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Arts & Culture

Rad Scientist Ep. 11: When The Virtual Becomes Reality

In this April 14, 2018 photo, Gwendolyn Barriac, an engineer at Qualcomm, proudly shows off her virtual reality goggles. Fun fact; the frames for her glasses are made from old records.
Margot Wohl
In this April 14, 2018 photo, Gwendolyn Barriac, an engineer at Qualcomm, proudly shows off her virtual reality goggles. Fun fact; the frames for her glasses are made from old records.
When The Virtual Becomes Reality
Gwendolyn Barriac wants you to embrace the future. She's pretty sure that will involve virtual reality. Her goal is to make it so that VR can be accessible to anyone carrying a smartphone with a Qualcomm chip. This is a KPBS Explore podcast. Find more KPBS podcasts at www.kpbs.org/podcasts. Subscribe to the Rad Scientist podcast on iTunes, Google Play or your favorite podcatcher.

Gwendolyn Barriac spends her days inside a one-room spaceship at Qualcomm, coding.

This episode isn’t sci-fi, it's part of her job as a software engineer. Barriac is creating the software that’s going to allow for the next generation of virtual reality — VR that’ll let people step into infinite digital universes with just their smartphone and a headset. In order to do that, she enters the same VR experience — the spaceship — every day to work on glitches in her software.

In this music-filled episode, Barriac talks about her unique path from a music student breaking into buildings to play piano, to doctoral student, and then to an award-winning filmmaker. All of the music in this episode was composed by Barriac.