Our Dreams at the Morlan Gallery

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Last Tuesday (on the 12th of September), alongside Richie Hoagland and Dima Strakovsky, two of Lexington's premiere VR and AR developers, several of the members of HVRE got to help host a small art gallery event dealing with different virtual experience, both through traditional play (via Dreams) and through new-age ideas (via Virtual Realities). Richie and Dima showed off new ways to have people in VR interact with one another, or even with people not strapped into a headset. They went through a few examples, like how a father could push a ball around with their child, only using their smartphone, if they could not make it home at specific times. Another example was when the child is playing a virtual instrument (in the case, a type of xylophone) on the Vive, the father would be able to control what kind of sound effect each note would give; so eventually, the daughter was playing a melody of farm animals instead of just a piano. The third example they provided had to do with allowing both Vive controllers to be used by different people at the same time, even though only one person would be wearing a headset. So, the player with the headset would be using their controller to poke at the object that the second controller would provide (in this case, a type of bulls-eye). It's neat to see how interactions like this could lead into even more elaborate ideas, and we are excited to be a part of this new frontier! As for our involvement in the event, we had all sorts of people both excitedly and cautiously come up to participate in any of the three versions of the game we were providing. They could either play it with a mouse on a monitor and PC, involve themselves with the GoogleVR version using the free download on Google Play and one of the GoogleVR headsets we provided, or they could take a dip into the worlds of Dreams using a Vive headset. Old, young, girl, boy, the differences didn't seem to matter; all seemed to really enjoy what we had made, and some even promised to come out to any future events where we would be presenting. And I suppose they are in luck, because we are planning on hosting even more small events while our pieces of digital art is being shown off at the Morlan Gallery (which should be until the second week of October). Come out, one and all, and not only browse, but interact with some local art!

If you'd like to see more pictures and information on our involvement with the Morlan Gallery, just follow this link to our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/HVREdev/.