When you’re out there developing your own platform, sometimes you can help others along the way, and earn money from it …
For the past year, since graduating from 2016’s Founder Institute in Perth, Ben Bauert and the team at Unleashed VR have been busy building their own soft skills training platform.
Recently, more and more clients have been asking him for help with their own AR or VR projects.
While this was not exactly core business, Ben saw an opportunity – the creation of Unleashed XR, their own design and development consultancy, which launched in January and sits alongside the Unleashed VR business.
Might this not distract and slow down the development of the main Unleashed project, Startup News asked?
“We already have clients (for Unleashed XR),” Ben told Startup News, “from a whole range of industries – medical, sport, construction… and we are resourcing the new venture appropriately.”
Extended Reality (XR) is here, the all encompassing term that includes everything from reality through augmented reality, virtual reality and mixed reality.
If a client wants a video or photo shoot (reality), or augmented reality (digital layered on top of the real world), or virtual reality (a completely immersive digital world) or even mixed reality (digital world interacting with real world) then Unleashed XR can help.
Headsets and XR platforms they can use with clients include:
- VR: HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, Windows Mixed Reality, Google Daydream, Samsung Gear VR
- AR: AR Core (Google’s Android AR platform); AR Kit (Apple’s iOS AR platform); Vuforia (holographic platform)
- Mixed Reality: Microsoft Hololens
“We’ve formulated a design thinking process to assist clients developing their own VR solutions – the whole planning, strategy, prototyping, wireframing, testing and build,” said Ben.
“We’re happy to workshop things with startups too, it’s not just the big end of town.
“Immersive tech is moving so rapidly and is such a young area for organisations to explore. There have already been many examples of poor understanding of these technologies ending up in wasted resources in either low quality experiences or applications that should never have been made using these technologies.”
Particular areas of focus are in in training, education, recruitment, medicine, design, engineering, mining and military, law enforcement and security.
Unleashed XR has three developers, a 3D modeller and a digital marketer.
With all this going on, how does Ben keep a work life balance?
“I try to spend as much time as I can with family,” Ben told Startup News, “They are the only thing more fulfilling for me than my work. I try to get a little bit of exercise most days. Even 10 minutes can be effective.”
“When at work, I don’t have difficulty staying focused. I absolutely love what I do and wish there were more hours in the day.”
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For more, visit Unleashed XR.
