Research VR Podcast - The Science & Design of Virtual Reality

In this final episode of Research VR, Casey Sapp, the CEO of VRTUL, an high-end underwater panoramic filming company, joins Azad to talk about the difficulties of creating VR experiences deep in the ocean.

Jeff Powers, Cofounder of Occipital and Arcturus Industries joins Azad to discuss active depth cameras, Apple's LiDAR, and his vision of the future of consumer volumetric reconstructions.

Topics discussed:

- The market for depth cameras in 2014 for consumers, developers.

- Why they focused on mobile-first with the Structure sensor.

- Google's Tango project not being adopted.

- Building a developer friendly ecosystem for 3rd party companies.

- A general Perceptual layer in software that can take any input.

- The economies of scale with new and niche hardware.

- Did Tesla pick the right choice with cameras vs LIDAR?

- Building the Room View 3D with Valve

- Interesting applications of the Index's dual cameras.

- VR eating up AR's use cases in the short term.

Petr Legkov, Krzysztof Izdebski, and Azad Balabanian, the three cofounders of the podcast come back together to discuss the last four years of VR, the podcast, and their lives.

Topics discussed:

- Why/how the podcast started

- revisiting old arguments

- retrospection on VR industry over 4 years

Retrospective on:

- locomotion theories

- roomscale gaming not being the goal

- best value VR headset

- European tech glass ceiling

- focusing on learning

Jessica Outlaw, a culture & behavior researcher and Rebecca Hyman, a mental health therapist to discuss human culture in-and-out of VR, VR marketing demographics, as well as representation in media.

Topics discussed:

- Building non-violent cultures in VR

- VR's target demographics and identities

- The unreleased Intel VR HMD's marketing campaign

- The border between messing-around vs griefing/harassment

- Reddit's subreddit self moderation framework

- The basics of culture in a community

Cofounder and CEO of Sketchfab, Alban Denoyel joins Azad to talk about all things 3D on the web.

Topics discussed:

- Why sketchfab was created

- Why the large tech companies can't compete against Sketchfab's community

- The importance of having downloading/remixing functionality

- Why it’s difficult to be build both a community and a store

- What’s the point of 3D reality capture?

Google Earth, Hololens, and Disney VR pioneer Avi Bar-Zeev joins Azad to share his perspective of the 3D/VR industry over the last few decades and make predictions of the near future.

Jesslyn Tannady joins us to talk about CTRL-Labs's advancements in BCI's, finger tracking, and input methods for games and VR/AR.

Topics discussed:

- CTRL-Kit, finger tracking and intent tracking

- Interesting use cases:

- Controlling robots in an intuitive way with intent

- Typing for VR/AR

- using it as a game controller

- thoughts on Neuralink

Shawn Whiting, the Community Designer at Against Gravity joins Petr and Azad to discuss the origins and the future of one of the most popular games in VR: Rec Room.

Leap Motion's open source Project North Star has been fascinating VR/AR enthusiasts for the last year, but due to the scarcity of sourcing the components, finding a fully built kit is quite rare. Noah Zerkin, based out of Shenzhen, China has been focusing on fabricating and building the necessary components to build kits. He joins the podcast to chat about the headset, its advantages, and the challenges of what goes into building one.

Video podcast: https://youtu.be/G010rKFJMyY

recorded in Feb 2019

The CEO and CTO of LIV, Dr. Doom and Ruu join us to talk about the past, present, and future of green screen Mixed Reality and livestreaming VR games.

Topics discussed:

- Origins of green screen Mixed Reality - how did it start?

- How is Mixed Reality being today and by whom?

- Discord and the importance of building a community for a product

- GameChanger API : Adding audience interactivity into a streamer's game

- Vtubers and avatar copyright laws

- The state of VR streaming on Twitch