The History of WizDish
I would like to tell you about the history of Wizdish. Back in 2001 the idea first came up as a concept. In 2003, my co-founder Julian Williams filed for a U.S. patent. Things were not going as quickly as one might imagine in the tech world. Therefore, he delayed that and it was finally granted in 2008. In 2009 we formed a company called Wizdish and I officially joined Julian in 2010.
Our First Demo
We then did our first public demo at Oxford University in the UK. We learned an enormous amount from watching the public using our VR platform. Watching them interact with it and see how they experienced virtual reality so much more so than what was available back then. Bearing in mind this was somewhat earlier than the Oculus Rift. The Oculus Rift DK1 came out in 2012. 2014 was a really busy year, the Oculus DK2 came out. Therefore, WizDish’s first major public demo, which was a fairly exciting experience took place at the Paris Motor Show which had over 300,000 visitors. It was that year that Facebook bought Oculus Rift, that doesn’t happen to many startup companies.
Techstars Accelerator
We were delighted by the Gear VR coming on the scene in 2015 because, from our point of view, VR is only really real when you can be fully physical in it. If you are restrained by wires from headsets that becomes a real problem. In 2016, we were invited to join the Virgin Media & Techstars accelerator in London and that was a pretty hard 4 months of 18 hour/20 hour days. It was great fun and made a lot of friends and we also launched our ROVR2 that year.
In December of 2017, we launched the Bluetooth product which enables you to be fully free, so you are wearing a phone as a headset and the Bluetooth will link to that phone.
