Introducing VR First: Unlocking the door to a future in virtual reality [Future Directions]

They say you make your own luck in life, but it certainly doesn't hurt to catch a few breaks along the way. Perhaps that's why when Crytek launched its VR First academic initiative back in January this year, we had a strong sense of our own history. Roughly 17 years earlier, the three brothers who brought the company into existence-Avni, Cevat, and Faruk Yerli-attended the E3 expo in Los Angeles, California, hoping to find an attentive audience for a demo on which Crytek had been working. Instead, they were rejected at almost every turn before eventually (and somewhat forcefully) securing 15 min of tech giant NVIDIA's time to show off their wares as the day's business drew to a close. The rest, as they say, is history. NVIDIA loved the early glimpse into Crytek's CRYENGINE technology that day, setting in motion a chain of events that has seen Crytek continue to establish itself as an influential independent developer of both video games and the software used to create them.