With the awareness and excitement of VR and AR increasing, it's no surprise that developers are following the trends and trying out VR for themselves. The problem they will face, like most emerging technologies, is fragmentation.

Many manufacturers want to own a section of the market, which gives rise to proprietary solutions and slightly different takes on what the standard should be, making the life of the poor coder a little more confusing. Even Microsoft, which had six headsets listed on their Windows Mixed Reality page back in March now only have two, casting yet one more cloud over the issue of which VR standard to support.

To support all of them is expensive, time-consuming and wasteful, especially if the hardware you just coded support for no longer exists and hitching yourself to a proprietary wagon restricts you in other ways.

As this infant tech grows, we need a solution that won't disappear and works on everything, and happily, one is in development right now called Open XR by the  Khronos  group. With runtimes now available, this breath of fresh air will mean VR and AR developers can code once and then run their apps and games on pretty much any hardware that has a supporting runtime, and according to the manufacturers who have signed up, that will be pretty much everyone.

We too have been spending some time developing our own VR tool for Education and will be launching it in early Autumn – watch this space!

And finally………meet Rick

As the flowery flared decade of the ’70s were ending, exciting technologies were starting to find their way into the average homes of the working class. In one such average household in North Yorkshire, England, these technologies awoke an interest and passion for these new devices. Having a computer in your own home seemed a ridiculous idea but then Sir Clive Sinclair released the ZX80 and then the ZX81. It was the ZX81 that started Rick on his technology journey.

Rick continued to code his own projects and was soon the proud owner of an Atari 400 (16k memory, colours and more!) This led Rick into a career with leading software publisher Europress. He soon switched to project management and helped bring game making titles such as STOS, AMOS, The Games Factory and Klik & Play to market.

There are many cogs that turn and whirl behind the curtains of TheGameCreators and it’s Rick’s role to ensure a lot of these metaphoric engine parts are well oiled and keep turning.

Asked to describe a day in his life Rick says, "I should try real life plate spinning - that’s how my days generally go! I usually start the day checking emails and any user questions sent to our tech support service, and then I’ll check the forums to see what’s happening and what’s being asked. Next it’s on with the tasks at hand to manage and plan projects that we have underway. AppGameKit Studio has just launched and so we’re busy now with the user feedback, planning a new update and working on the extra platforms that will support Vulkan."

Away from work, Rick frequently walks his half loyal dog Teddy in the hills of the Peak District, attends the gym a few times a week and loves to watch a wide range of sports (especially F1).

And finally, finally, whilst we are featuring Rick in this month’s newsletter we have to share with you this article from the BBC archives ?