The following is the 1 – 5 paragraph proposal I submitted to Oculus Launchpad 2017. In terms of why you should care about this, I am open to suggestions on what installments to make next.

Project Futures is a virtual reality series that aims to put people right in the middle of a realized product vision. I’ll set out to make a couple example experiences to share from rolling out over the next couple of months. The first will be about the future of farming. Vertical, climate controlled orchards that are shippable to anywhere in the world. 

“His product proposes hydrant irrigation feed vertical stacks of edible crops—arugula, shiso, basil, and chard, among others—the equivalent of two acres of cultivated land inside a climate-controlled 320-square-foot shell. This is essentially an orchard accessible by families in metropolitan settings. People will need help a) envisioning how this fits into the American day b) how to actually use an orchard/garden like this”

Since VR is such an infant technology, if you can communicate your idea introduce your product, using a more traditional method (e.g. through illustration, powerpoint, or video as below) then you probably should.

There are, however, some ideas that are very bad to communicate using traditional methods. That’s why it’s an appealing idea to use VR to introduce product ideas today. Climate controlled vertical farms that are shippable are extremely difficult to conceptualize for the average American. There is real value for the customer; who gets a learning experience fueled by virtual interactions and immersive technology about what it’s like to use one such orchard for grocery shopping. 

Now here’s where my story starts to converge with this idea for the series. I keenly seek out constraints that will allow me to keep healthy and eat healthily. Incredibly, I’m using a service which allows local bay area farms to deliver groceries for the week to my door every Tuesday.  I only order paleo, or rather plant based pairings with a protein, ingredients.

What I want to focus on, is that currently, this service isn’t ready to scale across the nation. I guess, there simply aren’t resources for the same crops in different places among other logistical reasons for not scaling far beyond the bay area. So I thought…. this delivery infrastructure obviously sits atop resources created by farmers. So, to scale this delivery which can be so good for the consumer’s health, well, the infrastructure promise of a shippable orchard can be huge. Conditional on the climate controlled, shippable orchard’s effectiveness, all geographic areas would be addressable markets for such a delivery service.

I would like to empower people across the world to have access to healthy foods. But an important point in this process is a shift in thinking about how this healthy future might exist. VR is a device that I’ve paid close attention to for a couple of years and before I get too far ahead of myself, I will see what I can produce with it to communicate on the idea of the climate controlled shippable orchard. An example of the interaction a user would have is depicted here.

As a user puts the tracked controller into the collider of the plant she can spatially pick one of the options (“pluck”, “about”, “farm”).

‘Pluck’ will do exactly what you’d expect, spawning perhaps a grocery bag for the user to place that bit of shiso (or kale) in. ‘About’ would detail more about the crop (i.e. origins and health benefits). ‘Farm’ would articulate the local of optimal growth and known farmers of such a crop.

If you have an idea that you think would slot well into the Project Futures virtual reality series about the future of different products. Ping me at dilan [dot] shah [at] gmail [dot] com as I would love to talk to you about it.