How I started a Virtual Reality company

Last year, when I had my first interaction with virtual realityI felt that the potential of the technology is huge. I won’t event talk about the vast amount of industries in which virtual reality and augmented reality will have a major impact. Within seconds of trying on the HMD* I realized that my mind interacts perfectly fine with the virtual environment, people and any other type of immersive content displayed by that time.

HMD* Head Mounted Display

After digging into it and learning about the history of #VR and how it failed in the past, just because the technology wasn’t developed enough, I got obsessed about finding a niche market in which #VR and #AR respectively would make a change. I even got a Skype call with Mike Alger to discuss about what is he working on at Google and what fields would be potentially disrupted by the burst of VR & AR technology. During the Skype call we’ve mentioned dozens of industries that could be improved by implementing virtual reality solution but only one seemed solely interesting to me, namely online shopping.

“I should open a VR e-commerce shop, but to test the market I believe it would be more likely to get adopted if the VR shops runs side by side with existing e-commerce shops.”

After a couple of moments I could already describe the user journey:

“So, you go on amazon, search for the product, and then you have the possibility to click a button which says “see in VR”, right?When pressing that, the app launches, the phone turns split screen, then you place the phone in your head mounted display and voila, you have the 3d model of the product and you can interact with it.”

With that conversation, TURNIIVR was born.

With the idea in mind, I started to assemble our founding team across all key functions- tech, design, business dev, sales and finance. I must say that without the network, my idea wouldn’t see the day light as I couldn't built it myself.

At the core, TURNIIVR views virtual reality as an enhanced medium for immersive experiences, ranging from entertainment to training and education to health, industry and commerce. Virtual Reality provides a new platform for makers, designers and technology enthusiast to explore and build experiences that resemble or even exceed familiar moments by making them more engaging, entertaining and immersive.

We have an incredible team at TURNIIVR and to put something together that far surpasses what I imagined when we started on this, just a few months ago. This is the work of an incredible team and that’s why I’m excited to introduce them to you now. COO Cosmin Pirvu, hasn’t been so excited about an idea in his life. We have both joined our forces to build this idea for our master thesis, after I’ve shortly pitched it to him. Tibold Kandrai, CTO hasn’t slept in days. He came to me with an amazing working demo, right after discussing the idea. Roland Pop, our Lead Developer took his role and responsibilities beyond what I am considering as being possible today and our student helper, Bence Sipos who’s working hard on putting together a self explanatory webpage.

We’re launching our first product soon, The TURNIIVR app, available on both iOS and Android. It’s the first concept in VR that aims at keeping the existing procedures and design while adopting a new one. It’s the culmination of months of work, and I have never been much prouder of anything else I’ve worked on before.

Our goal with TURNIIVR is to showcase amazing content, while we keep on believing in a world where the online shopping experience can be more satisfying, immersive and comfortable than shopping in store.

TURNIIVR is virtual reality application, designed for existing online-shops to easily provide their customers with an immersive shopping experience by the use of virtual reality technology.

TURNIIVR will improve e-commerce metrics by driving customer acquisition and retention and by reducing product returns. Being a versatile application, TURNIIVR delivers state of the art software solution to allow online stores to showcase their products dedicated and amazing 3D content in a virtual environment. Moreover, since TURNIIVR tracks position and orientation data for the user’s head at all times, TURNIIVR can deliver valuable analytics & metrics for e-commerce to understand how customers interact with their products.

Virtual reality presents us with a lots of opportunities and I’m glad we can take part in being among the pioneers in spreading the technology into mainstream markets.

Find us on Facebook and Twitter our check our webpage @ TURNIIVR.com