The holiday season is here, and despite the torrential wind and rain impacting the Bay Area, Silicon Valley Virtual Reality (SVVR) brought the VR community together for a celebration. With an amazing line-up of demos, exhibitors, and speakers the night was one to remember. To top it all off, Oculus made an appearance with the coveted crescent bay prototype.
For this event, SVVR returned to its roots at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, where the inaugural SVVR meetup took place in April 2013. The incredible demo line-up featured experiences from VR power players including Samsung, Oculus, Sixense, CastAR, Seabright, Immersion-VRelia, zSpace, AltSpace VR, Jaunt, and more. A company new to demo in the bay area, GeoSim, was showcasing their incredible 3D city scanning technology with a high-fidelity scan Vancouver, Canada. Very impressive, photorealistic quality. Other great software demos included Ethereon, Jump Scare by First Rule Studios, VRChat, Vox-Machinae, and more (for a full list of demos see the SVVR meetup page).
Special announcements and presentations were made throughout the evening. Our good friend Amir Rubin from Sixense, presented the first STEM system to Karl Krantz to mark the release of the highly anticipated STEM development kit. Sixense was also proud to demonstrate a new version of their light saber demo working flawlessly on the Samsung GearVR. The integration of their motion-tracking input device with the untethered high-resolution GearVR is an incredible achievement.
It’s always exciting to see the community come together and enthusiastically share their experiences, and a spectacular event like the SVVR holiday party was the perfect gift for VR professionals and enthusiasts to close out 2014, the year that set the stage for the arrival of consumer VR.
Thanks again to Karl Krantz, the founder of SVVR, for pioneering the community and spreading the magic of VR.
