Coronavirus Ignites VR-And Other Bytes From the Basement of the Matrix

As COVID-19 changes life as we know it and has industry scrambling to prioritize public health and employee safety by minimizing travel, canceling GDC and SXSW among many other high profile events, Social VR takes center stage in conversations about working remotely and collaborating at a distance. The challenge is, how accessible is VR outside of the industry's early adopters? 

The pandemic has us wondering beyond the scope of development into global supply chains and sustainability. For more about conferences in VR check out: 

• Thoughts on "GDC in VR" - Liv Erickson
• Behind the Scenes of the Educators in VR International Summit - Educators in VR
• Eight Resources for Meeting Using Virtual or Augmented Reality - WXR Fund
• AltspaceVR Offers Extra Support for Virtual Conferences During Coronavirus Outbreak - Altspace
• Reduce Travel by meeting in Mozilla Hubs - @ByHubs

In other news, the recent viral video of a mother seeing her deceased daughter in VR also flooded our feed, reminding Melanie of how she volumetrically capture her mother's magical apartment with the help of Emily Olman, CEO and Co-Founder of prop-tech company, SpatialFirst.

After a recap of Oculus Launch Pad demo day and lessons learned from the Facebook Oculus program, we reach the dev side of life where we had to take a step back from starting our Unity project to set up the legacy Rift headset (CV1) we're using only to discover an install bug dating from 2016 - that we have yet to fix! 

We switched gears to set up Melanie's Oculus Developer account and profile organization, which is required to create an Oculus app. The developer dashboard menus are a little squirrely so we suggest book marking  visited pages, like the developer and App ID pages. 

• Oculus developer site
• Create organization
• All about Release Channels

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Next week we'll confront our glitches or see about using a different, Rift S headset.

Until then, wishing everyone clean hands and smooth installs.

Siciliana and Melanie