Enea Le Fons
When I told you the story of me meeting Mister President Alvin Wang Graylin, I didn’t tell you the whole story (sorry guys&gals, it was a secret!): actually, he was in my city (Turin, Italy) because here there is an epic guy that is living 30 days inside virtual reality! Now that the info is public, I can finally tell you his wonderful story.
Everything started some time ago, when Mister president Alvin Wang Graylin predicted that someone would have stayed 30 days inside virtual reality. Then, Vive started receiving submissions from people wanting to actually participate in this crazy adventure and in the end, it selected one: the project by Enea Le Fons.
Who is Enea? Well, he is an epic guy, in all senses, since he has also worked for Epic Games (in the majestic Enterprise sector). He is a mix of a developer, an artist, and a business guy. If you looked at his curriculum on Linkedin, your jaw would just drop, but talking with him you would also realize that he is not only a very talented guy with which you can talk about AI, VR, gaming and such, he is not only a person that has a lot of relationships with important people in VR and gaming, but he is also a nice person with which is possible to have fun and joke a lot.
Being him in my city, me and Max have gone to his place multiple times to follow his 30DaysInVR experiment and we loved a lot to see his passion for VR, his crazy amount of ideas and also his ability to laugh a lot even in difficult moments. I remember funny moments with him, like the one when he had his back hurting and so I decided to become for a moment his masseuse and I massaged his back (I discovered that I’m better at doing massages than at developing… I don’t know if being happy with it or not…).
I also remember a lunch where we all together ate, talked about VR and had a lot of fun. But I also remember all the info he gave me about crazy experiments with artificial intelligence in China or about futuristic virtual reality headsets. I think you got the idea: having spent some time with him, I can tell you that he is a great person, a great artist, and a great techie.
And he loves VR, he loves experimenting and he also loves opensource and free software. He has this idea of making the world better, of letting people live freely and exchanging their expertise. He has this idea of a VR ecosystem that is completely free of chains. So he proposed to HTC to live 30 days in VR in a way that in these 30 days he could develop very cool things like AI bots and VR locomotion systems while being inside virtual reality with other people helping him remotely… and then share everything developed there to the community as open source software. Isn’t it cool? Yes, it is. That’s why HTC couldn’t do anything but accepting his proposal. This way has born the #30DaysInVR project.
The project was very ambitious, that’s why Enea has passed through a long stage of preparation with the help of his little team and of HTC, that is sponsoring and organizing the event: he had to organize the schedule of the event so that it could be interesting for the VR community; take care of organizing his days in VR so that his health had no possible risks; prepare a lot of experiences and experiments beforehand so that the community could see interesting stuff since Day 1 after the official launch and so on. But now everything is set and he is ready to develop virtual reality experiences, in VR for VR with us all. And then let all the artistic and technical creations be a permanent heritage of the worldwide VR community.
I had the occasion to live interview him during day 0 of this artistic performance and he told me a lot about his interesting vision for the future of VR. And he also told me that he really wants to use this #30DaysInVR experiment to create a lot of creative stuff with the help of all the VR enthusiasts of this world. Everything that he will develop, everything that he will discover, will be completely opensource, forever, for everyone.
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His project is very… human. You can meet him, talk with him, develop with him. And then it is also very technical because you can contribute to create some amazing VR solutions that people from all over the world will use! 30DaysInVR is actually a big hackathon that lasts 30 days and encompasses a lot of aspects of virtual reality development.
The idea is the one of the whole world working together to take VR development to a next level. But it is more than a development project that it also tackles potentials issues in staying long-term in VR and shows the possibilities of working in VR, eating in VR, and eventually, living in VR. Because yes, during the days that he has already spent in VR, he has tried various experiments for eating, sleeping and doing everything with a VR headset on his head.
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This picture alone is able to show how this project is able to mix art with technology
What’s more is that this experiment of #30DaysInVR will actually go far beyond the 30 Days! At the time of writing, Enea has already spent more than 30 days in VR (I met him and Mister President on March, 5th!) so that he could take things to the public stage only when he had enough data and material, with a lot of preset stuff to give for free to the community.
As I’ve said, he has not spent 24h each day in VR, but he has spent an average of more than 7 hours a day inside HTC headsets, mostly the Vive Pro. This event has already been launched in China various days ago and now he is coming here to the West, too. Enea is ready to go on, to stay 15-30 days more inside a headset, for even more hours than before, to develop with us all some components that can help the virtual reality ecosystem to grow together, in a completely open and distributed fashion.
Do you want some examples of what he and his team have built for VR? Well, visiting him I’ve seen a lot of wonderful stuff, like for instance:
– A part of his house completely re-created in VR thanks to creative low-cost photogrammetry solutions. During the event, he will publish a guide on how to create a 3D model of an object just by using an off-the-shelf webcam (or your phone’s camera) and a lot of patience. And then how to use this model to laser-cut a cardboard to obtain the object in real life!
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And all of this without mentioning the fact that by wearing such VR devices for various hours a day and reporting all the problems with HTC, he’s helping in creating a better future generation of virtual reality headsets. So, what he is doing will also help VR hardware in becoming better. (Actually I’m also quite happy to see that it is possible to use VR for all these hours every day without bad consequences for the health…)
But Enea is not the only amazing person there: another fantastic person is Andrea Bay, that is managing and hosting the event. Andrea has been very kind to me since the very beginning and I very much appreciated the positive attitude he shares with Enea, the same willing of wanting to make the world a freer and better place. And apart from that it is also an amazing 3D artist and has shaped various 3D environments that Enea is using for his experiments. Together they are a fantastic duo and I want to hug them every time that I meet them.
To help them with coding there is Giacomo from the studio 34 BigThings (yes, the ones of Redout), who has coded with Unreal to help in transforming the ideas of Enea to reality. I appreciated a lot talking with him about VR and development every time I went to the studio.
And then, of course, there is HTC that is supporting them.
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The core team of the project 30 days in VR: from left to right: Andrea, Enea, Alvin… and then there is an intruder (me)
And… well, even if only for a 0.0001% there are also me and Max. Actually, we’re not officially part of the team, but we found the idea so amazing and the people involved so pleasing that we started helping them as we could. We’re the first two people from the communities that have joined their project. For instace, I’ve helped in developing the A-frame social application (do you remember my rant dedicated to A-frame? It was because of this experience!) and the Focus clubbing experience. Now I’m also working to try to take also ImmotionRoom to the Vive Focus, to have full body VR with no cables or worn sensors.
I’m providing tools (my post about streaming the content of the Vive Focus has been made to help them!). I helped with brainstorming things. I’m spreading the word about this event on all the channels that I have. And I’ve also massaged and hugged Enea when he needed it, this was fundamental. All of this because I myself strongly believe in these people and in this project that will lead to a brighter future of virtual reality.
Thanks to this event, I had the opportunity to do a live interview with Mister President Alvin Wang Graylin. He himself was there to show his full support for such a fantastic initiative because it shares the same vision of VR of his. And he was also there to see his profecy fulfilled :). I made a video of this interview so that you can all be inspired by his words. You can see how I was really too excited of doing such an important interview and so I spent the whole time moving nervously all the parts of the body… but anyway, just ignore me and listen to the interesting things that Alvin has to tell you about #30DaysInVR!
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Source: Skarred ghost