Tag: community

We were invited to biggest conference of Virtual and Augmented Reality in CEE region – Czech VR Festival in Prague.

Whole event took place in very artsy building. The hall – former slaughter – was filled with stages of different companies trying to impress visitors with cutting edge VR&AR tech. Most of them were games and visualisations of real world – this is still 90% of VR market right now.

It was great meeting so many people who are making in happen in VR. And we are also proud that octopusengine has much to offer even among such competition – our proposition is still quite unique.

We also found ourselves among speakers – Microsoft, NASA Unity and even couple of venture capitalists. In 2nd part, we will go into more detail – Czech VR Fest was really worth the effort.

 

When iNFINITE organised second VR hackathon , we couldn’t say no. After the experience from the first one, we wanted to shine again.

This time our team was much bigger, counting 7 people altogether – Honza, Mato, Hans, Ondrej, Brano, Lukas, Simon.

We set up couple of goals for our project:

• Connect object zero to Android platform
• Run octopus engine on Oculus Rift with Unity
• Connect data from BTC exchange to VR via API
• Create a demo for octopus engine functions
• Have a good time 🙂
• Don’t get sick from chips and redbull

After initial troubles with setting up the stage, our team was ready to go.
Thanks to Ondrej, we managed to run Android app, that means we can extend project to Google DayDream (Cardboard). That is important, because this way we can target much larger audience and community.

Hans and Lukas helped us with gathering data about Bitcoin price from the internet, while Brano was able to run Oculus Rift with Unity.

With Honza we also tried Tiltbrush and now we think about using it for creating hyperobjects.

Unfortunately, we did not have time to finish all our goals, but it was still another great time spent in community of like-minded VR geeks and enthusiasts.

We are definitely looking forward to next hackathon!

“VR hackathon is a friendly event with the purpose of creating together, prototyping, diving into something new or trying that project you delayed for so long. All skill levels are welcome, we help beginners out and veteran creators can benefit from sharing experience with others.”

You probably know what we are creating, but you may wonder what octopus engine actually is.

OE is not a company (not yet) and it is not a pure hobby either. Right now we describe OE as community.  Community of passionate people from various backgrounds, who want to create awesome things with new technology.

That’s why we connect with others in VR meetups and hackathons, discussing new tech, sharing ideas, creating together. Our first meetup happened in PaperHub Coworking space visited by IT geeks, cryptocurrency fans and tech cyborgs. By the way, it’s the same place Honza first met Maťo and challenged him to play one match of Go. OE team emerged from that encounter.

At that time, our vision was still hard around the edges and not easy to explain. But we still found guys wanting to get involved with the idea.

Creative graphic designer, who created this scary Sea Devil 3D model, which we put into VR.

Look at those details!

Or young Internet of Things enthusiast who would like to help us with the idea of connecting VR and IoT devices.

There are many really exceptional people we are meeting on our journey. We will mention some of them in our blog so stay tuned.

OE is based in Prague, but we aim to bring together enthusiasts worldwide.

Want to be part of our movement?

Contact us!

You are the average of 5 people you hang around with the most. – Jim Rohn

– team octopus engine –

 

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32 hours of Virtual Reality experience. 25 VR enthusiasts. Lots of caffeine and pizza. No sleep. That was VRMag.cz Hackathon – where we could join other geeks in creating VR games and applications…

During this exhausting weekend, we managed a lot. Maťo learned how to create virtual worlds and animations in Unity3D.

Marek with Honza overhauled our C# code and made huge progress in interaction with objects – demonstrated by Laser Pointer of Mass Destruction (TM). Code will be available on github soon.

Lessons we learned:

• best code = less code – 3 hours of thinking and 1 minute of coding is better than vice versa
• check your Unity Scene in VR early (you will avoid risk of it being too large/small or suboptimal in any other way for VR)
•  tutorials and solutions for every problem are online (even for VR dev), learn how to find them
• sounds and music can vastly enhance your VR experience, use them
• plan for UX before you start modelling your VR space, think how will user react to his surroundings, where will he want to go and what will he do, don’t get stuck into monitor or 2D thinking
• VR Horror games can make you scream like a little schoolgirl

Other teams had inspiring projects of their own – creating vomit-inducing jumper game, or fast-paced office clerk with stamp simulation. We fit right in with this bunch of geeks, dreamers and weirdos.

Our vision – universal virtual platform for creation and cooperation – is now more real than ever before. And we look forward for new challenges.

What is “real”? How do you define “real”? – Morpheus 

– team octopus engine –

 

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Welcome to our first octopus blogpost!

Technology is booming and our world is changing. People accomplished so much in recent years – advancing high tech fields VR, AI, IoT… and there are more opportunities ahead. To share faster, connect more deeply, cooperate more effectively…

Right now, our main focus is Virtual Reality. It’s not a new idea per se, but only now we are seeing it’s true progress. And yet main applications of VR are still in entertainment – games, movies, presentations (and yes, porn).

But we believe entertainment is only small fraction of what we can achieve here. There are countless opportunities in medicine, education, construction, psychotherapy, art, commerce… and we want to tackle them.

In this blog, we aim to show you everything – victories, fails, UX and programming challenges, problems with hardware. We will be brutally honest with ourselves and with you – our readers. Nobody said creating New Reality is easy.

Join us on our journey.

– team octopus engine –