OSVR at IEEE VR

Arles (image source: Wikipedia)

I'm heading to the city of Arles in the south of France (someone had to go, right?) to participate in the IEEE VR conference and exhibition. This would probably be my sixth or seventh IEEE VR but going to it the feeling and the goals are different.

What's unique at IEEE VR is the it is first and foremost an academic conference, not a VR exhibition. Hundreds and hundreds of researchers (many of which are Sensics customers) come to share, learn and discuss their research, experience cutting-edge demos that are not yet mature enough to show up at a GDC or CES. Because of the renewed interest in VR, I'm sure there will quite a few corporate visitors that were missing from previous years and wish to pick up trends, technologies and partners.

I am chairng a panel discussion on the resurgence of open-source VR. My co-panelists (Sebastien Kuntz from MiddleVR, Goeffrey Subileau from Dassault Systemes and Bill Sherman from the Desert Research Institute) will seek to answer several questions including:

• What’s new (relative to 1-2 years ago) in open-source and closed-source VR software
• When should I use closed-source and when should I use open-source?
• Should I contribute to open-source projects, and if so, why?
• What’s missing in current open-source VR?
• Is there an opportunity to combine open-source and closed-source frameworks

and of course we will take questions from the audience.

Later in the conference, Dr, Ryan Pavlik and I will be presenting a technical overview of OSVR, targeting both industry and academia.

When not in session, we will be demonstrating the OSVR HDK and the Sensics dSight at the exhibit area.

But what I am most interested in doing at the conference is listening. I want to hear about all the great research that is out there. I want to have in-depth conversations with people who might want to become OSVR partners, whether it is to hack the OSVR HDK, write a smart software plugin for the software platform or create some new kind of VR experience.

If you are going, look me up! If you're not, stay tuned on these pages for what I found at the show.