This is a special joint meeting of MN VR and HCI, and GDG-TC (Google Developers Group - Twin Cities.) Thanks to Vidku for being such great hosts, and making this possible!

VR and Google Cardboard Crash Course

Paul Christian and Zach Wendt

Creating your first VR app can be suprisingly fast, easy, and cheap. But, there’s definitely pitfalls along the way. We’ll get you started out in the right direction!

Zach will give a quick and broad overview of important VR design considerations, and the hardware and human perception factors behind them. Paul will give a tutorial on Google Cardboard development in Unity, and some features of the Cardboard app he made for Toursler. The talk will cover:

• Summary of VR “tiers” - hardware and experiences
• Overview of relevant human perception factors, with fun illusions
• VR design Do’s, Don’ts, and painful mistakes
• Cardboard viewer differences
• Deciding between the Cardboard SDK for Android, and SDK for Unity
• Build and Deploy a sample Unity project for Google Cardboard
• Leveraging Unity scripting to pull data from the internet in real time.

Oculus Connect 2 (oc2) Summary

Various

The second annual Oculus Connect conference is Sept 23-25th. It should be just as jam packed with great info as last year. Check out last years talks for a flavor, Tom Forsyth’s talk was my favorite.

Since Oculus will be livestreaming and putting all talks online after, we’ll just have informal recaps from attendees - favorite stories, demos, new knowledge and celebrity encounters. We have at least 3 people from MN going.

Oculus will be livestreaming the oc2 keynotes on their Twitch channel Thu 9/24 at noon. But if you’re hardcore, you’ll be watching in Convrge or Altspace. Talks will show up later on YouTube.