Yes, just a few weeks after heading to Vienna for our visit to vrei, it drew us back there this past Monday to attend the AVR-Playground conference at the Technical University Vienna, organized by techmagnet, the largest Austrian Tech YouTube channel. We decided very spontaneously to go after having a closer look at the speaker program. The event was split in two parts, the presentations and an exhibition, a.k.a. the playground, where attendees got to try out different VR displays. 
In the presentations we gained some valuable insights into current challenges of developing content for VR by some of the university’s bright minds dealing with VR.
Dr. Hannes Kaufman and Dipl.-Ing. Dr. Annette Mossel gave an overview about the projects they are developing and pointed out that positional tracking is still a big problem, especially in large rooms. Furthermore, we also learned more about the social implications that VR has from Valentin Sam, one of the founders of vrei. He gave interesting ideas on how to make a VR experience a social experience. He gave the example of a game (Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes) , where one person wears the HMD and sees a bomb, the other players have written instructions in front of them on how to defuse the bomb. The game requires that participants work together, in the virtual reality and the reality. Axel Dietrich, founder of VRisch, gave an explanation about different capturing techniques, pointing out the differences for 360°, stereoscopic and a “real” VR video. All of the presentations can be watched on YouTube where they were originally broadcasted as a live stream.
During the playground, we had the amazing opportunity to talk to the speakers and other VR enthusiasts. We had the chance to talk to them about their opinion of the importance of VR in the travel industry and their thoughts on how this topic will develop. Most of them agreed that VR will play an important role in tourism promotion, but they don’t (yet) see tourism content in other areas, such as entertainment. It was a great event and we are happy that we had the chance to attend it. As soon as the livestream will be uploaded onto YouTube, we will add the link here so you can check out all of the presentations for yourself. For now, feel free to check out our own pictures.
Roman Egger
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