The co-founders of a virtual-reality company here think VR is on the verge of becoming another entertainment and communications platform.

Now, the self-funded company is looking for ways to convert the technology into a revenue stream.

Lew Strachman co-founded NovaWake Studios LLC, located in rented office space in the Turner Mansion, at 1521 E. Illinois, with Anna Czoski last July. Strachman, 68, has spent his career as a hardware and software engineer and developer. Czoski, 29, is a 3-D graphic artist and designer.

NovaWake Studios bills itself as a virtual reality experience designer. The company is currently working on its first public release of a VR experience designed by Czoski called Gravity Compass. That experience is scheduled to go on sale in an online virtual reality store currently being built by Irvine, Calif.-based Oculus VR LLC., Czoski says.

The purchase price of the Gravity Compass experience hasn’t been determined, she says. Oculus’ VR store, similar to Apple Inc.’s App Store, is scheduled to debut to the public in late March or early April, Czoski says.

In the meantime, Strachman says NovaWake continues to seek out angel investors for startup assistance.

“We are currently working with people in the community as we’d like this to be a communal venture,” Strachman says.

NovaWake Studios occupies two first-floor office suites at the Turner Mansion. One suite houses designers and programmers while the other serves as home to the Time Traveler Lounge, a place where the general public can experience VR for a fee of $15 to view its latest content. The lounge is listed as a venue on the movie ticketing site Fandango.

Strachman says Czoski sold him on the belief that virtual reality isn’t far from becoming a mainstream entertainment, and possibly communications, platform.

“Before film, entertainment, messages, and information were performed live much like a Broadway play,” Strachman says. “But film came along and changed how we communicated and processed information and messages. Movies, television … we believe virtual reality is next. But VR is creating another reality that you get to step inside.”

For instance, Czoski designed and created a 3-D video game called Nova Asteroids. Unlike a video game during which a player is sedentary, Nova Asteroids puts a player, wearing a special headset, in the center of a virtual asteroid field where the only way to avoid being repeatedly annihilated is by standing and using lateral movement, squatting, or jumping if necessary.

Meanwhile, you pile up points looking through the cross hairs in the virtual view finder and blowing up the asteroids before they dismantle you. The more points one can amass, the more strenuous the workout they’ll get.

Nova Asteroids was on display for a couple of months last year at the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture. Czoski says users provided valuable feedback to the company.

“We’ve had resistance from people putting on the headsets,” Czoski says. “We’ve had resistance from people wanting to try it out in a public place, and that’s one thing that really informed us in our market in seeing that people want these headsets in the privacy of their own home so they can spend all the time they want on it, and that changes how you design for it.”

Strachman says, “It’s still largely an experiment right now for us, but I believe we’re at the very beginning of a new medium. The technology and software have emerged in a way that it’s just a matter of time in which people will create content for it.”

For now, the company is self-funded, with the two co-founders and four software programmers constituting the company’s payroll, says Strachman, who oversees engineering while Czoski is in charge of art and design content.

“She’s not one to brag, but I have to say Anna has been able to put together some really nice work,” Strachman says.

Czoski met Strachman last year when she responded to an ad he ran online looking for a 3-D graphic designer.

“Lew put out a call for artists for a different business plan model. He said he met a lot of people who were basically incompetent in 3-D art,” Czoski says. “When we met, he said he realized we could do something bigger.”

Strachman says, “In looking for someone to work with, I kept lowering the bar of expectations as I interviewed people. They would tell me they could do this, they could do that, but they couldn’t, and I could tell that just by talking to them.”

“But when I met Anna, she was talking about doing things I hadn’t considered doing. It didn’t take long before I realized that working with her would open up possibilities that could be much greater than what I had expected.”

He’s had a wide range of jobs during a professional career spent primarily in the tech sector as an engineer. A Spokane resident for more than 20 years, Strachman previously was employed in the aerospace sector, working on remote-sensing satellite equipment. He also has worked in the telecommunications field and with a medical group that he claims developed the original angiogram system used to conduct heart tests.

In the lounge are three 3-D stations where wrap-around goggles and stereo headphones hang. In a matter of seconds, what was a trip to northeast Spokane turns into a venture through a Czoski-designed virtual world that has users floating through space.

Instead of coming home at the end of the day, grabbing the remote control and looking for something to watch on TV, maybe the near future will involve reaching for the goggles, headphones and unwinding—or getting a workout dodging asteroids—in a virtual environment. These experiences could be done individually or as a group, Czoski says.

“Right now, we just don’t know how it’s going to play out,” Strachman says. “What we do want though is for users to have a positive experience from our work. That’s why we’re reaching out to people. We need people to be able to give us feedback.”

“We’re still trying to figure out whether or not we can generate revenue from this,” Strachman says. “What we can clearly see is there is a gamer’s market for VR.”

Strachman and Czoski, who Strachman calls a “VR evangelist,” and with Strachman attended a three-day gaming developer’s conference in San Francisco a year ago.

“Going into it I didn’t think it (VR) was mature enough in its development to be a possible venture,” he says. But with the development of the 3-D software platform Unity, Strachman said it is powerful and flexible enough for creating multiplatform 3-D games and virtual experiences.

As with any new technology though, Czoski says she and Strachman have experienced no shortage of naysayers who question whether virtual reality has the potential to be mainstream.

“Sure, there’s a lot of skepticism and negative feelings around technology taking over our lives in yet another way,” she says. “I think there will always be that sentiment when new technology comes forward. But once we start talking about applications of this new technology, a lot of times those same people will say, ‘Oh, well that’s great!’ It’s how you use the technology that makes it good or bad.”