Growing societies have developed highly efficient structures and abstractions to facilitate communication and get around. With man-made media on the forefront of this, both designers and audiences of all media types today seem to be stuck in a specific rhetoric that not only manifests but reinforces our system culture. Beyond our ambition of creating thematic content to foster change,as designers it thus seems necessary to understand general structural and aesthetical mechanisms of legacy media that have been drastically limiting our capacity of acting out, thinking and even fantasizing about change on a larger scale.The session highlights the very special characteristics of VR and AR in contrast to traditional screen-based media, discusses chances and challenges of a more humane design approach as a start to developing a new mindset for designing alternative realities.

The AI-« Cambrian Explosion »  is a good metaphor of the current «  inflection point » in Artificial Intelligence developments. In particular, this implies far-reaching consequences on VR-, AR-, MR-based applications. Furthemore, AI-assisted generation of audio and video media and widespread AI forgery capabilities will destroy trust in the very social fabric (fake news, botched elections, fraudulent democratic process).

Designing an impact game share most of the challenges than an entertainment game, plus some interesting additions. For instance: a very specific type of audience to address; the need to rationally link the gameplay to the intended impact; or the setup of a methodology to measure this impact. We will evokes these challenges, in the perspective of the versatile environment of game ecosystem.

Since its beginning, the games industry has learned how to engage players with best practices that have been adapted and improved every time a new platform became available. More recently, digital games potential to have an impact in several fields became evident with few success stories. Being a developer with 15 years of experience on commercial games who decided to change and created a nonprofit organization, Francesco will share his vision and his experience on how digital games can be used for impact.

Regulating “embodied AI” is challenging and will strain the European legal system. Shall we accord robots legal personality? Shall we consider them as the “new slaves” – the robot being a sort of “legal hybrid” in the summa divisio between humans and “things”? Can an embodied AI hold copyright on its work? Can a robot be considered liable? How should the law deal with “technically augmented humans”? The European Parliament is already dealing with these issues. The initial regulatory decisions will be crucial, as it will be difficult to change regulatory course once decided. We will briefly review the main issues and where we currently stand.

Take a deep dive into the landscape of Virtual Reality and explore the challenges facing Producers and leaders in this new medium. Kim will discuss both the opportunities and the roadblocks in this fast-moving world of technology and art, as well as strategies for setting productions up for success.

Developing for a VR audience changes the rules. The skills that you have learned as a developer are still applicable, but you’ll need to adapt them to the new reality of player controlled experiences. Cameras, lighting, player attention, audio, pacing, testing, and player movement are all funhouse mirror versions of what you know. We’ll discuss the challenges and possible approaches that shape how you’ll develop your experience for VR.

Concepts and techniques explored by the Google Spotlight Stories team for creating high quality immersive and interactive short films.

As a technologist and someone interested in developing tools that are making it easier for anybody to create content for film, television and VR, I will talk about the latest bricks of technologies that were developed in all 3 fields (AR, VR, MR) and consider what we should be doing next in order to make these technologies easier for people to use.

In our natural environment, 3D soundscape, we apply different modes of listening according to context and personal motivations. Augmented audio reality requires that the listener pays attention to random events and his personal ability to superimpose information. In virtual reality, immersion and localization increase the credibility of the audio or audiovisual scene. Examples of urban sound projects, interactive experiments or audio games will illustrate this presentation.

At the Davos Forum held in the last year, it was claimed that we were about to enter the 4’th industrial revolution which is characterized by the range of technologies that fuse the physical and digital worlds. If this is the case, VR-AR shall be the major component that shapes our future. In this talk, I will first present the historical context in which VR is viewed as a media. I will then argue that VR has to be the key media in the age of the 4’th industrial revolution.

We first present a quick overview of political games in general, and then we present the story of political games at Enjmin. This story kind by related on one way to the story of the game industry and on the other way to the evolution of the political engagement of young students in France during the last sixteen years.

Kim Adams and David Bowman co-host this workshop in which we will discuss the kinds of projects best suited for VR / immersive formats. Participants can bring their projects and proposals and we will advise on how to take them to the next level by providing practical feedback. We will help to define the biggest creative and technical challenges of your project, as well as brainstorming solutions and helping to clarify the kind of team needed to execute the experience.

Walk-through the different platforms and outlets for immersive content, and how to target the largest possible audience, while maintaining high quality experiences.

Let’s be practical and consider what would be the minimum equipment required to create content for VR or AR: what can we create today with just a smartphone and nothing else?

After presenting the main goal of their project and possible questions, discussing and giving feed backs on sound impact (functionality, style), and helping to prototype sound documents for participant’s project team.

VR has gained a lot of popularities these days. One can argue that the contemporary VR is just a digital version of human attempts to create the immersive and interactive 3D space. In this workshop, we will investigate various aspects of VR, from the technological aspect to the social aspect. We will then take some seminal VR systems, and will attempt to re-interpret and re-design by taking advantage of the recent developments.

VR and AR experiences are not competitor but complementary, let’s imagine together what could be the kind of mechanics that associate both in a seamless experience.