karl-almost-smile-269x200Karl Krantz made a strategic move to California in order to start the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality meetup in May of 2013. One year later, he organized the first consumer VR conference with SVVRCon that had 400 people and 35 companies. SVVRCon 2015 had 1400 people and 100 companies, and Karl is expecting it to double once again for SVVRCon 2016 on April 27-29 with a projected attendance of 3000 people and 200 companies.

I caught up with Karl to talk about VR startups, fostering the VR community, plans for virtual components for SVVRCon, content creation & imagination, and the phenomena of “time dilation.” Karl had an experience of playing a VR game for 12 straight hours without a break, but he only thought he was in VR for around 3 hours. He’s concerned about the addictive potential of VR, and that it’s a technology that’s going to force us to face our demons otherwise VR could be really disruptive to our lives.

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Palmer Luckey said in an interview at E3 2015 that his longest play session was between 12 to 16 hours. He wanted to beat a game in one sitting, and so it’s possible that he experienced some time dilation.

I’ll be exploring more experiences of time dilation in some more interviews that I did at Unity’s AR/VR Vision Summit.

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  • Sky Castle

    I am going back to school to learn how to develop software because VR completely blew my mind and has given me more passion than anything I have ever wanted, but computer programming seems really hard so I just hope I am cut out for it.

    • Rob B

      Why not game design and animation perhaps?

      • Sky Castle

        I would like to learn how to code but I thought about your suggestions as well.

    • Mudd_Farnkom

      I’m doing the same thing for the same reason! :) But I’m studying online rather then going to uni and loving it.

      Apparently, Udacity is doing an online VR Engineer course sometime this year, so I’m gonna be keeping an eye out for that during my studies.

      • Sky Castle

        Nice man! That’s interesting I’m going to look into it thanks!

    • OgreTactics

      Lol. I’m doing the same, although I always regret computer as still so archaïc that you need to learn for years like 0,07% of the planet (that is the estimated number of people who know how to code) to create something with a tool as spread as computers…

  • It’s absolutely exciting watching how fast VR is evolving.