Wine & Design: Designing for immersive technologies

Panel discussion: Designing for immersive technologies (special focus on VR/AR)

What’s the maturity of the tools? Where are the opportunities? What type of things do we need to take in consideration when designing for immersive technologies? What’s happening in the scene?

Agenda in detail

6:00 Doors open & drinks and snacks

6:30 Opening words by Futurice

6:40 Post-VR: Society and Politics lighting talk by Avenir Institute

7:00 Introducing the panelists

7:10 Panel & discussion

8:00 Q & A

8:15 Demos and mingle

Lightning talk: Post-VR: Society and Politics

by Avenir Institute

The advent of the Virtual Reality (VR) challenges the structures of society and political systems with new opportunities and risks. While the coefficients of happiness are posed to gradually replace the GDP per capita as the indicator of prosperity, chance has become an unacceptable notion in the society where we can supposedly have complete control over our “organic” lives. What role the VR can play in the design of futures?

Avenir Institute is an extra-territorial think tank at the intersection of philosophy, politics, science and art with a focus on post-structural and critical analysis of potentiality in futures. The Institute was founded by Denis Maksimov and Timo Tuominen in 2015. Denis Maksimov is a curator and researcher of art, politics and visual culture. Timo Tuominen is an artist, designer and developer.

Panelists:

Dr Harry Brenton (BeSpokeVR)

Dr Harry Brenton is director of BespokeVR ( http://www.bespokevr.com/ ) which specialises in immersive UX design and virtual human research and development. Clients include the NHS, Imperial College, UCL and Generic Robotics. He has a PhD in VR & medical simulation from Imperial College, has published over 30 papers about VR & applied technology and was a Research Fellow at Imperial College for 4 years.

Dr Marco Marchesi (Happy Finish)

Marco Marchesi started his career in the creative industry as a director of music videos but he always loved to play with interactive technologies, looking for new ways to connect humans and computers. He spent some time doing research at Apple in California, working at Siri on Artificial Conversational Systems and UI (but he's not the Italian voice of Siri).

After he received his PhD in Mixed Reality technologies at the University of Bologna in Italy, he joined Happy Finish to lead the dev team into the future on exciting VR and AR projects and to push creativity beyond the limits with Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning.

Sergio Irigoyen (Neutral)

Sergio Irigoyen is an architect, computer graphics artist and video game developer, currently leading the department of real-time visualisation and virtual reality at Neutral Digital.

His main research focuses on video games tools and techniques applied to architectural visualization and design. Sergio holds a Masters in architectural design from The Bartlett.

He teaches digital studies at IE university in Spain and Media Studies at the Architectural Association in London.

Jerome Maurey-Delaunay (Neutral)

Jerome is technical Director at neutral digital. His work focuses on creating experiences for VR and AR, 360º videos, in-flight entertainment and interactive exhibitions.

Panellist and presenter covering new technologies and delivering immersive experiences, including Clerkenwell Design Week, the British Association for Screen Entertainment and Shoreditch Rising Minds.

In his spare time Jerome likes to tinker with Processing, OpenFrameworks, Arduino, Makey Makey, Ototo and 3D print things.

Kirsi Louhelainen (Futurice)

Kirsi is a senior technology consultant for Futurice. Based in Helsinki, Finland, Kirsi, has spearheaded Futurice's internal development capabilities through FutuLabs. The main focus of FutuLabs is to explore emerging technology (often beta) and exploit its potential uses and business opportunities. The current focuses of FutuLabs include developing products and services around IoT, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality. Kirsi will be able to discuss how HoloLens is being used for Futurice's booth at Nordic Startup conference, Slush.