Dluya the Chicken & Villa
When I was 5 in Tivon, Israel, my father, a PhD in zoology, built a chicken coop for my sister and me in the backyard, and gave us a tray of two dozen chicks. I was crazy about anything that flies at the time like paper and balsa planes or even watching pigeons fly, and my first question was: Can chickens fly? to which I got a swift response from my Dad: Nope, they can hop while flapping, but they don't really fly. But why? I persisted. They have wings, they must fly! I adopted one of the chicks and named her Dluya.
Every day I’d throw her with the intention to see her fly. Initially she fell to the ground. But with time, her flappings got her some distance. And eventually after a few weeks, she grew to have exceptionally strong wings. When I’d throw her, she would flap and fly long distances, circling the skies for 1–2 km! On weekends when friends visited my parents, they would look up and say: ‘What was that massive white thing circling your house?!' My parents would proceed: Oh, that’s Dluya, Ofer’s chicken! only to watch their friends agape as they observed Dluya cackling her way to a treetop, then landing and bending it. Dluya was the last chicken to survive years after her brothers and sisters perished: While Dluya escaped predators with flight, the others were eaten by them.
The story of Dluya is no happenstance of course. It’s who I am, even years later. What moves me is pushing potential, realizing the superpowers within us. Back then it was Dluya. Today it’s Villa. Villa is an enterprise collaboration platform in VR made by a company I founded called realvr.ai, that maximizes the human potential. See, all of us ultimately, are Dluya. We have superpowers, oftentimes unbeknownst, buried within us. We just need to realize them into being. And we need the tools to make them happen. As we’re 3D beings, where we belong is 3D, and most certainly not 2D. We are meant to use our senses in 3D. To be in motion, alive, immersed, and to be able to exercise our inalien superpowers.
Meet Villa. Villa is a VR platform that takes you to many places around the world in a 'work hard play hard' environment for corporations of all sizes. In Villa you get an airbnb sized villa with conference rooms, a backyard with a pool, and expanses from beach to mountains to vineyards to do the best work of your life from, be social, meet people from your organization and outside of it, and even interact back with those poor souls still stuck in 2D, and how not — a game of flying birds! Villa is not meant to replace the 2D world for now, but to enhance it. It's an alternative. No, it doesn't mean you'll be expected to wear something on your head all day. Yes, you can use it for a few hours at a time, and time will fly in it. You're immersed, you're productive, you're excitable in multi sensory mode, and you get everything you got before Corona IRL, only way, way better.
To Villa you'll need a Quest ($299 on Best Buy) or any of a host of PCVR devices like HTC Cosmos, Valve Index, or HP Reverb. Hit us up at futureofwork @ realvr.ai to get your teams started.
And although the app is an enterprise platform for professionals, many of our clients find that their kids can also express themselves in ways that make them, well, the superheroes and superheroines they already are!
