

Neil Schneider is the founder of the Meant to Be Seen forum at MTBS3D.com and he talks about how his failed business led him to deal with his depression by playing video games. He wanted to have more and more engaging and immersive experiences, which eventually led him to getting into 3D gaming with shutter glasses and CRT monitors.

Neil talks about his journey of being the 3d game evangelist within the film and video circles who were also getting into 3D. What he ultimately wanted was to have a more immersive gaming experience, and he decided that in order to do that then he’d need to cultivate a community online to demonstrate that there was indeed demand there for game developers and technology manufactures gain enough confidence that there was a market who could support the required software and hardware.

He talks about how Palmer Luckey was a moderator on the MTBS3D forum, and the famous thread where Palmer first announced the Oculus Rift and how that lead to connecting up with John Carmack and other forum members who went on to be a part of Oculus VR.

In hindsight, Neil’s efforts to help consolidate and organize gamers interested in stereoscopic 3D immersive experiences seems to have had a pretty significant impact on the resurgence of virtual reality. He says that gamers are usually the early adopters of these technologies, and for the longest time they were discounted and ignored by the major 3D hardware manufacturers who were more interested in trying to cash in with the expected boom in 3D televisions in the home. Obviously that didn’t work out as planned, and Neil cautions that virtual reality isn’t destined to succeed and may face the same fate if there isn’t enough compelling content that draws people into buying their own virtual reality headsets.

Neil also talks about the history of the non-profit that is called The Immersive Technology Alliance, and it’s mandate to help make immersive technology successful with technologies ranging from virtual reality, augmented reality and stereoscopic 3D. He also talks about bringing immersive technology events like Immersed to places beyond the hot beds of technology and entertainment in Silicon Valley and Los Angeles.

Neil talks about some of his GDC highlights, whether it’s too soon to talk much about interoperability, whether there will be an effort to control the platform & distribution, and what he sees as a concerted effort to have more collaboration and open communication amongst virtual reality hardware manufacturers.

Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio

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