HTC Vive Unbound Developer Conference Recap
Corporate News
5 minutes read
Virtual Reality is poised to take off in China at a faster rate than in any other global market due to the demand for industrial VR technologies, demand for VR applications for healthcare and education, the highly innovative mobile market, and the rate of adoptability for the immersive new entertainment experiences VR will provide. With this in mind HTC has launched a comprehensive developer program in China in order to accelerate the proliferation of Vive applications in a wide range of entertainment, industrial, real estate/construction, and healthcare segments.
The HTC Vive Unbound Developer Conference in Beijing offered an amazing chance to show the unique room-scale VR experiences that the Vive offers. A plethora of highly respected speakers discussed a number of topics relating to VR – not only from HTC and Valve, but also Epic Games, WEVR, Bandai Namco, NVIDIA, AMD, Noitom, and many more pioneers in the VR space.
The Keynote
Cher Wang, HTC Chairwoman and CEO, opened the keynote with an explanation of why HTC has entered the VR space and our uncontrollable excitement for the Vive. She went on to tell the story behind the new Vive branding.
Cher Wang
Chet Faliszek from Valve addressed the audience with an overview of learnings from developing in VR through out the past year and how people can approach working with this fantastic new technology.
Chet Faliszek and Cher Wang
Katsuhiro Harada from Bandai Namco, Neville Spiteri from WEVR, Eric Darnell from Baobab Studios, continued the keynote on developing content for VR, giving us insight into the thoughts behind every detail when it comes to providing truly emotional and immersive experiences with a deep sense of presence.
Live Demos
Surgical Theater showed off their VR experience for exploring 3D scans from CT, MRI, angiogram, etc. in VR. This will allow surgeons to analyse their patients in a groundbreaking level of detail.
Noitom demonstrated their ability to use Vive controller tracking to track even basic household objects like a trash can. They hooked up a $7 toy gun to a Vive controller and built a basic demo for it – allowing the user to have a gun which feels and handle exactly how it looks in the virtual world.
Demos
We opened up 12 demo booths for developers, media and the general public to try the Vive. Over a thousand demos were given thoughout the entire event, all of which had extremely positive feedback. Two developer studios, Shade Realm and 51wofang, also had a speaker session on what they were working on with the Vive and used the chance to show it off to the audience.
51wofang had developed a showroom system for showing properties to prospective buyers in real estate developments. With room-scale tracking, the user is able to wander around the entire room, interact with objects, and change a variety of objects in the room such as table top material and wall colour. Countless people came out of the demo wishing they had this technology when they had bought their homes.
Shade Realm demonstrated some multiplayer VR using modern networking technology.
Taking Vive to Beijing was a great experience for us, thank you everyone who came or streamed the event. We hope to see you at CES!
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