This is a guest post by filmmaker, author, entrepreneur, and now Virtual Reality developer Hugh Hancock.
Virtual Reality's here. Woo. Yay. More tech toys.
The UK just voted to leave the EU. Trump's in line for the White House. Climate change is making its effects felt. Automation's really starting to bite. A lot of very smart people are starting to get very worried about AI.
So why exactly should you care about a bunch of nerds strapping really expensive phone housings to their face?
Well, I recently dropped a 20-year film career to go full-time into VR - specifically room-scale VR, the kind where you walk around and flail about. I've spent the last 2-3 months completely immersed in it, for full-on 80-hour-week crunch values of "fully immersed", developing Left-Hand Path, a Dark Souls-inspired room-scale VR RPG.
There's a reason for that. I've been doing the "futuristic tech" thing for a while and I've been involved in massive, super-exciting technology shifts before. I founded a rather successful dotcom during the first dotcom era, for example.
This feels as exciting. I'm pretty sure that ignoring VR right now looks a lot like ignoring that "Interweb" thing circa 1996. It's going to change the world.
And here's the important bit: it gives us a whole load of reasons to hope that it'll change it for the better.
