Women Pioneers in VR
April 2016 – The Diamonds Unleashed program by Kara Ross held an event at The Battery in San Francisco celebrating women’s empowerment. The example at this event was the involvement by women pioneers in the rapidly emerging marketplace of Virtual Reality (VR). The event was presented in partnership with CanadaMark diamonds. The VR marketplace and ecosystem is rapidly expanding in the business community, the media & entertainment space which includes gaming and in the education marketplace. Women are rapidly adopting and developing products for the education space to help bring a knowledge base and resource base to the female community.
The event was well attended with a packed crowd that was predominately women from the financial and technology industries. The event focus was a panel consisting of perspectives from the investment, development and artistic creativity communities, and moderated by an award winning journalist. The all women panel highlighted and discussed the trends and opportunities in VR as a market on the whole. The discussion included a drill down to gender targeted applications and content that could be enacted by the technology.
As the VR community develops the language and tools for the creative process and tools for deployment, it is targeting the cloud as a main technology backbone. This brings access neutrality to the development and user community. As a result, the quality of the work and the creativity on a schedule are becoming the dominant criteria for the work effort. As the marketplace is evolving so quickly, the availability of high quality content , that can be released as early as possible into the market, is taking precedence over who or where the content is being created.
This mantra of quality and timeliness rather than gender is a core belief of programs like Girls who Code. The open release of software development kits (SDKs) allows anyone who is familiar with the standard coding languages to develop products for the Occulus Rift, Samsung Gear, HTC Vibe and Google Cardboard platforms. It is experience and creativity that dominate.
These key aspects driving the products to market are central to both software development and artistic aspects of the content. The artistic and development speakers discussed how the workplace is still male dominated, but the positions are starting to think gender blind.
