First time as a VR exhibitor, at SFVR VR Showcase
I met Matt Sonic, the organizer of SFVR meetup, at Oculus Connect 2 back on September. That was the first day of Oculus Connect 2, and it was the time before we started watching someone’s talk. I always love to share my narrative VR film ‘Imago’ to anyone who is interested in Virtual Reality, because most of time I got positive feedback telling me something like “This is touching” or “This is a beautiful peace, I really like the ballet part”.
I always follow up the people after I meet them, and Matt was one of them. He relied me that “It was nice meeting you at OC2. Your “locked-in syndrome” demo was compelling. It’s a shame that the talk started and I didn’t get to give you any feedback. It was very powerful. You are turning the limitations of VR into a storytelling advantage. Nicely done!” I never expect that kind of result. I didn’t know a little sharing could become a big impact. Then, I became one of the exhibitor at SFVR VR showcase on Nov. 3rd, 2015.
I’m now working on a project called Gotan, which is using Google Project Tango on a head mounted display(HMD) and gives people the ability to walk around in the virtual world. Why? Project Tango is a mobile tablet with three cameras in front, the motion tracking camera, the depth sensing camera, and the pixel camera. It combines 3D motion tracking and depth sensing to give the user the ability to know where they are and how they more in the reality, when they are wandering in the virtual world. Our system makes everything into boxes and it results in a voxel world. For example, when you are in front of a player with Project Tango on HMD, you become a body-shape boxes. So when they put on the headset, they won’t bump into you or any stuff because they see you through motion tracking camera and depth sensing camera. That’s the interesting part of my current project. We call this project a Mixed Reality experience.
This was my first time to become a exhibitor in the US. 300 people came to the event. I didn’t need to promote or talk to people, and there was already a long line in front of my booth. Even though it was the shortest line in the whole event, I was still exhausted because I was the only representative of my teams. Thanks to Matt, I could talk to a lot of VR enthusiasts and investors. After this event, there have been so many investors are interested in working with me. I was so surprised, but I was glad to see that. I know this is the famous Bay Area. Everyone is looking for investors, and on the other side, everyone is looking for good potentials.
There were two things happening at my booth: one is my current project Gotan, and one is my previous project Project Hypnos. The only common thing of two projects is that, I’m proud of being part of the team. Jaehee Cho, Joel Ogden, Junwen Chen(Eric), Amy Stewart, and Tsung-Yu Tsai(Jack) were my Project Hypnos’ teammates. Wei Xie, Keng Hua Sing, Vivek Vidyasagaran, and Nigel Randall are my current partners. I’ve been writing about ‘Imago’ for a long time, so it’s time for my new project, Gotan.
With three and half programmers in a 5-person project, it’s powerful. At the 4th week of the project, we could have three prototypes running simultaneously and see which one worked best on Project Tango. Then we kept iterating until we feel something went right. Interaction goes right, the art looks right, players feel right, then we’re satisfied. That’s why there were so many people felt right at SFVR, because we are doing something right.
It was a small space. With Project Tango, player should be able to walk around in a 40x40 square meter(130x130 square feet) space without any problem. But it was too crowded. All I had was merely a 2x2 square meter(6.5x6.5 sq ft) space. However, this wasn’t part of my plan. I brought my Gear VR to show my narrative VR film ‘Imago’. That’s all. And I figured out that bring my current project to let more people know about mixed reality since Hololens is such a popular topic right now. ‘Imago’ is a quite long VR experience. And I found that it should be a nice chance to talk about my current project when people were waiting in line. People loved it! And there was one woman came and asked me “Is this the hologram one?” “Probably… I guess?”, I said. I think it was because of Microsoft’s Hololens. We call ourselves, a mixed reality experience.
The whole process went pretty well. I think I got around 20–30 people to watch ‘Imago’ and play with Gotan’s MR experience. The only thing I didn’t think of was that…it’s really hard to handle 20–30 people by myself! Fortunately, I got two friends came and helped me out for a little bit, but only for 1.5 hours. The event started from 7pm to 11pm. Including the setup and pack-up time, I was there for 5.5 hours. I was exhausted, but I was satisfied when people told me they love it and want to learn more about it. I think this is the meaning of a meetup event, to get to know more people, to get to know how people think about your product. And it was also the first time I ran out of my business card, and the first time I was eager to have extras around me. There were so many “first time” things at this event for me. I felt grateful and joyful that I got the chance to do it. Again, special thanks to Matt Sonic. Thank you for giving me this chance to be there. And thank you Carnegie Mellon University Entertainment Technology Center for supporting us Project Hypnos!
