Entrepreneurship and Ogres: ESMT Alumna Pioneers Virtual Reality in Berlin

When I graduated, I decided to pursue consultancy. I lined up interviews with McKinsey and others, and while preparing I started working on a start-up competition as a consultant for the European Commission. This was great because it helped me build an even stronger European network.

From there, I met the founder of Startupbootcamp, an accelerator program where I worked as a Chief Operating Officer for a year. After that I established – along with two other people – the German Tech Entrepreneurship Centre, which was based at ESMT for the first year. I then met the Virtual Lab team through GTEC and joined as the fourth co-founder.

The Virtual Lab was a spin-off of a PR company based in Italy, which was founded by a co-founder of mine. One of their clients was Eli Lilly, who wanted to do something new and innovative for a medical conference. They connected with my second co-founder, our CTO, who had previously created a VR experience showing the journey of skin disease development. Scientists and doctors were able to interact with this experience and ‘cure’ the condition using drugs from Eli Lilly. So, at first, this was an interactive educational product.

Our third co-founder Jacopo, who also studied at ESMT, was the project manager and brought me on board. The VR interest was clear and the quality we were producing was great, but we felt that a focus on building by demand for each client was more suited to a consulting model, not a scalable business.

By taking the profits and pumping them into the company to develop a product for the B2C market, we created VHyper, a six-axis motion chair you sit on. The VHyper has a multi-sensory wall in front of it which emits heating and cooling and we’re busy working on its capacity to emit smells. This is paired with content movies, around 10-15 minutes in length, which create an immersive experience for users, speaking to all of their senses.

The Ogrecoaster is our prototype, it’s the first content we built that could be experienced on the VHyper. It’s a hyper-reality cinematic experience, where players travel through a magical world filled with characters like ogres, balrogs and dragons.

We primarily built it to test the hardware as there were a lot of elements freely available, for instance, characters from Lord of The Rings, so we could use them without creating everything from scratch. We built it over three months, exhibiting it in Berlin and then travelling to New York and LA with it.

The feedback from users was incredible, even though The Ogrecoaster was only a test, so we’re developing it further. It was single-player and now we’re turning it into a multi-player game, as we found from testing that people want to experience it with friends or family.

We’re now working on converting old movies into a VR experience, the next one is Fantastic Voyage from 1966. The goal is that youngsters interested in VR will want to experience it, but we can also speak to another generation. Parents might say, “Yeah, we remember this movie, we’ll come check it out with you”.

Absolutely, I think even though you’re wearing the glasses and escaping from the real world, humans always want to experience things collectively. The great thing is we can still hear and see each other, so as different avatars, we can still experience it together.

We also want to develop this to be location based. We don’t expect people to buy this chair for their home, it would be in shopping malls and cinemas or even airports. We’re now busy preparing an installation at Munich airport for December. We also want to expand into Europe, we see France as an even bigger market than Germany for VR currently.

I’d say to pick a school with a good entrepreneurial background so you can tap into that alumni network, and get involved in entrepreneurship clubs to connect with the field. You can’t expect an MBA program to deliver every connection you need but you can really leverage the business school you’re studying at to build crucial contacts.