aaronwidd's comments

Location: Los Angeles, California

Remote: Maybe

Willing to relocate: No. (Just moved back to LA from NYC.)

Technologies: Seeking beginner-level VR developer work in Unity, Virtual Reality, C#... or any role even tangentially related to VR. 8 years in Python / Django, 15 in full-stack web programming. Also UX, UI, product management, tech management. Have an art school degree that included formal 3D modeling & game development classes.

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaronwidd

Email: [email protected]

Making a big career pivot from web to VR in any way that I can. Willing to take entry level work at any pay/rate, preferably in Los Angeles. Using a pseudonym to blog and network for VR, contact me for more info

SEEKING WORK - Los Angeles, CA

I'm pivoting careers to Virtual Reality development, after over a decade working in web. I've been a full-stack web developer, product manager, digital marketing strategist for a long time now, but feel that VR right now is much closer the creative greenfield that I loved so much when I first got into tech.

I've been learning Unity and C# by building a game for Samsung Gear VR. I have a degree in multimedia that included formal (albeit dated) training in 2D game programming, 3D modeling, and film / video production. So less a fish out of water, more going back to my roots as a creative person. I've also been learning Maya.

My web skillset includes Python/Django, PHP, UX/UI design & development, tech management, vendor integrations etc.

Just moved back to LA after a few years in NYC and doubling down on VR. Would love to find an ongoing contract on-site here, but happy to entertain any work even tangentially related to VR.

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Contact: [email protected]

Haven't explored this subject before, but I'd guess there's likely some sort of social, psychological and biological basis for why museums exist and are popular in the first place. Likely the activity involved in "discovering" objects and then inspecting them as if you found them for the first time, simulates "seeking" behavior and solidifies the memory in the context of finding the information on your own instead of being shown it.

If the reason for why museums assist in learning, and are driven by the rewards of "discovering" something and experiential aspect of inspecting something in a 3D environment, then there are certainly some fascinating opportunities to create not only augmented museum experiences or virtual museums, but take the behavior to new places. There are maybe new types of museums that wouldn't be possible in the physical world. Pretty exciting

SEEKING WORK - Los Angeles, California or Remote

I am seeking work in Virtual Reality and have been building skills in VR, Unity, C#, and 3D modeling over the last few months.

I'm a recovering web developer who has decided to pivot entirely to VR by the end of 2016. I also just relocated back to LA from NYC. I was working on a VR game in Unity for Samsung Gear VR as a training exercise in order to teach myself all the skills necessary to ship VR product and slowly getting back to wrapping that up. My background is in frontend and UI/UX and I intend to apply those skills to VR.

My skills in VR currently include entry-level Unity, C# Oculus SDK, User Interface and User Experience design for VR, Samsung Gear VR (hopefully HTC Vive, Oculus, Microsoft Hololens, Google Daydream soon), 3D modeling in Maya.

My applicable skills from 15 years in design and development for the web include being a full-stack web developer (Python / Django, PHP, DevOps, DBs, Javascript HTML/CSS etc), UI/UX designer, product and project management, remote team management, online marketing, QA and development lifecycle, tech writing and system architecture, more. I also founded 2 social media startups and have worked in early stage with multiple VC backed startups, as well as interactive agencies and SMBs in the past.

I attempted to start a "journey" blog here: http://www.globalgum.com though I've slacked a bit in updating it since I started the coast-to-coast move. Looking to fire it up again soon.

If you are seeking a VR team, I have been building up a network of Unity developers and can work on assembling a team if needed. If you're doing the same, reach out and maybe we can team up.

Feel free to reach out at [email protected] Thanks!

SEEKING WORK - Los Angeles, California or Remote

I am seeking work in Virtual Reality and have been building skills in VR, Unity, C#, and 3D modeling over the last few months.

I'm a recovering web developer who has recently made the decision to pivot entirely to VR. I currently live in NYC and will be relocating back to LA in late August, for the long haul. I've been working on a VR game in Unity for Samsung Gear VR as a training exercise in order to teach myself all the skills necessary to ship VR product. My background is in frontend and UI/UX and I intend to apply those skills to VR.

My skills in VR currently include entry-level Unity, C# Oculus SDK, User Interface and User Experience design for VR, Samsung Gear VR (hopefully HTC Vive, Oculus, Microsoft Hololens, Google Daydream soon), 3D modeling in Maya.

My applicable skills from 15 years in design and development for the web include being a full-stack web developer (Python / Django, PHP, DevOps, DBs, Javascript HTML/CSS etc), UI/UX designer, product and project management, remote team management, online marketing, QA and development lifecycle, tech writing and system architecture, more. I also founded 2 social media startups and have worked in early stage with multiple VC backed startups, as well as interactive agencies and SMBs in the past.

I attempted to start a "journey" blog here: http://www.globalgum.com though I've slacked a bit in updating it.

If you are seeking a VR team, I have been building up a network of Unity developers and can work on assembling a team if needed.

Feel free to reach out at [email protected] Thanks!

This. Remote assistance would be huge

A few weeks ago I went to a family gathering and brought along my Gear VR to demonstrate to my family. My mother, who is in her late 60's loved it immensely. I set her up with a street view app and dropped her in the little village she grew up in as a child. Someplace she hasn't been in years but talks about every day.

Watching her swirl around and comment on her surroundings was really amusing. She overheated the Galaxy phone several times and couldn't get enough of it.

My father is 84 years old and now living in a nursing home, where mom sits with him every day. He suffers from advanced Parkinson's, with increasingly bad dementia - lots of trouble parsing reality from fantasy, often mixing up TV shows with events in the real world. His life consists of nurses, wheelchairs, broadcast TV and a lot of sleep. He's miserable.

Mom pleaded with me to let him use the VR headset. Even though I wanted to, I just couldn't take the risk of it having some negative effect. He barely understood digital technology when he was still sharp, so the jarring effects of seeing an error message, getting a broken visual or something would be highly alarming in his current frame of mind. Plus I couldn't guarantee he wouldn't get some sort of psychosis or motion sickness from using it with his illness.

I really hope more research comes out about how VR affects the elderly, and people with dementia or other neurological disorders. Being bedridden in a hospital is the worst possible scenario for anyone and VR could be a godsend to people in this situation.

It sounds like there's more than a few people working on this idea now.

I just feel like it's a little early to be expecting users to go about multitasking like a desktop when we're still at a point in the evolution of VR tech where prolonged sessions of VR HMD use is not common behavior. Even getting users to put the headset back on after stepping away, is still a challenge. Not to mention the difficulties of reading text in VR among other issues.

That's not to say there isn't a use case for a multitask desktop in VR, it's just that this is a problem to be solved in the future. In the present, we simply need software that gives users a good reason to put the headset back on again after the novelty wears off

Personally, I think VR will find it's killer app in being a creative medium and expand from there.

There's been too much emphasis on it's possibilities as a passive entertainment experience so far, but the truth is we're nowhere near the point of VR being a good platform for consumption of passive entertainment yet. It's an active experience, not a passive one

Well, I just googled around and found my idea is not super unique.. already found 2 teams working on it:

https://www.jukedeck.com http://juke-bot.com/

What this will change probably isn't pop music, it's soundtracks for TV commercials, video games, shows, movies etc.

Currently to put music in something you need to license it somehow, in most cases the generic music you hear in most media is sourced from a company that has a library of royalty free songs that they sell for a pretty hefty license fee.

Imagine being able to instead go into some software and punch in some keywords to describe the scene, the duration, track what happens in the scene on a timeline of some sort and let the computer render original music for the score. No middle men, no musicians, no royalties or licenses other than for the software. It would change the industry overnight.. and make being a professional musician even less promising of a career choice than it is today...

Oh wow this is exciting. Dropping the cost of the hardware is definitely a welcome chip away at the consumer barriers to entry with VR

There was a brief time when QuickTime VR and photo stitching were considered essential skills for anyone getting into digital media.

The use cases for it in web projects turned out pretty limited after the novelty wore off though. Quickly narrowed down to mostly real estate and automotive demos. But some companies in manufacturing and science I think really relied on the tech in their digital sales materials for a long time.

I liked this one: http://autopsy.io/ And this: http://www.cbinsights.com/blog/startup-failure-post-mortem/

Personally I'd like to see a post mortem for companies that collapsed. Sometimes they are the only historical record we have of these businesses.

So frequently founders and investors rush to burn the evidence of their failures before the lessons they learned are ever taught, and the business completely vanishes into the ether as if it never existed.

There's a lot of value in documenting and aggregating data in companies that failed for whatever reason. Not only to apply the lessons of failing but it does a great job of logging the industry zeitgeist, seeing what trends in ideas we thought were worth investing in that turned out to be duds, what flamed out and then sprung back years later. Too much of that data has been lost over time, it's a real shame.

The first time I've attempted putting content of this sort out there.

If anyone on HN is interested in the topic of getting into VR (or AR or MR) from a background in web, I'd love to hear what questions you want answered or any feedback at all. Thanks!

3D modeling is a prerequisite skill for emerging tech like VR/AR/MR. The ability to manipulate 3D models competently is soon going to be a pretty essential foundation, like using photoshop

Very cool to see someone else is making the leap!

I just wrote a blog post about the same thing as it pertains to breaking into VR in general. Interestingly, I had dedicated a chunk to the prerequisite of 3D modeling and animation.

Mine is no where near as good a post since I'm not an experienced blogger by any stretch of the imagination. But complementary I suppose..

I posted the link to HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11733068

Consumer VR is in it's infancy. Embryonic almost. In the early days of desktop computer, how many different OSes and hardware configurations were there? In the years of the automobile before the Model T, how many wildly different types of car were available to the public?

One platform to rule them all will come in time, but we should be happy that for now the ecosystem is competitive, it means the consumer gets a voice in deciding what shape the tech will take

That article left much unanswered.

One side thought is that I really wonder what the societal implications are of life-stage depression shifting down to a younger age, coupled with a massive generational cohort (millennials) all entering that life phase at the same time. What effect does a collective wave of people all feeling hopeless at once have on our culture?

I was actually hoping this was going to be a story about a very clever marketing campaign