Hosting companies like Opposable and events like VR World Congress, Bristol has become a hot spot for VR in the UK. Another studio is now joining that burgeoning list.
Giznode is a VR and AR innovation studio formed by Chris Price and Tim Edwards (pictured above). It’s a sort of mix of both B2B client work and an indie developer working on its own projects and IP. Currently funded out of pocket, the company is looking to quickly build up a strong client base looking into areas that few others in the UK are investigating, including data visualization, conferencing tools, and other practical applications.
I spoke with Edwards, who takes on the role of Innovation Director. His last job was at Opposable, the developer of the upcoming Salvaged and a driving force behind VR in the UK industry.
“So after a while working there we just sort of saw the growth of working in VR and a lot of the different types of applications that people were making and we really wanted to set up something that, as well as sort of focusing on the experiences and the games side, will also focus on the more practical applications that are coming out,” he told me.
In fact, Giznode already has a few of these applications in the works. It’s too early to show them, but Edwards tells me the studio is currently developing a collaborative working tool which should be finished by the end of the year and ready early next. There’s also a Vive conferencing app that one company has commissioned, allowing for annual business meetings without all of the expensive travel.
Most of the time, Giznode will be booking meetings with companies and pitching ideas for VR and AR apps to them. Price, who runs the studio, has ideal experience for this having previously worked at Mubaloo, a company that did similar client work with phone apps.
“Initially it was a lot of the draft work of convincing companies why they need an app,” Edwards says. “Now everyone has one. I think in the VR industry Chris definitely sees that going in the same route.”
One of the areas it hopes to have some significant success is in data visualization. Edwards tells me that “there’s been studies done recently that, when you’re moving around in a 3D space basically, that’s when you take in the most information.” The developer believes that humans “take in most when you’re playing football or driving and there’s lots of other conscious things going through your head. And if you’re just reading something or looking at something off the screen you’re a lot more disengaged with that.”
He uses an example of a map of a city with traffic being displayed. “If you put that in like a VR environment and you can walk around, you can pick stuff up and put it down, in your brain, you can start to see correlations a lot better than if you were just reading maps and Excel sheets and things like that. Because everything’s digitally physicalized in a VR environment it just helps you process information quicker and help businesses come to decisions quicker.”
It’s easy to see these types of apps materializing in both VR and mixed reality headsets like Microsoft’s HoloLens, which the company is also hoping to work with.
Giznode is hoping this sort of client work will help the company to reinvest in its own ideas and intellectual property, which we can expect later down the line. To start off with, though, it has a lot to invest in with VR equipment, and Edwards and Price are also hoping to grow their team to around seven by the end of the year, consisting of artists and developers.
Betting your future on convincing companies to use a niche technology sounds risky, but Edwards doesn’t appear to be phased.
“If you go in with a good business case or a good reason to use it,” he says, “then that’s fine.”
The next few months will tell all.
