Virtual Reality is the creation of simulated environments using computer technology. Instead of viewing on screen , the user is immersed inside the experience. They are able to interact with the 3D world by interacting with the virtual objects present.
Sitting at home, you can experience the view from the top of Eiffel tower or the snowy mountains of Switzerland. The experience is unparalleled in comparison to traditional methods.
Oblivious to the past , most people don’t know that VR is not a 21st century invention. It’s been out there for quite a while. One of the first VR Headsets (Telesphere Mask) was invented by Morton Heilig in the 1960’s .
Akin to Artifical intelligence, VR was ahead of it’s time. The dawn of the 21st century and it’s powerful mobile technologies and constantly driven down prices seemed perfect time for the technology to gain mass acceptance.
Every form of content produced for mass consumption, requires a simple enough medium to produce.
VR content creation , in the beginning required knowledge of complicated game engines and programming languages.
But, for VR to gain mass acceptance like images and videos, content creation in VR must be as easy as clicking a photo from your smartphone and uploading it to social media. Having used such game engines ourselves, we realized that making VR popular is not going to be possible using them.
Apart from being simple , the content creation tool must offer variety of virtual objects which can be placed in the scene, to offer interactivity and engaging content output. Thus , Melzo was born.
Melzo is a web-based VR/AR content creation tool. It makes producing content as easy as drag-and-drop. The published content is supported across all devices / browsers / HMD’s. Content consumption is as easy as sharing a website link.
Outro — Developing the tool and supporting content consumption across the diverse devices and internet speeds requires lots of design and technological decisions. We will discuss some of these in the upcoming newsletter.
