The 2016 Vision VR/AR Summit focuses on immersive technologies and in its inaugural year is boasting quite a long list of luminaries as part its line up. This year, alongside addresses from Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, Clay Bavor, Vice President of Virtual Reality at Google and Dr. Richard Marks, Director of the PlayStation Magic Lab, there’ll also be a rare appearance from Valve’s Gabe Newell, giving a special address via video.
Update (2/5/16, 4:36 PT): Representatives from the Vision Summit reached out to clarify that Newell’s address would come via video rather than in person.
Unity as a company have spearheaded the support and adoption of virtual reality as a technology since the early days of the Oculus Rift. Their game development platform has enabled the creation of a huge number of VR projects, the vast majority in those early days, and remains an excellent choice for VR developers today.
To mark this commitment to immersive development, last year Unity announced it was to hold a conference dedicated to augmented and virtual reality. It’s now just around the corner with a roster of speakers that reflects the technology industry’s growing focus on AR and VR
A surprise and rare address is set to come from one of gaming’s most famous of names, co-founder and Managing Director of Valve, Gabe Newell. Newell’s address during the event is of course in light of this year’s big push from Valve for its SteamVR platform and the first virtual reality hardware developed for it, HTC’s Vive VR headset. The system will launch in April and from what we’ve seen, Valve’s full force is behind the project with developers all over the world building projects
Oculus founder Palmer Luckey will give a speech too, marking the company’s ramp up to delivering their much anticipated Oculus Rift VR headset, which opened pre-orders in January and is due to begin shipping at the end of March.
See Also: Oculus Founder: “pre-orders are going much better than I ever could have possibly expected”
Google’s Clay Bavor will also speak. Co-creator of Google’s Cardboard project, Bavor now heads up Google’s stronger focus on the development of immersive technologies, including their 360 video technology pipeline, Jump and perhaps their own consumer line of VR hardware.
Rounding out the list of speakers from this year’s virtual reality battle for VR supremacy battle is Dr. Richard Marks, Director of the PlayStation Magic Lab, credited with the creation of PlayStation Eye, Move and Project Morpheus, the PS4 VR headset now known as PlayStation VR. The PSVR is due in the 2nd half of 2016 for PlayStation 4.
The event takes place February 10-11 in Hollywood at the Loews Hollywood Hotel, CA and will play host to more than 40 breakout sessions covering the latest technologies and best practices, designed to help make developers lives easier when building VR and AR apps and games in Unity. You can grab tickets to the event right here.