My Virtual Reality Tuition Fund

Who are you? 
Hello all! My name is Jewel and I am a hybrid artist and developer with both a degree in Art and Computer Science. More than anything, I love creating beautiful but impactful things. Making those things are, however, not easy and they require a lot of openness to accept mentorship from others and to give a lot of yourself to your project. My goal to combine art and technology to give people lasting impressions of things that are collectively important to us, such as history and other educational topics, and I believe Virtual Reality is the perfect space for it.  

What are you raising money for?
This is my first time crowdfunding for anything so it is a little difficult for me. I have recently been accepted to 
Make School’s competitive advanced developer program for Virtual Reality . While I have received a partial scholarship,  it unfortunately isn’t enough to cover my expenses for the commute and the tuition. At this time, I am actually in the process of finding a job and have limited personal funds. In some ways, its a rare opportunity in my adult life where I have a break and can even take this course! This program is special because it will be taught by industry leaders and gives us a lot of amazing mentorship in a short amount of time (8 weeks). There's also a demo day at the end where companies come out to hire. Who knows? Maybe you can help me with making some great content with a great company soon! Success happens when preparation meets opportunity and I could certainly use the help with the educational preparation!

The tuition will be due in full by August 12 and I hope to raise as much as it as I can by then!

Why Virtual Reality? Why does this mean so much to you?
My dream, not just in Virtual Reality related ventures, is to create content that truly becomes part of people’s lives and creates impact. Virtual Reality, while young in many ways, is a great vehicle to do just that.

I have always been jealous of musicians because they create content that can take you back to a time in your life in an instant. Their music is in your home and, in many ways, can serve as milestones through the different eras in your life. I think visual art has its limitations in that it cannot be all encompassing as music is when you listen to it. While visual art will never be like music, for the first time in my life, I feel that visual art can be brought as close to music as possible with virtual reality, in a way that you can be immersed in it and become emotionally invested in the things you learn through it.

My favorite uses of VR is to travel before I go to bed. I'm not a filmmaker so that wouldn't be my focus. I want to use my strengths in visual art create experiences like Apollo 11 VR, where they used real audio from the historical event to make people feel like they were really there. I saw people demo it on YouTube in tears because of how special it was to them. I want to create data visualization for education so people will be moved by our history, such as what was done with Fallen , an interactive visualization of the number of people who died in WWII.  I want to create a sort of "Magic School Bus" Virtual Reality series, where people learn new things in a "I could never have experienced it like this" kind of way and where kids and adults alike could be shown something new (and totally unboring for the kids ;) ).

My current project is to create a series of data visualizations. The first will be focused on the global economy in the context of history (wars!) and current events. I'm interested in people and relationships and feel that countries can be viewed as larger people and larger relationships. Hopefully, it'll make someone think!

In the future, I'd like to also experiment with creating short graphic novel in VR, as well as partner with different people to incorporate Taoist principles in a meditation VR app.

How thankful will I be?
UNBELIEVEABLY. You may have noticed that I have 'reward' levels. Since I am an artist, I thought I'd do this as a strange way for you to get commission some art from me, since I'd be really uncomfortable with you just giving me money.  If there's something you really want and it's not on my list, as long as its easy to ship, please ask if the modification is possible. 

All shipments and art will be made sometime later in the year, when my energies aren't on my projects and my job hunt :) It will certainly come before next year, I promise! The digital sketches will be much easier and will get to you much sooner.

To my VR community, I know we are all learning together. I am so happy to be part of you and can't believe how supportive you've been in terms of your knowledge and your openness to include others. I promise that, whether or not you'll be able to support this venture, I will give back the things I learn :)

Lastly, some photos of my art work, so you know I wont send you stick figures!










Thanks for reading my ridiculously long plea! :)

Photo Credit for the main photo on the page goes to Jeris JC Miller , who had taken it at Oculus Launch Pad.