How close is the VR revolution?

Last week, we held an event at the Brilliant Basics studio in London, as part of the London Design Festival. Our event centered around the theme of Design + Tech = Magic. It is a topic extremely close to our hearts, as we understand the power of combining these two disciplines to create truly amazing experiences.

Brilliant Basics London opened its studio door for the London Design Festival.

A hot topic in our space (and the industry) is Virtual Reality (VR) and some of the bb team are VR fanatics, so we chose to focus our event around this theme. The aim was to give our guests a taste of all things VR and demonstrate and try how it is being used across a number of sectors.

Guests were treated to an introduction to the Top Digital Innovations 2015, handpicked by Springwise’s editor, Chris Kreinczes, you can view these here.

The bb team was bowled over by Disney illustrator, Glen Keane, when he released a video about how he is using VR to sketch. We played this inspirational video and had some of the bb team on hand to discuss how VR could impact how designers work in the future.

There was the opportunity to try out a selection of VR tech.

We were delighted to have award-winning, international production company, Visualise, at the event. Visualise provided hands-on demos of exactly how VR and 360 video can be used, with a selection of Samsung Gear VR headsets. Whether you wanted to experience a tennis lesson with Tim Henman or play on stage with Kasabian there was something for everyone.

We even built our own hologram.

After this light introduction to innovation and VR guests were taken into our back meeting room, hosted by bb’s Alex Cohen, which was kitted out with a range of VR tech. Within ‘Geektopia’ as we nicknamed it, you could try out the Oculus Rift, have a go a building your own VR experience, give Leap Motion a go and learn how to build a hologram (we had two on display).

After enjoying the experiences, guests enjoyed drinks and snacks and talked about the tech on display. All of these demos proved just how easy it is to create these experiences but also some real-life practical examples of how this can be used.

The bb London team enjoyed throwing open the doors to the studio for one night only.

For some the VR revolution is underway already and for all the rest of us, it’s not far away at all.