Putting Lithuania on a VR industry map
I travelled the world as a technical evangelist and considered Lithuania as a pet project, — tells an article I wrote when I left Unity last November, — it is July 2015 outside, and the statement is still correct. I believe it is time to report on my pet project, as it has managed to level up again. I’ll split my story into short brain dumps on Medium until I am able sort out a solid piece of text on a proper, well, medium.
VR is a cool new buzzword everyone seems to care about, but few find a real world use case with a business sense. I discovered VR when I went to the first meetup of the Lithuanian VR community. Great demo boothes, awesome speakers and a packed 250 people venue. Not bad for a first ever meetup happening at a rainy spring Thursday.
Everyone seemed to care about VR suddenly. With VR creativity is important again — you do a 5–10–15 minute experience, a boxed product just as in good old retail days. And you can barely think of monetization and revenues overall, everything is about the final product again! And when the product is the king and there’s no industry rules, a newcomer is able to deliver. Boom! This is the chance for my pet project to deliver well.
The basics were there — media, ads, movie, creativity agencies willing to experiment with AR/VR as well as indie gamedev teams doing their first VR-steps. I just had to raise my hand, connect relevant parties, where needed, and evangelize a bit here and there. It worked.
The summer of Lithuanian Virtual Reality
Google submitted a batch of 400 cardboards to GDG Vilnius, promising to double that shall we distribute the first 400 between schools, universities, teachers, students. So we thought about VR education with Vilius, the lead of GDG Vilnius. Unity Technologies and Epic (Unreal Engine) folks expressed their support in VR trainings in Vilnius, as well as award winning VR AR Lab and Nival VR devs. Green Garage and Build Stuff immediately offered their spaces for trainings to take place. Obviously free of charge — we’re building an industry here. So there’s a lineup and space, now we shall set up a course for teachers and devs with the ultimate goal to teach the teachers — the younger crowd should grow VR-savvy. The School of teachers (Mokytojų mokykla) agreed to assist.
We were quite loud about our ambitions and assembled a meetup at Green Garage with partners presenting themselves and sharing industry experience. Overall, our group participated in a set of developer, startup and consumer events in Vilnius — VR is a hot thing, everyone wants a piece of it — and now we have at least three major events asking us to arrange a VR expo with a pinnacle — the VR Jam. We believe we’re covering the full loop here — learn, make and present.
I spoke to so much people and got so much help and attention. I loved my peers proactively pushing stuff forward. I get inspired by people in this small country being ready to invest their time in a kind of thing that does not bring direct benefits, but is a right thing to do overall. Somewhat rare these days. Or am I just luckily surrounded by great people?
VR is not a kind of game you play with a helmet
“Can I build stuff with Unity and output it as a VR-ready movie?” — asked a guy at one of our early meetups. “Why would you want to do that?” — I replied thinking the guy did not know what he wanted to do. I was totally wrong. The more I talked to people around, the more I understood VR-movies might actually be cool. Then David Traub came to Vilnius to evangelize VR and share experience, suddenly all this VR-filmmaking crowd became relevant, interconnected and willing to work together.
The VR-industry is in its infancy, everyone has a chance to build a killer app, a beautiful experience no one knew they actually wanted. I was happy to appear in the middle of a super-productive environment, and I am sure we’ll put Lithuania on a VR globe as soon as the globe does emerge.
