VRARA Vancouver Spotlight:
Miguel Testa, CEO of PanoRabbit
Interview with Laura Ryu, VRARA Vancouver Marketing Manager
What attracted you the most into the VR industry? I got hooked into the VR industry after an HTC Vive Game Jam hosted by CDM. At the time, neither the Vive nor the Oculus Rift have had consumer releases, so I’ve never really tried before then. Before starting on coding our team’s entry, we had the chance to try some room-scale demos by the sponsors. I was overcome by awe of how real it felt. But it was the moment I uploaded a test build I created with Unreal Engine 4 that I really came to love VR. I made a room whose walls are made from the stock UE4 materials with a single light in the centre. The moment I put on the headset is the single most transformative experience in my career. I was inside a world, simple as it maybe, that I created. I could walk through it, see it’s details, see how the light bounces from different angles. From then on, I decided that I wanted to build more worlds like that one.
What is your company all about? PanoRabbit is all about making VR and 360 panoramas simple. At the time, there were not a lot of tools to upload 360 content to share and view in Virtual Reality. Most of the time, you had to make a basic Unity scene to view 360 photos in VR. I found this to be a pain, since I was doing some work in the Real Estate space making VR walkthroughs. My co-founder, Kenny Wong, approached me and shared the idea of making a platform that simplifies the process of sharing panoramas to be viewed in VR.
What do you love the most about your company (product, service-wise, culture, etc)? I love our users. We have been laying low for the past little while because we’re thinking of reworking a lot of aspects of our product, but we have a couple of core users who still upload panoramas regularly.
What excites you the most about the VR/AR industry and how is your company going towards it? The VR/AR industry is always evolving and there’s always something new around the corner. One particular aspect of the industry that is getting a lot of steam lately is the new frameworks and tools coming out for mobile and web VR development. Among these are A-Frame, Viro VR, and React VR. These new tools will help us integrate new and exciting features into our product. We look forward bringing those into our new builds.
What is one thing that we can expect from PanoRabbit in the future? We’ve been experimenting and working on a major overhaul these past few months, so expect a big upgrade sometime in the future!
If you want to learn more about PanoRabbit, check them out:
https://www.facebook.com/panorabbit/
https://twitter.com/PanoRabbit
