Austin: capital of the VR, AR and 360° world in March 2016
Recently I was in Austin, Texas to visit the South-by-South-West-Festival. (SXSW, 10th till 20th of March, 2016). My main focus was on the question, how much the topics VR, AR and 360 degree videos have developed throughout the last year.
The schedule was tough: The festival started every morning at 9 am and every 90 minutes you had to choose between a selection of about 20 parallel events in different venues around the city. Main places to be were for me the Austin Convention Center and the Hilton, the Marriott and the 4-Seasons-Hotel.
Trends in way of use
What was different to 2015? In VR,AR and 360 degree videos the topics changed from the more gaming landscape (which I had to admit Iam not very familiar – apart from Angry Birds) to a wide range of topics as medicine, education, science, adult entertainment (was probably there first) and also storytelling in form of tv reports in 360 degrees.
Technology
Earlier this year at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the two South-Korean tech giants Samsung and LG presented their new smartphones and their matching VR goggles. With this step into the mass market the two companies will be the drivers for VR and 360° on the consumer segment together with the game console producers like Sony and Oculus and Google with it’s cardboard.
