Portland Virtual Reality Meetup

[Raven Zachary]

Hi everyone. With the interest out there in Google Cardboard and related solutions for iPhone (e.g. Zeiss VR One), the recent release of the Samsung Gear VR based on Oculus technology, and the upcoming release of the Oculus Rift consumer version sometime in 2015, Kent Bye and I are forming a Portland Virtual Reality Meetup group. 2015 is going to be a big year for VR. There are similar meetup groups in Silicon Valley, San Francisco, New York, and Amsterdam, with strong attendance.

More info here:

http://www.meetup.com/Portland-Virtual-Reality-Meetup/

Our first meetup will be on Wednesday, January 14th from 7-9pm at the eBay Community Lounge in downtown Portland (address on the Meetup page). Doors will open at 630pm, hopefully for food (I'm working on it), and we will likely arrange for VR demos at the end of the gathering.

While Augmented Reality is not a focus area of this group...yet (as consumer releases beyond smartphone apps are not near-term), it is a topic of interest and I suspect Augmented Reality will come up in 2015 for this group.

Kent is the host of a popular VR Podcast, Voices of VR (http://voicesofvr.com). I'm more of a lurker, although VR has been a topic of interest for mine now for 25 years. I've just been waiting for the technology to get to this point.

If you have an interest in VR (whether you're a developer, designer, entrepreneur, or enthusiast), we hope to see you there!