Vive reveals winners of the Viveport Developer Awards; sets stage for sessions and news for VR developers at Game Developers Conference
HTC VIVE™, the leader in room-scale Virtual Reality (VR), today announced winners of the Viveport Developer Awards (VDAs) recognising a diverse lineup of VR content. The company also set the stage for presentations at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) next week in San Francisco, where VDA winners will join a panel with the Vive team looking at VR developer success stories. The panel is part of three sessions from Vive looking at ways VR developers can reach broader markets and help drive adoption of high-end VR. Vive will be making several news announcements around upcoming VR content and key initiatives next week.
The winners of the VDAs represent the best in VR content outside of games. The awards are organized by Viveport, HTC’s app store for VR, and offer $500,000 in cash prizes in five categories. Winners were chosen by the VDA jury in categories featured on Viveport: Explore, Create, Connect and Experience. A fifth Community category chose winners based on votes from the VR community gathered by online personalities Taryn Southern and Nathaniël (Nathie) de Jong. The winners of the VDAs are: Explore – Apollo 11 VR; Create – Fantastic Contraption, Connect – Cloudlands: VR Minigolf; Experience – Allumette; Community – A Chair in a Room. The awards also offers smaller cash prizes for second and third place categories. For the full list of VDA winners, and details on a limited-time promotion on VDA winning apps on Viveport, please visit https://blog.vive.com/us/2017/02/23/viveport-developer-award-winners/.
Penrose Studios (Allumette), Futuretown (Cloudlands: Mini Golf) and Northway Games (Fantastic Contraption) will join the Vive team for a panel to talk about what helped them make a VR hit. The panel is part of Vive’s lineup of sessions taking place next week at GDC:
The Holodeck Year 2: Growing the VR Ecosystem in 2017 (Feb. 28)
Rikard Steiber, president of Viveport, and Joel Breton, head of Vive Studios, deliver a split keynote looking at how Vive is accelerating the adoption of VR with both consumer and enterprise facing initiatives, and giving developers more ways to fund and monetize premium VR content.
VR and the Return of Arcades (Mar. 2)
Jenna Seiden, head of content acquisition at HTC Vive, looks at how out-of-home VR at arcades and other amusement centers represents a burgeoning market and an important touch point for more consumers to experience and adopt VR
Winning at VR: Developer Success Stories (Mar. 3)
Joel Breton moderates a panel with successful VR developers – including winners of the Viveport Developer Awards – to look at how they’ve have managed to build an audience for their apps, and what they see as their next step in VR.
GDC takes place February 27 through March 3 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Follow Vive at @Viveport for updates on news and activities from the show.
