By Chad FreyNewton Kansan

After spending the past year huddled over computers and inside of virtual reality and augmented reality headsets, Corey and Michele Janssens emerged last week to find that some of the worlds biggest electronics and computer companies and TV news and other media were anxious to talk to them.

Michele Janssens put her 20-year speech-language pathologist career in Newton on pause in 2016 to partner with her husband Corey on software he was developing that converts any 2-D content for film, TV, cameras and VR/AR into the highest quality stereo 3-D on the fly.

We got a warm reception, which is what we needed to see if we had what we thought we had and the best way to monetize it, said Michele Janssens. We have worked hard. We are a small organization right now in Kansas. We don't have contacts, and a lot of things a person would have going into this. We have had to hustle pretty hard to get where we are.

They work from their own basement, though they are getting attention from elsewhere. ViewVerge, the software they are developing, has generated calls from the likes of Samsung and landed them on an ABC TV station in San Francisco last week. They were also interviewed by Lori H. Schwartz for The Tech Cat Show on the VoiceAmerica Business Channel (VoiceAmerica.com).

According to a news release, their public coming-out party at the annual international Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara, California, attracted reps to their booth from the likes of Amazon Studios, Disney, Facebook and its VR company (Oculus VR), as well as Sony, Panasonic, Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, Dassault Systems, Intel and even Toyota.

They are planning a trip to a similar expo in China later this month, and have been invited back to San Diego later this year as conference speakers.

They hope to license their software to a major firm and are also open to investors. The VR/AR/MR market alone is projected by Digi Capital to grow to $108 billion by 2021.

Corey, a former Army UAV pilot (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) who served in Kosovo, Macedonia and other locations, is something of a Renaissance man -- he has created many paintings and other works of physical art and works on cars and home remodeling. Hes also a theoretical physicist and engineer whose conceptual prototypes for innovative computer processors, artificial muscles, propulsion and suspension systems and robotics resulted in leading a confidential think-tank for Microsoft for five years.

Corey has done a lot of things, Michelle said. He is one of those people that learns really quickly and puts things together in a way that is really special. All of that, and his different interest, led him to the Microsoft think tank.

The ViewVerge technology is a fully-automated process that takes a more natural and biological approach to create elements inherent in human 3-D vision.

The VR-360 headset immersion experience offers the biggest and most realistic impact when that world live-action or computer-generated is in full parallax stereo 3-D, delivering the deepest depth and separation.

Read this article:

Virtual reality - Newton Kansan