Here's the 13 VR Startups Philip Rosedale & Other Leaders Chose for the 1st Virtual Reality Accelerator

VentureBeat's Dan Terdiman* has a good summary on the startups selected to get seed funding and other support in the first venture capitalist accelerator for virtual reality startups. The selections were made by High Fidelity's Philip Rosedale and other leaders in the space, so this is a good survey of where they think VR is going as an industry:

The 13 companies are:

• Fove, which is making “the world’s first headset to use eye tracking to create an immersive experience.
• DeepStream VR, which is developing virtual reality heath care games aimed at relieving pain and assisting with rehabilitation.
• Emblematic Group, an immersive virtual reality journalism project.
• Psious, which is developing VR-based immersion therapy for mental health practitioners helping patients overcome their fears.
• SDK, a startup developing industrial training and travel tools in virtual reality.
• Solirax, a VR education platform for “exploration, discovery, and creativity.”
• EmergentVR, which calls itself the “Instagram of VR,” is making an application for making and sharing 360-degree VR experiences.
• Vantage VR, which fashions itself the “Ticketmaster for VR events” with a 180-degree concert and live events viewing experience.
• Triggar, another system for capturing and sharing 360-degree VR imagery.
• Reload Studios, a VR game studio.
• Innerspace, which is developing “high quality content focused on artistic and cultural expression.”
• Discovr, which is working on “immersive learning experiences about exploring the ancient world.”
• Thotwise, a VR game studio.

*My pal Dan, by the way, has been covering virtual reality since back in the day, wrote a book on business in Second Life, and as it happens, wrote a 2003 Wired story about my embedded journalism role in SL. (So it's particularly interesting to me that one of the selected startups is embedded journalism in VR.) Can you feel the second hype wave building?

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Comments

[maxwell graf]

worth mention:

• MS Hololens
• OSVR - Open Source Virtual Reality protocols
• GLNext - a completely revamped OpenGL API for graphics coming from (primarily) Valve software

The head engineer of OSVR confirmed recently (in a reddit AMA session) that right now a big part of what is holding back VR is not hardware related but an almost complete lack of viable applications for that plethora of hardware. The software is missing, the "killer app" (forgive the phrase) that will convince the masses to strap something onto their face. The hardware hype cycle is in full spin, for certain, with the recent CES being choc-full of VR and AR gear from just about everybody. This follows the dangerous precedent of inflated hype cycle followed by ultimate let down consumer cycle that VR has promised and so often failed to deliver on since CGI first appeared on the screen in James Bond "The man with the Golden Gun" in 1974 (the scene with the car flipping over the ruined bridge was done using very early polygonal models to plot the correct math for the jump and test various outcomes.) With this in mind it is refreshing to see many of the items on Phil's list leaning toward application rather than hardware.

Aside from some major game titles the initial big push for USING the hardware coming out will still be the place where it will already have a lot to use it on: Virtual worlds. That is largely dependent on the initial releases of products from SL2, HighFidelity, Mivvo and Cosmos3D. If any one of them can pull off what they are attempting to accomplish, it will be a huge opportunity for the hardware industry trying to convince us that this is really going to be big this time, not just another virtualboy-du-jour release cycle based on vaporware and promises.

I really like that the projects on his list are slanted to edu and special needs applications like dealing with disease, handicaps and mental illnesses, all of which are undervalued and underexposed in the current worlds out there.

[Sniper Siemens]

Very nice....eheheh
The return of " The Rig" :-)

http://secondlife.wikia.com/wiki/The_Rig

[Cindy Bolero]

Worth Mention:

I love VRchat!!

Its a user-generated content VR MMO that can be used even without an HMD! Anyone with basic Unity3D skills can create rooms and environments, as well as upload custom avatars.

My favorite part? EASY PEASY! No coding!

Visit VRchat on Sundays 4pmPST for weekly Meetup!

http://vrchat.net/downloads.php