It’s odd to add a post to this page, since the last one was in December of 2014, but here I am.
2020 has been a year like no other, no doubt. I live in Minnesota, and when George Floyd was killed, it exposed and put a spotlight on the Minnesota Paradox. This is something I had been researching as part of my work as a member of the Minneapolis College Foundation Board. More awareness and exposure to this systemic problem is a really good thing, and is the first step towards fixing it.
George Floyd Square, June 2020
We’re also in the middle of a global pandemic, and it’s really been a forcing function for change, impacting everyone in many different ways. I’m a person of science, and I’ve been using that as my guiding light through this time.
Given all of this, I’ve been fortunate this year - I’ve read more than ever, spent more time outside than I normally do, made many new friends (while gaming), and experienced some amazing new things in the emerging AR and VR technology space that has led to some of the best work of my career.
The word “virtual” get used and misused, and I promise not to do that here. At space150, we got behind the Kickstarter for the original Oculus Rift in 2013, and we haven’t looked back. From that time forward, it’s been an amazing experience understanding how it works, what’s it’s best at, and what it all means going forward. Our early VR work at space150 was experiential (like our work with Polaris), but we quickly transitioned to using it to make our work better - like helping us design this amazing Coca-Cola billboard in Times Square NYC. Using VR, we could understand not just what it looked like, but what if felt like to stand near it.
space150 x Coca-Cola Times Square
This in turn helped us use VR to design better Innovation Centers for 3M. It’s one thing to see a space, it’s another to experience it, and with VR, you can do that. We used VR to experience our space before we started to build it, which allowed us to make changes earlier in the process. We could experience the space before we built it, and it made the end result so much better. Below are a few clips of what we created using Unreal Engine 4 around the time the HTC Vive was first released.
I’ve been fortunate to be early in the AR space too, with the Meta 1 and 2, the Hololens 1 and 2, and in the mobile AR space when Apple Launched ARKit and Google followed with ARCore. I’ll post more about what we’ve seen in this space too, as things are just advancing at an amazing clip right now…
