Eric Bear, founder and CEO of MonkeyMedia
Today, the company released a developer toolkit for its patented BodyNav technology that allows people to try out the BodyNav technology on existing games and applications available for HTC Vive and Oculus Rift.
Eric Bear, founder, and CEO of Austin’s MONKEYMedia, an award-winning, independent research, and development lab, calls BodyNav a game changer for virtual reality applications.
Motion sickness in VR is estimated to impact between 25 percent to 80 percent of the human population and is reported to affect women four times more than men, according to Bear.
“We’re moving to a future where we are going to have virtual reality headsets on every desk,” Bear said.
Making the technology accessible to as many people as possible by eliminating the motion sickness will lead to wider adoption of virtual, augmented and mixed reality applications, Bear said.
In this episode of Ideas to Invoices, Bear talks about the benefits of BodyNav. He also discusses his entrepreneurial ventures and how he left Apple to found MONKEYMedia in the ‘90s in San Francisco. The company’s patent portfolio includes in-house inventions that date back to 1992 and are incorporated in more than 184 million movies distributed on DVD and Blu-ray.
Bear has over 30 years experience crafting and establishing user experience strategies for major corporations and is the first-named inventor on over 100 software and hardware patents and patent applications. Products based on his inventions are used every day by millions of people and thousands of companies.
Bear is also a partner at Capital Factory. He is a mentor and investor in Austin startups. He is also the Chief Experience Officer at Curb, a smart home startup that sells and intelligent energy monitoring system.
BodyNav’s technology allows people to be immersed in an application and comfortable viewing it, Bear said. The BodyNav technology replaces hand controls to move throughout a virtual environment. To move, people simply lean in the direction they wish to go.
For more on MONKEYMedia, BodyNav and Bear’s entrepreneurial ventures, please listen to the podcast.
