Stepping into the spotlight is Lauren Frazier, Cofounder and CTO at Ramen VR, a Y Combinator VR game studio and makers of the award-winning Conjure Strike.

On our 6th podcast episode Lauren fills us in on Ramen VR’s upcoming game, Zenith, a cross-platform massive multiplayer for VR funded in part by Oculus. She shares how Y Combinator prepared Ramen VR for the business world, Kickstarter tips for success and how she risked a stable career in iOS mobile development for VR gaming, with a little help from Oculus Launch Pad.

Plus Lauren's quarantine playlist and more!

 Thanks for listening and happy installing!

• Share, like and subscribe to Zero to Start on your favorite podcast platform.
• Follow Zenith @ZenithMMO 

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FEATURED LINKS

• Ramen VR
• Zenith on Discord 
• Zenith Alpha Sneak Peek Trailer
• Zenith Kickstarter - funded in 4 hours!
• Conjure Strike - Oculus Store
• FMOD - Adaptive audio solution for games
• Oculus Start Developer Program

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TUTORIALS

• Design, Develop, and Deploy for VR - Unity Learn
• Unity Roll-a-Ball Tutorial - updated for 2020!

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LAUREN'S QUARANTINE PLAYLIST

• Lucky Daye
• Study Chill
• Beyoncé

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Stepping into the spotlight is Jasmine Roberts, an accomplished software engineer who has worked at pioneering companies including Unity, Sony Playstation and Google Creative Lab in New York City where she developed and launched, Lines of Play, a Google experiment AR app highlighting the features of Google’s new AR Core Depth API. 

Jasmine was a 2017 Oculus Launch Pad fellow and in 2020 Forbes recognized her on their Games 30 under 30 list. 

On this episode of Zero to Start Jasmine shares her insights about developing with the latest AR APIs, a mini-dive into SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping), what she wished she knew when she started in the industry and tools beginners should explore as they start their journey.

Plus Jasmine's quarantine playlist and more!

Thanks for listening and happy installing!

• Share, like and subscribe to Zero to Start on your favorite podcast platform.
• Follow Jasmine Roberts  @ladykillmonger

================================

FEATURED LINKS

• Lines of Play - Google Play
• Google Creative Lab launches Lines of Play - An Open-Source Experiment To Showcase ARCores's Depth API - Forbes
• Waves of Grace, Gabo Arora + Chris Milk - Within
• Oculus Start Developer Program

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TUTORIALS

• Quick VR prototypes - Josh Carpenter, Mozilla Blog
• Design, Develop, and Deploy for VR - Unity Learn
• Unity Roll-a-Ball Tutorial - updated for 2020!

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JASMINE'S QUARANTINE PLAYLIST

• Earth Wind & Fire 

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Stepping into the spotlight is Richard Duck, Store Operations Manager at Oculus. 

On this episode of Zero to Start Richard talks about how  his team helps guide developers as they prepare for publishing their titles on the Oculus Store. 

Richard highlights the importance of testing all aspects of your VR title and how testing helps create community around your work.

We talk about the magic of VR, film and theatrical influences on VR, spatial audio and how studying the history of games can help inspire creators as they develop experiences for the radical new era of spatial computing. 

• Share, like and subscribe to Zero to Start on your favorite podcast platform.

================================

FEATURED LINKS

• VIDEO: Facebook: Game Developers Showcase / Best Practices for Launching Games on Oculus - YouTube
• VIDEO: Facebook Connect - Introducing the Oculus Developer Hub - YouTube
• Oculus Developer Hub Update 1.1 - Oculus Blog
• Oculus Start Developer Program

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TUTORIALS

• Design, Develop, and Deploy for VR - Unity Learn
• Unity Roll-a-Ball Tutorial - updated for 2020!

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RICHARD'S QUARANTINE PLAYLIST

• Lighter Than Air FM
• The Lot Radio
• NTS

================================

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Stepping into the spotlight Kathryn Hicks, AR/VR Designer at the Danse shares how the Savannah College of Art and Design led her to virtual reality, igniting the creation of her first animated 360 film, Tall Tales of the Aerona Temple. 

Kathryn fills us in on her latest project working alongside Memphis developer Justin Palmer on Mend, a cross-platform puzzle game and 2019 Oculus Launch Pad scholarship winner. 

Plus Kathryn shares her recommendations for open source 3D tools that emerging designers and artists should explore as they dive into immersive asset creation. 

We have fun talking about her fascination with the classic horror genre and sasquatch.

• Follow Kathryn on Twitter @gokatcreate
• Follow her latest VR project @MendTheGame
• Share, like and subscribe to Zero to Start on your favorite podcast platform.

================================

FEATURED LINKS

• Meet the 2019 Oculus Launch Pad Scholarship Recipients - Oculus Blog
• Oculus Start Developer Program
• Quill - VR illustration and animation

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OPEN SOURCE ART TOOLS

• Blender - 3D modeling and animation
• Medium - 3D modeling by Adobe
• Gimp - image editor
• Krita - painting and illustration 
• Fire Alpaca - painting
• Scribus - desktop publishing
• Inkscape - vector graphics editor
• DJV - video player

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TUTORIALS

• Design, Develop, and Deploy for VR - Unity Learn
• Unity Roll-a-Ball Tutorial - updated for 2020!

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KATHRYN'S QUARANTINE PLAYLIST

• Hello from the Magic Tavern
• Critical Role

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Stepping into the spotlight Clorama Dorvilias, Product Manager at Oculus shares her first ah-ha moment in VR, her previous experience building VR training solutions to reduce bias in education, new Oculus product releases, tips for aspiring VR product managers and her quarantine playlist. Happy installing!

• Follow Clorama on Twitter @CreativeClo
• Subscribe to Clorama's YouTube Channel
• Share, like and subscribe to Zero to Start on your favorite podcast platform.

================================

FEATURED LINKS

• Facebook Connect September 16th
• Oculus introduces new ways to play together - Oculus Blog
• Teacher's Lens by Debias VR - Oculus Store 
• Meet the 2017 Oculus Launch Pad Scholarship Recipients - Oculus Blog
• Oculus Start Developer Program

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TUTORIALS

• Design, Develop, and Deploy for VR - Unity Learn
• Unity Roll-a-Ball Tutorial - updated for 2020!

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READING LIST

• Cracking the PM Interview - Gayle Laackmann McDowell and Jackie Bavaro
• Decode and Conquer - Lewis C. Lin

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QUARANTINE PLAYLIST

• 90's Spice Girls
• Beyoncé

================================

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Siciliana Trevino is excited to bring you her new Zero to Start Spotlight series featuring insightful conversations with VR creators and industry leaders about how you can break into VR, brought to you by Oculus from Facebook.

Now in its fifth year Oculus Launch Pad is an essential VR developer program designed for promising content creators from diverse backgrounds. 2020 Applications are open until August 20th. Our first spotlight guest, Allison Lee, Developer Program Manager at Oculus tells us everything you need to know about applying to Launch Pad.

Allison also shares her perspective on VR design, resources like the free Unity Learn - Design, Develop and Deploy for VR course, beginner tutorial rites of passage like the Roll a Ball tutorial, how VR is made for this moment and what's on her quarantine playlist to stay on task.

Follow Allison on Twitter @AvLee_ 

Share, like and subscribe to Zero to Start on your favorite podcast platform.

Happy Installing!
================================
FEATURED LINKS

• Oculus Launch Pad 2020 Application
• Oculus Launch Pad  2019 Scholarship recipients
• Oculus Start Developer Program
• Design, Develop, and Deploy for VR - Unity Learn
• Unity Roll-a-Ball Tutorial - updated for 2020!

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Reading list

• Virtual Vernacular by Sarah Bonser

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Quarantine playlist

• Donny Benét on YouTube

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Send us a note!

Our 7th episode finds us in another Mercury retrograde, over 100 days since Berkeley announced its shelter in place and reminiscing about Berkeley's annual Martin Luther King Jr. Breakfast last January.

Melanie takes a 3D scan of her garden using the Display.land mobile app by Ubiquity6 (which is now discontinued), succeeds in building her first Unity scene, although we get an app ID error when we try to upload her project file to her Oculus test release channel. 

Happy Installing!

We recap: 

• Black Lives Matter 
• ARVR Women's 2018-19 Futurists in Residence
• The end of Bose AR SDK and 
• Siciliana's War of the Worlds interactive podcast audio AR game 
• High Fidelity's new 3D audio meeting platform
• Display.land volumetric capture mobile app - now sunset! 

Community Shoutout

• IIlya Szilak's Queerskins a love story  launched on the Oculus Store

Featured links

• Oculus Start Developer program 
• Center for Cultural Innovation (CCI)
• VIDEO: War of the Worlds Game Trailer - Quirkeley
• VIDEO: Kent Bye demo of High Fidelity spatial audio
• Download Unity Hub - Unity
• Lifecycle of an Oculus VR app - Oculus
• About Oculus Release Channels - Oculus

Quarantine Playlists

• The Gamma

Subscribe to Zero to Start on YouTube

===================
Zero to Start Music by Melanie Mentzel and Leonard Sherman

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Ten weeks ago the Bay Area began sheltering in place. Learning how to build an oasis in VR has never been more profound or essential, if not disorienting as we face a staggering loss of life from Covid-19 and outrage over the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. 

As we learn how to turn on the lights in the virtual world we’re building with Unity, reality is in turmoil and in need of healing. While technology alone can’t cure disease or injustice, VR is a powerful medium that can inspire compassion and collaboration, resilience and community.

We're on a quest to make that potential a reality. Thanks for joining us.

On our 6th episode Melanie and I recap: 

• Epic Games announcement of the release of Unreal 5, their free to download game engine, introducing two new core technologies, Nanite and Lumen.
• A field trip into Engage VR for Caitlin Krause’s Collaboration in VR event
• Melanie’s first Unity project “Moasis” Unity render pipelines part 1
• Our quarantine dev mode playlists on YouTube: Elements and The Gamma

Featured links

• Setting up Unity XR in 2020 - Gerald McAlister, RGB Schemes
• VIDEO: What are shaders? - The Happie Cat
• VIDEO: How game engines work - The Happie Cat
• ICYMI: Today, 60% of #AR and #VR content is powered by Unity! - @unity3d
• VIDEO: The Art of Mise en Place - ChefSteps
• Looking back/1995 All you wanted to know about FireWire - cmple
  
  

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Zero to Start Music by Melanie Mentzel and Leonard Sherman
Leave Me in My Broken Dreams by Raär

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We're back! Thanks to Berkeley Community Media, Melanie has a new VR-ready gaming PC and is all set with Unity Hub and the Oculus Rift CV1. On this episode we reflect on my early days in VR (way back in 2015) and my first GearVR project, how VR development keeps you on your toes, we dive into Melanie's new PC and the VR experiences she's been exploring including AltSpace and VRChat. We also highlight a few of the many thriving VR art communities on Facebook that will inspire you on your VR journey and more.

As always, stay focused in dev mode with our weekly music playlists on YouTube: Elements and The Gamma

Happy Installing!

Featured links

• Oculus Start Developer program 
• 360 VIDEO: Snow Angel "We Love"
• 360 Filmmaker Kevin Kunze
• XEODesign CEO Nicole Lazzaro 
• SpatialFirst CEO Emily Olman
• Zencaster High Fidelity Podcasting
• Ableton - software and hardware for music creation and performance

VR Hardware / Tools / Social Platforms

• VIDEO: ASUS G11 Gaming Desktop Computer overview
• Unity Hub
• AltSpaceVR
• The HiveVR in AltSpace
• TOOL KIT: AltSpace world building 
• VRChat
• Tilt Brush by Google
• Google Blocks

VR art communities on Facebook

• XR Artists
• VR Art Live!
• Learning Unity for VR/AR Artists 
• Tilt Brush Artists
• Immersive Animation

Follow us on Twitter
@BCMORG
===================
Zero to Start Music by Melanie Mentzel and Leonard Sherman

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We're on lock down! Last week on March 15th Berkeley, then two days later, the state of California issued a Stay at Home order that moved us from the basement of the matrix and onto Zoom. What is an essential business and does it include cannabis clubs? Will social distancing increase VR adoption or will the supply chain limit VR to industry and early adopters? Are we living in a simulation sparked by alien technology? 

We contemplate our new reality and re-cap our encounter with an Oculus Rift install bug from 2016 that has us pivoting yet again in search of a way forward. 

• Oculus Forums / Oculus Setup: KB2670838 and KB3033929 required, but already installed

Be sure to catch our YouTube playlists for music inspired by the intensity of the moment. 

• The Gamma
• Elements

Stay home and stay safe everyone!

Featured links:

• NeuroExplorer VR on Oculus
• Exploring Cornonavirus molecules in VR, CDC YouTube
• Nanome on Oculus, nanoscale design / get covid-19 model via the PDB code 6LU7. Nanome is free to download through Oculus, Steam, Sidequest, or nanome.ai/setup
• VRChat on Oculus
• RecRoom on Oculus

Happy Installing!

Siciliana and Melanie

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