Harold Raichur

The best way to learn is to practice the skills, teach it & write about it. My first foray with VR, involved a lot of research, VR in 2018 , we had very few peers, very few resources & not many courses. But now its much easy, there are enough resources & courses all over the internet. Once you start working on project, the project itself will drive what & how you will learn. Because no two projects are the same. What you can hope or try for, is to find every chance to work on a diverse set of VR projects- Sports, Industry, Education, Entertainment etc. This should keep you on your toes, keep you innovating & keep you at the cutting edge of Virtual Reality development.

Value is not one thing that you do, its the total sum of many small & big things that translates to a great expereince. Offer value with the first talk, before the pitch or the quote. Many clients dont understand the tech, are in two minds or unsure of the use case. Thats where you show authority- you have to resolve the doubts & help them arrive at the best decison for them. Going deep into VR apps design & UX can, in many ways reduce the need for too many external documents or videos. Docs & video content helps, but doesnt solve all problems.Getting on a call & backing up a client in the midst of a presentation or at a trade fair is great value. The ability to anticipate challenges & plan ahead is invaluable during any project.

When LLM and GenAI surfaced, it changed the game. I used Chat GPT, Bard, and Perplexity on a complex writing project, and the results were good with the last two. Playground AI, Midjourney, and Leonardo all gave great results. My goal is to overcome inertia and test what's new. It keeps me in the loop, and I learn more and know more now. In the past, I made the mistake of ignoring crypto, even though I was tracking it. I still don't know much about it. I used AI for my projects, and it made a huge difference to my productivity. Now, I cover AI in my newsletter too. Grasping the basics early on for any new tech is crucial. You can make informed decisions on trends to stay current, relevant and competitive.

VR is yet to reach critical mass, in terms of demand for VR apps. So it may not be a good idea to stay in a single niche If you are a service provider & dont have domain expertise. In an ideal world, you would have liked to work in a specific niche & that should be a future goal. In our case, we worked on a large sports VR project, yet took projects in entertainment, education etc. Reason being, we couldnt sit idle till we bagged another sports VR project. If you have a variety of projects, then you have a better chance of bagging another sports project next time. In case you have domain expertise- in engineering or helathcare, then you are limited to your domain & your portfolio will showcase that expertise.

Game design is not about learning game engines or coding languages. Game design is about understanding a games system design. Ways to get started with GD - Read '8 types of Fun' by Marc LeBlanc - Riot Games website has a course on GD Reverese engineer the mechanics of a well known but simple game. Can be boardgame or a digital game. Try it with TIC-TAC-TOE Paper games are faster & easier to make, break & playtest, if you dont know to code. Or use a simple no-code program like SCRATCH. Learn game design basics in a workshop or short in-person class, its a better & faster way to learn. But its not easy to learn Game design. You cant learn GD from books. A person with a multi-disciplinary skillset may find it easier to learn GD.

Recently Nvidia launched G-Assist, An RTX powered AI assitant tech. It takes text, voice & image inputs from the player to assit players when they have some issue or need guidance. Earlier players scanned the web for cheat codes, quests, items & whatnot. The game leverages AI vision model & context awareness to suggest actionable responses to a players queries. Based on the games genre, developers can customize G-Assists vision & language models to a specific games features with high level of accuracy. As the AI is context aware, it can personalize its recommendatins to match the players gameplay. The AI can also finetune the players PC to maximize the hardwares performance. AI assitants may become a important feature for large games.