Things have been a little quiet over the summer in terms of news from the Podrift camp and in light of today's wonderful article on the BBC ( Podrift: Is podcasting ripe for virtual reality? ) I thought it was a good time to drop by and share a little of how things are coming along.

Where we're at.

Earlier in the year we worked hard to complete and show case a proof of concept for Podrift. It was a really enjoyable experience and something you can read up on more in our article "Out in the wild for our first showcase".

As with any proof of concept, the way it was put together was focused around speed rather than quality of code. It served its purpose extremely well and taught us a lot though we found working to further improve the experience on top of that code base was proving tricky.

So what did we do? What any good developers do. Start from scratch... well, almost. We've stripped back to basics and are rebuilding using a mix of fresh code alongside improving the existing code. This will allow us to move forward much quicker, vastly improve our workflow and have a new angle with which to solve some existing problems.

Working toward a public release.

The end goal is of course to get people in to the experience to create, share and enjoy content; naturally this is something we want to do as soon as possible. Our initial plan is to release a set of pilot content as part of our alpha phase; this will be with a select few content creators initially that will help us show case a range of possibilities. This covers everything from a casual conversation; to something a little more adventurous; to a full blown performance art piece.

We have a few dates in mind for when this will be and will be making more of announcement on that in the coming weeks. We're extremely excited about this project and though it's been a challenge to get underway, we're as keen as ever and looking forward to getting it out there.

Moving Forward

We kicked things off over a year ago now and have overcome many problems to get where we are currently. Though we want to release the project as soon as possible, making sure the experience is a strong and positive one is our top priority.

There are a couple of great VR development teams out there working on projects in a similar space to us and they are setting the bar high. We're confident we can meet that level of quality and that what we have planned will co-exist nicely along side them. It's an exciting time in the VR world and we're glad to be a part of it!

If you have any questions on Podrift, please don't hesitate to let us get in touch via our contact page or on twitter @podrift.