It’s been two years since I wrote my primer on virtual reality: ‘From Rectangles to Reality’. Back then, VR was just starting to gain pace and people were truly excited about what was about to come.
Today, VR feels like a fairly normal experience. Samsung GearVR has sold over five million units, Google Cardboard is given away at agricultural conferences to inspire farmers, and gamers immerse themselves in all sorts of experiences from Canadian developers like CLOUDHEAD GAMES and their series ‘The Gallery.’
Beyond VR, we are seeing mixed reality becoming a useful tool in the world. Companies like Magic Leap have been hugely funded without product available yet, and Meta is starting to work on applications. Over the past few years, Microsoft secretly developed the Hololens in Victoria, BC, and now both Vancouver Island and the lower mainland have become the world’s hotbed of VR and MR development.
Over the next three to five years, VR and MR will be everywhere, and the metaverse will keep growing. Headsets and glasses will become standard, just like smartphones and Bluetooth earphones. We will start to move away from using our smartphones as those manufacturers — Apple, Samsung, Google, and others — and build out VR and MR capabilities beyond those screens in our pockets.
The evolution of the virtual, augmented, and mixed reality will be discussed at length as the designers, developers, visionaries, and users descend on Vancouver at CVR 2017 from May 5th to May 7th.
The three-day event includes speakers like Evelyn Miralles, lead VR innovator at NASA; Tony Bevilacqua, founder and CEO at Cognitive VR; and Kharis O’Connell, director of senior director of UX at Meta. The event also includes hands-on demonstrations of the latest products, and will be open to industry professionals on Friday, and the general public for two days over the weekend.
Companies at the event will touch on topics like solving problems in outer space with VR, designing the future of virtual humans, and featuring the latest evolution in entertainment.
“I’m very excited to be presenting at the CVR 2017, the Canadian’s premier VR/AR/MR conference,” said Miralles. “VR’s a technology that has been with us at NASA for several decades used for astronaut space training. But the technology has now come of age and it’ll be changing the way we interact with people and the environment around us.”
If you’re as excited about this as I am, and you’ll be in Vancouver from the 5th to 7th of May then you can be the lucky recipient of one of four tickets to CVR 2017. One person will also get a VR headset.
Just tweet ‘I’m excited about the future Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Reality in Canada and beyond at #CVR2017’ and the team at CVR will be in touch if you are selected.