Category: Katie Goode

Posted on

Bring Your Cat Into VR With This Awesome Add-On

Bring Your Cat Into VR With This Awesome Add-On

If you own a cat/dog/baby and an HTC Vive then you’re probably familiar with this scene. You’re playing your favorite room-scale game with all of your chairs, desks and other items cleared out of the way. You have a free space to run around in and forget about the real world, moving into the virtual one. Except all of a sudden you stumble and kick something soft. Something that moves. Something that runs away.

Then comes the guilt.

I’ve accidentally kicked my cats in VR more times than I care to count and each time it weighs heavy on my soul. That’s why I wrote about why I’d want to stick the new Vive Tracker on my pets when it releases later this year. Unseen Diplomacy developer Triangular Pixels has been thinking along the same lines, only it’s got its hands on one of the Tracker development kits and is already working on a real solution.

Yesterday the team’s Katie Goode posted up images of a modified cat jacket that sported the Tracker, worn by the developer’s 10 year old feline.

Work on this project has only just started, but the idea is to alert VR users to when their pets or children are in the room by bringing them up within the given experience. That way you can say goodbye to any surprising collisions with friendly pets. We’d love to see this open sourced so that any developer could include it in their VR experience and the virtual world becomes a bit safer for our furry friends.

Goode clarifies that the Tracker is light and the jacket is a comfortable fit, thus isn’t causing her cat any distress.

I can’t help but wonder if I could pick my cat up and use it as a flamethrower in VR, but PETA might have something to say about that.

This is actually something Triangular Pixels has been thinking about for a while, long before the Tracker was announced. In fact the team even submitted its own idea for a tracked-collar for the cats for a Viveport competition last year.

It’s early days for the project, then, but we’ll keep our eyes on it. The Vive Tracker itself is shipping out to select devs now for free and will be available at $99.99 later in the year.

Tagged with: , , ,

Posted on

BAFTA Has Announced Its VR Advisory Lead, But the UK Community Isn’t Too Pleased About It

The British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) have been investing much more time and energy into virtual reality (VR) with a new advisory group dedicated to VR, but it seems as though they might be taking it in a different direction from was is expected of the British VR community. A petition has been made for the BAFTA VR Advisory Group to be entirely based in the UK following the announcement of LA-based Roy Taylor of AMD to lead this UK group.

The aim of this petition is to make BAFTA reconsider making the lead of the VR advisory board either a UK or EU figure. This was started up by Katie Goode of Triangular Pixels, based in Cornwall, in the South of England. She first showed her disappointment when she contested against the announcement of Roy Taylor becoming the lead of the board on Twitter, to which Taylor replied himself that “I promise the EU will have a strong voice. I am English.” Nick Button-Brown, the BAFTA Games Committee Chair, then failed to comment on the matter.

BAFTA

VRFocus got in contact with Goode who shared her disappointment in the lack of response from BAFTA regarding the situation: “There has been no response or discussion even to a full BAFTA member (my developer friend), and no response to me – a BAFTA Crew Member, BAFTA Judge, and someone that’s pushed VR at BAFTA with showing and giving VR talks there.”

When asked who should take on the role of leading the BAFTA VR Advisory Board, Goode replied: “They don’t have to be British, but they do need to be part of the UKVR and EUVR community, be hands on every day, go through what studios over here have to go through.”

She went on to explain why Taylor wasn’t a good choice: “I really don’t know how they came to choosing who they have. I personally have not met Roy, I have not seen him on our online VR community of +800 international developers that talk daily with each other, I haven’t seen any VR work that he’s created himself, hands on. I have no personal qualms with him, but we shouldn’t have a British institution deciding to create a group in the US when we have local experience here in the UK.”

BAFTA are yet to respond to this petition, and VRFocus has reached out for comment to BAFTA and Roy Taylor.

Stay with VRFocus for all the latest in the world of VR.