After winning the Virtual Reality Education Hackathon in Orange County, members of Originate formed the Las Vegas Virtual Reality Meetup to build a community of Virtual Reality enthusiasts in Las Vegas.
The hackathon was hosted at a tech hub called Peoplespace in Orange County. The idea was to bring together designers, developers, makers, and educators for a weekend of VR development exploration. The mission was simple: Break into teams and try to use VR to create educational experiences.
“Everyone arrived at 9:00 am on Saturday and they all brainstormed on different educational hacks they could do in 36 hours. One group did a virtual classroom that allowed users to walk around and learn about different topics by looking at them and plugging in the audio stream. Another team created a virtual museum with great works of art hanging on the walls and when you looked at them, information popped up about the works and the artists,” Rob Mallery, Head of Origination at Originate, said in an interview with The Innevation Center.
“Our team decided to do things a little bit differently and built a game to help you learn to type on your keyboard without looking,” Rob Mallery continued. “They created a virtual keyboard and then produced graphical tiles that would float at you from all angles and when you stared at them inside the goggles, you could explode the tiles by properly typing the word on the tile. It was sort of like Asteroids for typing! Team “Typing Game” ended up winning the hackathon.”
Rob Mallery said after spending the weekend with an amazing group of futurists and developers, he knew he wanted to continue the momentum in Las Vegas. After quick search of Meetups in Las Vegas showed there was no Virtual Reality gatherings, he decided to spearhead his own.”I got the bug. I saw we aren’t doing anything like this in Las Vegas, and thought there needs to be something happening here,” Rob Mallery told the Downtown Podcast.
Join Rob Mallery and others at the first Las Vegas Virtual Reality Meetup meeting on Tuesday, July 1, 2014 at 6pm at The Innevation Center.
“The Oculus Rift is an easy-to-use new development platform that allows you to experience VR and create it as well. Everyone is welcome: engineers, designers, game developers, entrepreneurs, and VR fans,” the team says on Meetup page. “The group will have demos, presentations, speakers, and educational sessions and will also conduct hackathons with Oculus Dev Kits.”
About Originate: Originate partners with forward-looking enterprises and high growth startups to design, build, and invest in ambitious software products and companies. Our designers, developers, and product strategists design and build modern mobile, web, and data-driven software in iOS, Android, Ruby, Scala, Node.js, Javascript, and other scalable technologies. To fully align partners and employees, Originate passes through 20% of the upside it earns in each partnership to the employees that contributed to the success. Founded in 2007, Originate has eight global offices including Los Angles, New York, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Las Vegas, Orange County, Stockholm, and Hangzhou, China. Go to www.originate.com to learn more.
[…] Learn more about how the meetup in Las Vegas got started here. […]
[…] Learn more about how the meetup in Las Vegas got started here. […]