Boston VR Bender

Owlchemy recently hosted an event in Boston called the Boston VR Bender — a week-long series of 3 events starting off with a weekend VR game jam, and ending with a VR drinking night at the Mead Hall in Cambridge. Unity did a post on their blog all about the event, so instead of paraphrasing, I thought I’d quote some of Pete Moss’ words, who was a huge help at the event!

From: http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/07/02/vr-game-jam-in-boston/

Date: July 2nd, 2014

Over the last days of May and into early June, over 50 people from in and around the Boston game community gathered together for a VR game jam. The event was organized by Alex Schwartz and Devin Reimer of Owlchemy Labs in conjunction with devs who saw VR demos back at Steam Dev Days and wanted to do a VR Jam. So Valve and Unity went out to help. The purpose of the jam was to expose developers to positional tracking and low persistence.

To enable this, Valve brought along some prototype headsets with positional tracking using desktop IR cameras. A couple of us from Unity went along to provide support and witness the creativity of the community first hand. The event gave us all a chance to test the excellent new SteamVR Unity plugin being developed at Valve.

The participants split up into teams, some with just a couple of folks, others with full teams comprising programmers, artists and designers. There was only one rule – teams had to hit 95 frames per second (the refresh rate of the Valve prototype hardware).

Here’s a video of one of the VR games created during the jam! Carrie teamed up with Robot Loves Kitty to create this wacky game where you act as a pilot of a toy robot destroying / building a toy city.

Thanks again to Unity, Valve, and everyone who participated! It was a KILLER event!