VR(Virtual Reality), and RL(Real Life)

I haven’t written for a couple weeks, so I thought I would update on what I have been up to here in California. My internship is going really well. I have met a lot of great people and really important contacts as well as made a lot of progress on my project. I have been contacting different people who have a range of disabilities to try out using Virtual Reality for going on adventures. I have used my video of paragliding and Niagara Falls and people have been very impressed by it. I have also collected video at various other places since I have been out here such as local parks and this weekend around the Golden Gate Bridge.

I met a man named Mark Hehir who uses a power wheelchair. I met him because I was searching for accessible places to go and do video. He writes a blog for Santa Clara County about just that type of thing. I will post a link at the bottom. He decided he wanted to help me with video gathering so this weekend I met him at Vasona Lake County Park to give him a 360 camera and teach him how to use it. We had a really great time wheeling around the accessible trail along the lake and the video should be up sometime this week on Youtube.

Yesterday I went to San Francisco with another intern from work, named Hirotake. He is from Japan and in the United States for the first time. He really wanted to see the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco so I offered to take him. There was also a Virtual Reality event at Microsoft Reactor that we were both interested in as, I am working with Virtual Reality and he is actually working with the AR (augmented reality) system Hololens, which is what they were demonstrating at the event.

We got into the city early so we could go to Presidio and walk the trail down by the beach. This is where real life comes in to the picture. If you have never been to San Francisco this is one thing you need to do. Presidio is so beautiful and the trail leads to the fort that is underneath the Golden Gate Bridge. Along the way, we passed a huge group of backpackers celebrating the 100th anniversary of the national parks system and they were being led by police on horseback. As I was passing by the police I heard one say he looks like a Google car haha. I really do look like a Google car with my camera mounted to my wheelchair. I took 360 videos of the entire walk and all through the fort. I am loading it right now so I am not sure how it came out but it should be on my YouTube channel by the end of the day. It was really cool to be able to look up at the bridge from underneath and be that close. The fort is pretty amazing too with all kinds of wagons and displays inside. You should definitely watch the video but feel free to skip through some of the trail parts as it is just the same view of the bay mostly but there are some interesting rock walls with beautiful flowers along the way too, so don’t skip too much.

At the Virtual Reality, event there were about 100 people and a few of them were demonstrating different projects that had made specifically for the Hololens device. This is really cool up and coming field that you should definitely experience. I used a couple of demos. One was holograms that you could view floating in space and another was a game you could play that was mostly shapes and the shapes allowed you to interact with them to navigate through a 3d world.

I also made some really exciting contacts. I talked with one man who is starting a company doing something similar to my project of letting people experience the adventure through Virtual Reality. He told me about some grants and other avenues that I may use in the future to start my own company, which I have been thinking about. I am going to help him with some of his grant writing efforts. He needs to work with a nonprofit to get the funding but the beauty of that nonprofit profit gets a percentage of the grant so its a win-win. I also spoke with a man who is working with the national trails system to document visually all of the trails in the country through 360 video. This would allow someone that may not be able to navigate the trails in real life to be able to experience them virtually. He asked for my help in figuring this all out so I am excited to see where that might go. It is definitely a worthwhile project to be involved with and definitely works with what I am doing. Another man I talked to who was stricken with parkinsons has been working on apps that counteract the effects of his disease to allow him to do common daily tasks such as using a touchscreen display or even a pen. Pretty cool stuff and he wants to talk to me about working on something with him.

So lots of big things happening and things are moving along. I am still struggling a bit to get people to lock in times to meet with me to do this project but trying to work that out this week.

Stay tuned for more updates and big things!