Oculus Launch Pad Scholarship 2019!!

Mementorium, our interactive narrative virtual reality experience, was awarded an Oculus Launch Pad 2019 Scholarship! 🎉🎉 We’re thrilled to have Oculus’ support to develop our app over the next few months. 

Oculus Launch Pad was an incredible experience. We met so many talented developers with unique project ideas. We learned a lot from the Launch Pad boot camp, the Oculus Educational Summit, and the Oculus Connect 6 conference. We especially appreciate the friends we made and our connection to the growing Oculus Launch Pad Alumni community.

Photo Description: Hiking in San Francisco area at the end of February 2020 for OLP Demo Day when we shared our vertical slice with our OLP cohort.

Dylan is working hard on the narrative, and finding it challenging and fun. They’re drawing deeply from their background in the Learning Sciences, and Gender, Sexuality, & Feminist Studies, and returning to their most beloved authors who gave them strength & voice. They’re also finding that game writing dovetails nicely with their current academic writing on queering computing, and finding it very rewarding to have both the research writing and storytelling writing spaces to explore. The work in each is enriched by the other.

Scout is re-imagining our level design and experimenting with the procedural foliage tools in UE4. She’s finding virtual gardening is pretty awesome! 😀 We’re aiming for an atmosphere of magical realism, so she’s also dialing in the lighting to bring the right level of enchantment to the scenes. She’s really enjoying bringing the world of Mementorium to life and can’t wait to share more in the coming months! 

John is enjoying finding ways to support people to connect with the virtual environment. He looks forward to designing new interactions in virtual reality that help people connect gestures and object interactions to exploring memories. Collaborating with a team is like an exciting puzzle for John, of problem-solving the challenges we face to reach the goal of creating something together. 

We’ve got a lot of difficult work ahead of us, but none of us shy away from a fun design challenge. Especially when we get to work with friends!