A VR Startup: A Year in Pictures
StoryUP VR is only a year and a half old but thanks to a great team and a great God, we’ve managed to create a half a dozen immersive films for social purpose organizations, generate a sustainable amount of revenue, launch an app that categorizes media on the basis of brain wave patterns, file a provisional patent, introduce virtual reality to the Munduruku tribe in Brazil, scale a volcano, track mountain gorillas, charge gear with a solar panel, premiere a VR film during Sundance and add forward companies like Google, Facebook and Humana to our client list.
Here’s a look at the moments that moved us in 2016.
While thousands of Veterans got to virtually see their memorial over the last year…. sadly, we have at least 50 Veterans still on a waiting list for Honor Everywhere, a free program that provides VR tours for World War II, Korea and Vietnam Veterans. We simply cannot get goggles to them all in time. Most of these men and women will die before someone can get a VR headset to them. If you are one of the millions with these VR headsets or better yet if you’re the CEO of a company that has the ability to donate headsets (thank you Google VR and Merge VR for your donations already), I’d like to give you a sample of one of the hundreds of letters we’re getting in our inbox:
Dear Honor Everywhere,
My neighbor is 94 years old and will never have the opportunity to see the WWII Memorial in person. He was on the beach on D-Day as well as many other battles in WWII. He has five bronze stars as well as other metals. He is an incredible man. I would love for him to have the opportunity to use these goggles in this virtual reality fashion. I think that it would be an unforgettable experience for him. Can you please help?
If you have a VR headset and are willing to share the experiences with Veterans in your area, go to honoreverywhere.com for instructions. The World War II and Vietnam memorials are both viewable via the Jaunt app.
We had the incredible opportunity to tell a series of immersive stories about energy poverty for Empowered by Light. The experiences in collaboration with the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, Solar City and Give Power allowed people to step inside the stories of people who lack access to affordable electricity. “Are You Listening?” premiered at the Dubai International Film Festival and will be shown in the states in the coming months.
This Mizzou experience along with a host of other experiences categorized by brain wave patterns will debut on our app in January 2017.
We learned that even a hard drive that costs $10k is not powerful enough to play a 100GB piece of video. When working with proprietary cameras, proxies are your friend as are at least a gigabit ethernet connections. Speaking of data, we fill up hard drives now as much as we do our gasoline tanks. VR files are HUGE.
In a project with Facebook, Oculus and the charity, “Love Has No Labels”, we created an immersive film that allows people to examine their eyes and minds for implicit bias. The VR film shot with Nokia’s camera will debut at a private event during Sundance in January.
For thousands, StoryUP was their first VR experience.
We perfected our holographic dexterity with the Microsoft Hololens by playing with holograms in my living room.
The 360 “Surroundie” became a thing.
We created our first 3D passport photo.
Our Oculus Touch Controllers arrive and we learn how to grasp our new hands to catch virtual butterflies.
We try “vestibular audio” and feel our body move in sync with the video.
To challenge ourselves, we try to shoot and stitch a story in under 12 hours….in the middle of a flood. Yep it’s doable…even with a drone.
We learn that laying on your back on a gurney and movement in VR don’t mix.
We learned in your hidey hole, you can translate into two different languages.
To recap, VR is hard.
STORY is still king despite the tech.
But VR isn’t for you…….
It’s for them.
