Way back 11.5 months ago...



We started 2015 knowing we needed to keep experimenting with new ideas in VR, because it is still such a new medium, but that we also wanted to ship complete products too.

We knew commercial headsets were still a ways off at that point, but that the first ones would likely ship by the end of the year, and we needed to be ready in time for that.

We celebrated turning 1 year old as a company at the GDC conference in March, and it's been a rollercoaster of a year ever since. Let's jump into what that looked like, followed by where we're headed in 2016.





Yana Virtual Relaxation goes mobile

Yana was one of our earliest VR experiences, which we originally released for free on the Oculus Share website for desktop VR users.

We knew Yana presented a significant challenge to port to mobile VR platforms, due to certain performance-heavy elements in the scene like the reflective water and the light changing from day to night and back, and porting it flew in the face of Oculus' advice to start on mobile first instead of working backwards from an existing desktop VR project.

But we knew we would learn a lot about mobile VR optimization in the process, and it forced us to think outside of the box to solve each optimization challenge, which you can read all about here.

In the end, Yana turned into a beautiful little app for both the Samsung Gear VR and Google Cardboard platforms. Yana was even featured at the top of Google's Cardboard Favorites section!





Experimenting, err'day

In our first year, with VR being so new (to everyone, but also us), we spent most of it just experimenting and learning about what works and what doesn't, in order to establishing a deeper understanding of why the best practices are what they are.

This yielded TinyPlant (a miniature robotics manufacturing plant), Tower Crane VR (self-explanatory), Party Sketch 3D (even more fun than it sounds), and Range Of Motion VR (get stretchier!) to name a few. Needless to say, we learned a lot.

Virtual reality is all about human perception. It's about about how we perceive the world around us, our expectations and basic assumptions, and finding ways to work with those can be tough, and often counter-intuitive.

Our experiments in 2015 include:

Lightshow

Lightshow is a VR creation app that combines dance, music, and light to create your own VR performances. These performances could be recorded and shared with others on the web.

Lightshow taught us about positional data capture and replay, and multiplayer challenges such as time synchronization, as well as being really fun to play in!

Mushroomoon

We created Mushroomoon for the Oculus Mobile VR Game Jam. Mushroomoon is a third person platformer game, which turns out to be a surprisingly fun style of gameplay in VR!

Winnipeg Folk Festival in 360°

Working with Handcraft Creative, we approached the Winnipeg Folk Festival about creating a virtual reality video project people could watch to relive the festival.

We recently showcased the results at their annual Folk Fest in the City night.

CMHR Creation Lab

We teamed up with the wider creative community, including the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, the National Film Board, New Media Manitoba, and On Screen Manitoba, to collaborate on finding new ways to apply emerging technologies to augment the way visitors connect with the stories and content of the museum.

Oculus Connect 2

This September, Les was invited to talk at the Oculus Connect 2 conference. His talk was called "From Paper Cutouts to Virtual Cards: Making the Tabletop Interface for Lost Cities".

Here is a post where we were kinda freaking out about how cool this was for us.

Winnipeg Alternate Reality Club

This fall, we also started Winnipeg's first and only VR and AR meetup, called the Winnipeg Alternate Reality Club.



We've already had several local developers showcase their creations, tons of interest (this meetup isn't just for developers!), and some great conversations around where the technology is going, how it's going to change the way we interact with technology (and even with each other), the challenges of storytelling in VR, and lots more.

Check out the meetup page to find out when we'll be getting together next.

Lost Cities VR

I won't go into Lost Cities too much since we did that in another post just last week, but I will say that shipping our first game between March and December of this year was a huge undertaking with many ups and downs, but we really came together as a team and I think everyone should be super proud of the results!

We submitted Lost Cities to the Gear VR app store last week, and are just nailing down an official release date now.





What's up for 2016

We'll be announcing our next game in the new year, but we can't say any more than that quite yet - sorry!

We'll also be revealing more about our Scout 360° VR media player soon, which is the app that powers the Winnipeg Folk Festival 360° experience. We're releasing a VR experience of the University of Winnipeg next month too, which you can read about in the Fall 2015 issue of UWinnipeg Magazine (PDF alert).

Catch us at All Access in January. Les will be joining a panel called "MB Focus: The Creation Lab" talking about our weekend at the CMHR, and then you'll be able to try our Folk Fest 360° experience at the All Access Manitoba Interactive Digital Media Showcaselater that evening.

2015 has been one amazing year, but we're just getting started. 2016, watch out - we're coming for you!

P.S. Can we make virtually the new literally in 2016?



That time Oculus threw Rachael into their Oculus Rift Consumer Edition keynote for a minute or so.

- by John Luxford