However, we did and not just once but multiple times a day without any fear, as it was in a virtual reality. Sounds boring? It’s not! Because of the combination of VR and the feeling of a real flight inside the vertical wind tunnel of Indoor Skydiving Bottrop it felt like a real skydive.
Let’s start from the beginning. In this blog entry we will explain the idea, how we organized the event and what result we achieved in a 1-day hackathon.
In the beginning of 2018 we started a cooperation with Hochschule Düsseldorf (HSD). The University is close to our office in Düsseldorf, so we were able to organize some events with them, get in touch with professors and created the opportunity for students to work with us. Valtech always wants to benefit from the fresh open minded young talents as part of our innovative culture. They participated in the Valtech Research Lab that explores ideas and questions that need to be answered and researched.
One of those questions was “I read about the VR glasses Oculus Go and I want to know how it works and what might be possible”. So we started to investigate.
Besides that, Thomas Falkenberg our Students Coordinator and our HR Manager in Düsseldorf Joaquim Neumann sat together on a Friday afternoon after a meeting and talked about their plans for the weekend. Joaquim, who is a passionate skydiver, told Thomas, that he would be skydiving this weekend and Thomas said that it would be cool to program this in a virtual reality. Joaquim then told us that programming it in a virtual reality would not be enough for the feeling; but that it would be possible to use it in the indoor skydiving wind tunnel in Bottrop and that he always wanted to have a event there. With the Oculus Go technology from our Research Lab in mind and the idea of doing a hackathon as a recruiting event, we decided to combine these into one event: FlyHigh@Valtech – The virtual skydiving experience was born.