Virtual Reality and real-life reality collided a little over the last few weeks, making my December even busier than usual. I imagine we all get to deal with the usual level of craziness, good and bad. For me, in addition to the usual holiday stuff, I was swamped with a weeklong trade show, a holiday show, and of course getting the new novella, Heart of the Sky, out the door. You already know about that one. Hopefully, you enjoyed it. If you haven’t picked up a free copy yet and you aren’t already subscribed to the mailing list, you can take care of that and get the book for free here:
The trade show was in Orlando, Florida. And no, I didn’t get to go to any theme parks. With only a couple of weeks’ notice, I was sent to be the tech guy for a trade show for my day job. I always hope that I’m superfluous in that role, because our technology should always, you know, just work. However, the brass usually wants to show off something new and still in-development, and trade shows are notorious for having things go wrong.
So no, I actually had to fix a couple of problems during the four days of the show. Otherwise, I was talking to people in the military and simulation industry, and showing off our ship pedestal crane simulator, which was running in Virtual Reality.
I got to spend a little bit of time on the trade show floor, and see just how much virtual reality is getting used in high-end simulation these days. It was actually pretty impressive. There were lots of demos with people wearing VR headsets firing mock rifles, mounted machine guns, grenade launchers, and anti-tank missile launchers, in addition to the usual flight simulators. I also got to play with some of the latest hardware… the really expensive stuff aimed for the military and enterprise rather than consumers. That was fun, although I think the cheaper consumer-level stuff is really pretty good.
Not that this has a whole lot to do with my writing. My game development and simulation development experience (and being a VR aficionado) inform my writing, so there’s that. Plus, I wouldn’t mind writing another story involving VR like I did in my short story “Summoned” for Fantastic Schools Volume 3.
Here’s a picture from the trade show floor, showing my coworker in VR and his “avatar” inside the ship-mounted crane out on the open sea.
As soon as I got home from the trade show, I had another event at the Winter Dreams Festival in Pleasant Grove, Utah. The event was a lot of fun. Unsurprisingly, a lot of people were interested in Haunted Yuletide. I am very proud of that anthology. What was extra-cool was that one of the short story authors (L’ren Beck) happened to be at the event for a different reason (she’s a dancer). She had never done a book signing before, and we hunted her down to have her sign several copies that attendees purchased.
Work continues on the Vanished series. I intend to have Book 5 released in the first half of this year, and Book 7 in the second half. I also expect that my Car Wars novel, Dead to Rights, will be released “soon.” No, I don’t know when “soon” is. What I have discovered working with multiple publishers and self-publishing is that everything tends to come out all at once. Murphy’s Law of book releases, or something. I will keep you posted.
So… is anyone else here a fan of VR gaming?
