Inaugural VRDC talks offer insight from VR experts at HBO & Oculus

Game Developers Conference organizers are proud to debut the first pair of announced talks for the inaugural Virtual Reality Developers Conference, a sister conference that will take place alongside GDC 2016 in San Francisco next March.

Much like the eight focused Summits at GDC, the VRDC jumpstarts the week with two full days of lectures, panels, postmortems, and more to foster community-building and knowledge-sharing within the nascent VR/AR development industry. 

We're excited to welcome Pete Isensee, senior staff engineer at HBO, as a VRDC speaker who will be delivering a talk on "Creating Believable Human Characters in VR." A small team at HBO has been working for a year on bringing a TV series featuring real people into VR, and in his talk Isensee (a veteran game programmer and former Xbox technical lead who helped ship three generations of Xbox consoles) will examine how the team accomplished that using a mix of video, motion and facial capture, plus smart applications of animation and AI.

Check it out to get the lowdown on practical challenges to bringing humans to life in VR, learn about the trade-offs between using computer-generated scenes and real 360-degree video, and how you can apply cutting-edge VR production techniques to your own projects.

Plus, VRDC attendees should make time to check out "Making Compelling and Immersive Story at 90 FPS," an expert talk from Oculus Story Studio tech director Maxwell Planck. In his talk Planck plans to showcase how the creators of VR short films 'Henry' (pictured) and 'Lost' made hard production choices in service of the story, and how they tackled the novel challenge of developing a meaningful story in the context of presence.

Planck previously worked on multiple projects at Pixar, and at VRDC he'll share lessons learned about VR storytelling with game developers, creative project producers and anyone interested in telling interesting, engaging stories within the constraints of VR.

Conference officials are also pleased to announce that leading virtual reality industry publication Road to VR is the official partner of VRDC 2016. Founded in 2011, Road to VR is using its experience to help bring top content from across the VR industry to the inaugural VRDC. The publication will also be reporting the latest news and insights directly from the event.

And of course conference officials look forward to announcing many more VRDC sessions, alongside a plethora of GDC and GDC Summit sessions, in the months ahead. For now, don't miss the opportunity to save money by registering for the conference early -- the deadline to register for passes at a discounted rate is Wednesday, February 3rd, 2016.

The inaugural VRDC will take place in San Francisco March 14th-16th, alongside the March 14th-18th run of GDC 2016 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. For more information on VRDC, visit the show's official website, or subscribe to regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS.

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