Happy 2017, everybody!

I just wrapped up on my first week at UW’s CoMotion Labs, a coworking space for people working with augmented and virtual reality. As much as I love my cats, it’s amazing to get away from my desk at home and share an office with other humans. Especially such welcoming and enthusiastic humans! It’s been inspiring, chatting with people and learning about the wide range of projects underway in this space. I hope to make rapid progress on my own projects here. (I do find it much easier to write code without a cat prowling about on my shoulder. =P) I’ve also shifted to a mobile VR setup (which should be handy for demos) and gained access to some awesome shared resources—I’m already looking into how to record videos of my work using CoMotion’s mixed reality studio. I got us signed up for the Owlchemy VR Mixed Reality Beta, which looks glorious… I can hardly wait.

In other news, it’s been gratifying to see my efforts from the past few months opening the way to new opportunities and new connections. I never did make a follow-up blog post about my Ignite Seattle talk—it went well (you can view it here!) and led to an invitation to speak at Mensa of Western Washington’s Science & Technology discussion group later this month. Last month I had the pleasure of being an industry panelist at LWTech’s Gaming & Media Fall Quarter Portfolio Defenses, which had the happy side effect of introducing me to fellow panelist (and fellow learning technology enthusiast) David Hunt-Bosch. We’ve been talking about virtual reality and game based learning and it makes me really excited for future projects. And to top it all off, with my new VR setup I should be able to demo a prototype of Red Knight Green Knight at a meetup soon!