Justin Roiland, co-creator of Rick and Morty, loves VR so much he’s prepared to stand up in front of an audience and talk all about it.
Roiland is Saturday’s keynote speaker for the 2017 VRLA Expo, which runs from April 14th – 15th at the Los Angeles Convention Center, the same venue in which E3 takes place every year. Though he’s best known for his popular animated series, Roiland is also enthusiastic about the future of VR, having formed his own studio, Squanchtendo, which released the utterly bizarre Accounting on the HTC Vive last year. Rick and Morty is also making its way into VR with the help of Job Simulator dev Owlchemy Labs.
As for what to expect from Roiland’s talk? Well, we’ll let him answer that for you:
“What does the future of VR hold? Will there be more wizard games? Are grandmas real? What IS a wizard really? Are there wizard grandmas? How does this factor into VR? I did all this (simple) math and then made a power point “presentation that I **think** maaaayyybe has these questions (and more) all figured out. Please come to my incredible keynote address on the state of VR! You juuuust might learn something, maybe, I don’t know. I can’t make any promises on that because you may already know everything.”
Tickets for VRLA, meanwhile, are now on sale. This edition of the event features plenty of talks and sessions for VR veterans along with an expo floor where you can try a range of new VR experiences. Indie developers with less than $500,000 in funding can also apply for a spot in this year’s Indie Zone, a complimentary exhibition space for promising projects.
A business-focused 2-Day Pro Pass is available for $299 and a 1-Day Pass for a Saturday ticket is priced at $40. VRLA has become one of the largest, if not the largest, VR-focused conferences since it was started as a meetup in April 2014. If you want to go, the code VRLAupload should provide 15% off.
Here at #VRLA to see what Los Angeles is brewing for our future living in cyberspace. pic.twitter.com/1I57P9wyTT
— Ian Hamilton (@hmltn) April 8, 2014
That first meetup saw a couple hundred people attend with exhibitors including Epson with its Moverio, an early AR headset, as well as VR California-based VR software developers like Kite & Lightning, High Fidelity, Holden Link and E McNeill. Kite & Lightning and High Fidelity have each received significant funding since that first meetup while Link and McNeill have released multiple games. Epson continues to develop its AR glasses, releasing the BT-300 last year.
Since that first meetup the conference has grown into larger and larger venues with each passing event, offering a chance for L.A.’s vibrant creative community to discover some of the latest VR content and equipment, with L.A.-based studios like Survios using the event to publicly reveal their game Raw Data. By August last year, VRLA had grown to 6,000 people. 10,000 are expected at the next conference in what is again expected to be the largest VRLA event yet.
“There’s thousands and thousands of people that have been making content for other mediums, and now they’re looking at VR as the future of their business,” said Cosmo Scharf, one of VRLA’s co-founders. “We’re close to those people.”
We’ll see you there.
