![\"\"](\"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/OculusConference3.jpg\")
<\/a>Fourth-year GAME student Mehran Mansour Feizi (right) shares some of his design work with Tim Salvitti, Senior Community Developer at Insomniac Games, at OC6.<\/p><\/div>\n
VR already goes far beyond gaming. Companies like Hilton, Nestle, Walmart and Ford are using the technology to provide training, build empathy, tour factories and accelerate vehicle design. Johnson & Johnson Institute is using VR to accelerate and improve surgeon training.<\/p>\n
The fourth-year GAME students Henderson, Jones, CSeh, Mansour Feizi, Jolley and Hocson were invited to the important conference by Oculus, the Facebook-owned company that is leading the way in VR technology. The students\u2019 VR design studio Digital Details, launched as part of a course project along with classmates Dylan Doyle, Caldon Bowden\u00a0and Nick Anger, caught the attention of an Oculus startup program aimed at post-secondary students.<\/p>\n
The six fourth-years spent two days at Oculus Connect getting a taste of the future and realizing how ready they are to embrace the challenges and opportunities ahead.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor any student who\u2019s interested in games, the best thing you can do is be ready to show you know how to make games by actually making them,\u201d said Mike Daly, Lead Designer with Insomniac Games who was at OC6 for the release of Stormland. \u201cFor VR games specifically, getting exposure to what\u2019s out there in VR is really useful, and then using something like Unity to make your own prototypes is the quickest and best path to success.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was Digital Detail\u2019s VR game Magehem \u2014 designed and built by the Brock students \u2014 that led them to the conference, where they were able to show off the game to some of the top brands in the VR industry.<\/p>\n
\u201cGame development has a huge part that is theory and a huge part that is skill and ultimately you can\u2019t do one without the other,\u201d said Daly. \u201cLots of different skills are needed throughout the game industry.\u201d<\/p>\n
By the end of the first day of the event, the students were already thinking about the flexibility and adaptability of what they were learning in the joint Brock University-Niagara College GAME program.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the things that Brock is really heavy on is teaching us to be \u2018tools agnostic,\u2019\u201d says Henderson. \u201cWe learn the principles behind designing things, rather than being a taught a software platform. Then the Niagara College side is much more about tool mastery. You begin to see ways to transfer your skills to pretty much anything.\u201d This includes important project management skills that can be applied to other projects.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re learning the very basics of it so when a new system comes out, we have the knowledge already to be able to learn the tools,\u201d said Jones.<\/p>\n
The students are excited about the newest advances in VR technology and how things like virtual meetings and designing 3D objects in VR can impact their game design. They\u2019re unanimous that being at the conference has been a beneficial experience.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust being here has prepared us to think about what we\u2019re going to make with this technology,\u201d said Mansour Feizi. \u201cWe get to be ahead of others who will be working with VR later.\u201d<\/p>\n