2015 KALEIDOSCOPE VR FILM FESTIVAL

The 2015 Kaleidoscope VR Festival made a stop in the DUMBO neighborhood of Brooklyn on Tuesday. The event was presented by Vrideo. The festival has hit nine cities in 2015. There will only be one more: Austin, Texas. The event featured an informative panel with an assemblage of virtual reality experts, but the true star of the festival was good-old-fashioned virtual reality. (And yes, that sentence contains the oxymoron to end all oxymorons.) Rows of swivel-chairs were arranged throughout the expansive single-room venue. In those chairs were people, and on those people were virtual reality headsets – mostly Samunsung GearVRs, though the odd Oculus Rift or two made an appearance. The event featured a wide array of VR videos, ranging from an immersive plunge into a cirque du soleil performance to a trip inside a Vincent van Goh painting. And a note for future festival-goers: Get there early, before the lines become maddening.

Now, at the risk of dumbing down a sophisticated emerging technology with the capacity to revolutionize human behavior and interaction, it should be noted that the writer of this newsletter left the event with one primary takeaway: VR is super cool.

Oh, but first he spoke with Alex Rosenfeld, CEO of VRideo. Vrideo aims to become a major distribution platform for VR, functional on every major headset – a sort of YouTube for virtual reality. Rosenfeld had some fascinating thoughts on the state of the technology, as well as the overall appeal of virtual reality.

“I’ll often see people sit down, put on the headset, and then completely lose track of time,” he said. “They get lost in the experience…It actually still happens to me, even after all this time working on a platform, and working on the medium.”

It’s true: It’s easy to get lost in it, even with VR technology still in its infancy. So where does Rosenfeld think we’ll be in 10 years?

“That’s a scary question to me,” he says. “If you look at how fast VR has improved in the past couple years, it’s hugely impressive. And if we were to have just that continued rate of improvement, it would be mind-blowing. But keep in mind: Unlike the past couple years, now just about every technology company is pouring resources into VR. That’s going to speed up the rate of improvement even further. And of course there are also major creators in both video and gaming who are starting to create content for VR. That’s going to accelerate things too. Forget ten years. In even five years, or three years, I couldn’t even begin to tell you where we’re going to be.”

So what does that mean for Vrideo?

“A big focus for us,” Rosenfeld says, “is keeping pace with the improvement of technology. We’re focused on being a platform for streaming video, but what does that mean in three years? What new video formats are going to emerge? What new audio technology standards are going to emerge? It’s definitely going to be a necessity to remain nimble.”

And don’t forget cool.