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XR Resources

Getting Started

  • 360° VR Filmmaking Masterclass by Hugh Hou - This 360 VR Filmmaking Masterclass encompasses Hugh Hou's 7-year experience as a VR Director, DP and Post-wizard condensed into an in-depth, hands-on, and FUN course. This is a course that takes you from beginner to PRO in cinematic VR filmmaking.
  • AWE Academy - Offers paid online live courses by the XR community, for the XR community - and beyond. Courses are live interactive group sessions lead by the best instructors in the industry. They also include cameo appearances by renowned guest speakers, one-on-one interaction with instructors, and access to a vast network of experts and actionable resources 
  • VRARA Training Program: Classes & Workshops - Offers online classes to VR/AR Association Members for free or discounted. The organization's instructors have delivered more than 20 courses, and taught over 1000 professionals and enthusiasts how to begin creating VR & AR apps.
  • AWE USA is an AWE-inspiring community of XR professionals; An XR ecosystem marketplace where end-users meet solution providers in a curated setting.
  • DCXR is an inclusive community of designers, developers, and enthusiasts from around the DMV. Join us as we connect and explore the latest developments in the immersive industry.
  • Educators in VR is An open, global, cross-platform community of educators, researchers, and trainers exploring and collaborating with and in virtual and augmented reality. Educators in VR is the connective tissue between academia and businesses in the VR education industry.
  • Virtual Reality Society (VRS) - A one-stop information and news resource for virtual reality and its related technologies.
  • VR/AR Association is an international organization designed to foster collaboration between Members, that accelerates growth, fosters research and education, helps develop industry standards, connects member organizations and promotes the services of member companies.
  • Women in XR is an organization that advocates for women in XR with resources, events and interviews, sharing their journey into XR.
  • XR Access Initiative is a community committed to making virtual, augmented, and mixed reality (XR) accessible to people with disabilities. It is a community that engages, connects, and influences the field of XR, in order to build and share knowledge, skills, tools, user experiences, and leading practices to make XR inclusive of all, regardless of abilities.
  • XR Collaboration Resource Guide is an interactive and comprehensive online tool that helps companies utilize XR collaboration and remote work tools for businesses.  The guide will serve as a central repository of detailed information about XR collaboration products and platforms and include an easy-to-use interactive tool for matching to specific business needs, a feature that will be available by the end of this month. All of this will be free to use and free to share.
  • XR Distributed Research Network (XRDRN) - Help XR research reach the world. Remote VR/AR experiments from universities around the world. Take part in one to help science!
  • XR EcoMap - The Augmented & Virtual Reality industry has grown tremendously in a few short years. The XR EcoMap (Ecosystem Map) is here to help people understand what organizations are working to grow the industry, and what opportunities are available at these organizations The XR EcoMap also highlights companies led by diverse founders, in an effort to increase and showcase the true expanse of the XR community.
  • XR Safety Initiative (XRSI) is viewed by many stakeholders as a necessary component of proactively anticipating and addressing the cybersecurity challenges faced by globally dispersed researchers when establishing baseline standards and discovery of novel cyber attacks in emerging technologies.

Design Principles & Accessibility Guidelines

  • Google VR UI Design Guidelines - Daydream Elements is a collection of Unity tech demos that showcase principles and best practices for developing high-quality VR experiences. The core mechanics in each demo are built to be easily configurable and reusable for your own applications.
  • Inclusive Microsoft Design (pdf) - These guidelines are offered as simple starting points for meaningful change. Inclusive design is for those who want to make great products for the greatest number of people.
  • The UX of XR - A curated list of XR resources to help you on your journey into the User Experience of Virtual Reality.
  • Ultraleap XR Design Guidelines -  Ultraleap’s industry leading hand tracking technology is transforming XR. Users can experience the full power of natural interaction in AR and VR. Look down and see your hands, reacting and moving in real time. Effortless, intuitive interaction with no controllers, no wearables, and no learning curve.

Development Tools

  • Inclusive: A Microsoft Design Toolkit (pdf) - Provides a list of activities to infuse inclusivity into the design process.
  • Mixed Reality Toolkit (MRTK) for Unity - MRTK-Unity is a Microsoft-driven project that provides a set of components and features, used to accelerate cross-platform MR app development in Unity.
  • PTC Vuforia - Market-Leading Enterprise AR, Vuforia is a comprehensive, scalable enterprise AR platform. Our wide-ranging solution suite ensures that we can provide the right AR technology to every customer based on their business needs.
  • Reality Composer - Reality Composer is a powerful tool that makes it easy for you to create interactive augmented reality experiences with no prior 3D experience. Reality Converter quickly converts your existing 3D models to USDZ so it works seamlessly in our tools and on all AR-enabled iPhone and iPad devices.
  • Spark AR - Create and share augmented reality experiences that reach the billions of people using the Facebook family of apps and devices.
  • Top 5 Augmented Reality SDKs for Building AR Mobile Apps​ - An AR software development (SDK) kit is the key to AR app development. This blog covers some highly popular software development tools used for AR app development.
  • Unity Interaction Toolkit - The XR Interaction Toolkit package is a high-level, component-based, interaction system for creating VR and AR experiences. It provides a framework that makes 3D and UI interactions available from Unity input events. The core of this system is a set of base Interactor and Interactable components, and an Interaction Manager that ties these two types of components together. It also contains helper components that you can use to extend functionality for drawing visuals and hooking in your own interaction events.
  • Unreal Engine XR Development - With Unreal Engine's extensive support for XR platforms and devices, you can use Unreal Engine to deploy your project to any XR platform as well as utilize the immersive devices in your content creation pipeline.

Experiences

  • Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Byway - Explore augmented reality and virtual reality experiences that bring to life the powerful stories connected to four of the Underground Railroad sites. With the free audio guide, you can embark on this dramatic tour along the byway on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, exploring landscapes that Tubman knew as an enslaved woman and from which she fled as a young woman.
  • Honor Everywhere - This VR experience is viewed with special “goggles” which are brought to a Veteran’s bedside, wheelchair or assisted living center. These short films create immersive experiences for terminally ill and aging Veterans using Stereoscopic 360, 3D video.

Events

  • AWE EU Conference - Annual gathering of XR businesses, developers, and professionals in Europe.
  • AWE USA Conference - Annual gathering of XR businesses, developers, and professionals in the U.S.
  • Games for Change XR BrainJam - A meeting of the minds between researchers and XR creators.
  • MIT XR Hackathon RealityHack - Reality Hack is an annual community-run XR hackathon comprising thought leaders, brand mentors and creators, participants, students, and technology lovers, who come together and attend tech workshops, talks, discussions, fireside chats, collaborations, hacking, and more.Participants of various backgrounds and all skill levels attend from all over the world.
  • Sandia National Laboratories XR@Sandia Conference - A large collaborative, knowledge-sharing community. As part of our knowledge-sharing effort, we have held multiple events, including annual conferences, for Sandia and external XR development teams and vendors to showcase their work.
  • XR Access Symposium - This diverse group of accessibility advocates, researchers, industry leaders, and users from across the world explore how breakthroughs and big ideas in accessible XR will shape inclusion, employment, and social life in the years ahead.

Funding

  • Artizen XR Safety Grant - The XR Safety Grant is created to encourage AR and VR artists and stakeholders to create media projects that inspire and promote safety awareness around privacy, data protection, cybersecurity, our physical beings, our emotional and psychological state as we universally adopt these advanced technologies. In a world where big tech corporations move fast and prioritize their own interests to push AR/VR adoption, this grant exists to address the urgent need to raise XR safety awareness. The grant primarily focuses on Child Safety, Medical XR, Diversity and Inclusion, Ethics, Accessibility, Trust, Privacy, and all other aspects of Safety in XR. All formats, genres, and categories of safety will be considered including: video art, visual art, films, games, apps, architecture, storytelling, VR/AR projects and more. AR/VR based projects will be given priority. The project must have a budget less than $2,500 and must be completed within three months from the grant’s award date.
  • Epic MegaGrants Unreal Engine - Epic Games has committed $100 million to support game developers, enterprise professionals, media and entertainment creators, students, educators, and tool developers doing amazing things with Unreal Engine or enhancing open-source capabilities for the 3D graphics community. Show us your projects and you could earn a financial grant to help fuel your success!
  • Super Ventures - Super Ventures fund leverages in-depth expertise and extensive ecosystem relationships to selectively invest in promising companies that enhance perception, situational awareness, and power to act — creating computer-mediated “superpowers” through Augmented Reality, unleashing our full potential.
  • The Venture Reality Fund - The Venture Reality Fund drives innovation and investment at the intersection of immersive, spatial, intelligent computing, and 5G for consumer and enterprise sectors.
  • WXR Fund - The WXR Fund invests in two of the greatest opportunities of our time: the next wave of computing + female entrepreneurs.

Media

Thought Leaders

  • Matthew Ball is the author of “The Metaverse and How it Will Revolutionize Everything”; published in July 2022.
  • Tom Emrich is recognized as one of the most influential people in augmented reality, virtual reality and wearable technology
  • Charlie Fink writes about XR on Forbes. Variety calls him “XR’s explainer-in-chief.” He is the author of the new book, Remote Collaboration, Virtual Conferences and the Future of Work (2020), and the critically acclaimed AR-enabled books Charlie Fink's Metaverse (2017), and Convergence, How The World Will Be Painted With Data (2019). Fink teaches XR at Chapman University Film School in Orange, California.
  • Cathy Hackl is a leading tech futurist and globally recognized business leader specializing in augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), & spatial computing

Video Content

  • A11yVR: Accessibility Virtual Reality - This channel is a compilation of videos presentations and recordings of meetups where people discuss accessibility in technology for people with disabilities that apply to XR/VR/AR.
  • How can Virtual Reality help unite Countries? | Hyo-jin Ahn | TEDxCollegePark: April 12, 2021 - Growing up around North Korean war refugees shaped Ahn Hyo-Jin's early life experiences. The talk showcases how his company partnered with the Red Cross and The Ministry of Reunification in South Korea to use Virtual Reality and give those refugees an unforgettable memory. Hyo-jin Ahn was born in 1975 in South Korea. He majored in computer science and worked as a director of media art and VR content development. He established Tekton Space in April 2016 with the slogan of "Giving good influence to the world with technology". So far, Tekton Space was trying to create vocational rehabilitation contents for PWD (people with disable), unification education contents for the two Koreas, and contents for the 70th anniversary of the Korean War to give good influence with virtual reality technology.
  • VRARA On-Demand Videos - Watch videos from past events.
  • VRARA - Join industry leaders during these live webcasts with Q&A. We get 100-800+ attending live and 1000s watch the recording (we use BrightTalk, which promotes our webinars to their 10M+ users!)
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