This week, British Columbia fetes the tech community, while Google christens a new building in Kitchener-Waterloo. Plus: higher app prices from Apple, CraveTV for the masses, and VR in Vancouver.

Tech summit looks to put B.C. on the map

The first ever BC Tech Summit was held on Monday and Tuesday. It was opened with some remarks by Premier Christy Clark who said that “it was long past time that we did so … given the size of our tech industry”.

How interesting that she’s now trumpeting an industry that has been thriving in spite of being ignored by the government.

That said, now the province is paying attention. And they’ve got plans, they do.

Premier Clark said the tech industry has told her they need three things:

1. Money: A $100 million capital fund, which will be administered by a private fund manager, is the province’s solution to this one. It’s a good start.
2. Markets: The province is creating a “Developer’s Exchange” which a spokesperson likened to an app store, where developers can sell products to the government. Governments are, it was said, great first customers.
3. Talent: The lack of smart, skilled employees is being approached in two ways.
   1. Immigration: B.C. is simpifying and speeding up it’s part of the Provincial Nominee Program.
   2. Education: The province and the teachers in B.C. are making coding a required part of the K-12 curriculum as part of a shift to science, tech, and engineering (although there was no mention of the disparity in access to computing equipment in the province). They are making money available for retraining and upgrading in tech. In a clever reworking of the “all trades all the time” policy from recent memory, Clark said in a statement that one-quarter of government funding for post-secondary is earmarked for “jobs in demand”. I guess tech jobs are more in demand now than they were a year ago.

In a scrum after her speech, Premier Clark was asked whether the cost of living and housing in Vancouver would be a factor in the promotion of the tech industry. She said it was a problem “for any economy that is succeeding” and referenced Austin and San Francisco as places where affordability is an issue. She also intimated that there might be something about government support for first-time home buyers in the upcoming budget.

Why the low Canadian dollar sucks: Reason #17

With the dollar tanking, Apple has decided to increase the price of apps in Canada. The minimum price for mobile apps is going up from $1.19 to $1.39, and the minimum price for desktop apps is going up from $50 to $70.

Google opens new engineering headquarters in Canada

While B.C. is feting the tech industry, Kitchener-Waterloo is welcoming Google, which opened a new Canadian engineering headquarters last week.

Google has been in the region since 2005 and engineers have been integral in Gmail, Google Giver, the Chrome browser, and the OnHub router.

The new, 185,000 square-foot facility will be home to some 350 people.

Google is establishing a Tech Hub Network to provide financial support and Google resources to start-up communities. Kitchener-Waterloo and Montreal are two of the 10 cities in the North American network.

Watch even more television with CraveTV

Subscription television just got better. CraveTV is now available to all Canadians regardless of cable provider. A monthly subscription is $7.99 a month.

You can watch programming on your computer, on mobile devices, and on televisions. Currently, the CraveTV app is available for Apple TV and Google Chromecast. A version for Xbox One is in development.

One thing CraveTV has over competitors Netflix and Shomi is the entire HBO catalogue, including shows like The Sopranos, The Wire, and Deadwood. It’s also got the Showtime catalogue, which has The L Word, Weeds, and Nurse Jackie.

CraveTV also has every Star Trek episode ever created.

If you want to watch Game of Thrones, which premieres its sixth season on April 24, you need to subscribe to HBO Canada, which currently only exists in standard cable form. HBO Now is, as yet, not available up here.

Trial subscriptions for CraveTV are now available, and give you access to the service for a month so you can give it a try.

VR is happening in Vancouver

Cloudhead Games is not the only developer in Vancouver creating games for virtual reality (VR) headsets. But Tuesday at the BC Tech Summit I got a chance to try out their upcoming game, The Gallery: Six Elements, on the Vive VR system (which HTC is creating in partnership with Valve).

Where the Vive experience differs from other VR headsets is that players can actually move around. A space, about ten feet by ten feet, is observed by a couple of cameras, which translate that space, and the player within it, into the virtual world.

Being able to move around really helps with vestibular disconnect, the nausea that can result from your brain getting competing signals, with your eyes suggesting that you are moving around but your body insisting you’re stationary.

Cloudhead’s creative director Denny Unger told me that early development on The Gallery happened on the first developer version of the Oculus headset. At CES in 2014, he demonstrated what they had been working on for Valve’s Chet Faliszek.

A few weeks later, Cloudhead was invited to visit Valve in Bellevue, and Unger found himself in a room with nine other developers, most of which were AAA studios. Cloudhead was the only Canadian operation. The group were shown an early VR prototype that has become the HTC Vive.

It turns out that the ten studios had been hand selected to be the first developers to help prove the technology prior to its being revealed to the public in the spring of 2015.

That’s how impressed Valve was with the early development on The Gallery.

I spent 15 minutes in the first part of the game and got so immersed in the world that I completely forgot that I was in the middle of a convention centre. I was so immersed in trying to reach out and grab objects to investigate that I actually stepped outside the active space and the system went into pause. If that hadn’t happened, I’d still be there now, exploring the caves and crannies on that beach.

Unger was part of the Innovation Showcase at the BC Tech Summit, and got my vote for the B.C. company I’d invest in, given the means. I gave my vote before actually trying the game, because Cloudhead has figured out how to use the Vive VR for performance capture.

What this means is that actors who are performing for digital characters can actually be in and interact with a digital environment, instead of having to imagine what’s around them.

This new method of performance capture is able to capture the same fidelity of movement in an actor’s body at a vastly cheaper cost, Unger said. It could enable smaller studios with smaller budgets to take advantage of performance capture when creating new games.

It was a process that Cloudhead used to animate the character of the Watcher in The Gallery, played by Adrian Hough.

The first chapter of The Gallery, Call of the Starseed, is a launch title for the Vive, which means it will be playable this spring. HTC Vive preorders are expected to start in February.