to pervasive computer vision and augmented reality, but even more incredible is the entirely new medium that it’s blossoming into. That’s not to say virtual reality isn’t without it’s fair share of challenges, far from it in fact. We’re still in the early days, but the industry is moving faster than many of us anticipated. Everything from communication to healthcare, business to education, entertainment and beyond is going to be influenced by this new platform.

Many bright people are taking the leap into virtual reality every day. Those who do are going to be laying a foundation for the future of this technology. Just like research from the team at Xerox PARC played a fundamental role in shaping how we interact with computers to this day, I look forward to shaping how we interact with elaborate virtual ecosystems. If you’re as excited as I am, I would love to hear your thoughts as well!