VRTGO conference will be held at The Baltic Gallery on the South Shore in Gateshead this year.
Sponsored by Invest North East England, speakers come from a wide-rang of companies including Epic Games who have recently announced their move to Newcastle.
Check out the agenda below – tickets are available to purchase here.
9:00 am – 9:30 am
Registration and networking breakfast, Baltic Art Gallery
9:30 am – 9:45 am
Welcome, Carri Cunliffe, Secret Sauce & VRTGO Producer
9:45 am – 10:15 am
Nick Whiting, Technical Director of VR & AR, Epic Games
The Road to Robo Recall and BeyondWe’ll take a look at what we learned about players, technology, physiology, and psychology through creating Robo Recall, and how those lessons are shaping how we think about what we’re working on next.
10:15 am – 10:45 am
Thor Gunnarsson, Co-founder & Head Business Development, Solfar
Surfing Peaks, Surviving Troughs: Navigating Through VR´s Hype CycleFrom building and scaling Everest VR, the team at Sólfar gained a few hard-won lessons for any startup creating VR games and experiences in the middle of a classic Hype Cycle. What did we learn about the technical, design and business challenges of early VR? And how do we climb the slope of enlightenment together?
10:45 am – 11:15 am
Break
11:15 am – 11:45 am
Jeremy Dalton, VR/AR Lead, PwC
Virtual Reality: Now and in the FutureJeremy will be taking a look at the where the VR market is now and where it is heading. This will be a useful session for everyone!
11:45 am – 12:30 pm
Simon Barrett, Games and VR entrepreneur, Cooperative Innovations
Panel: Social VR / AR – Challenges and OpportunitiesSimon and his guests will be looking at how AR and VR can help us and hinder us wit our social interaction in both work and play.
Find out if you never need to leave your home again!
12:30 pm – 2:00 pm
Lunch and Networking
2:00 pm – 2:30 pm
Aldis Sipolins, Head of Virtual Reality and Game Design, IBM Research
Enhancing Cognition with VR and Machine LearningVirtual reality tricks your brain into believing you’re somewhere real. This is the power of Presence, and it’s going to revolutionize human research. An IBM Research experiment had subjects play a memory game in VR while wearing an EEG brain sensing headband. Using machine learning techniques, researchers were able to successfully predict memory based on brain activity. In other words, we can predict whether or not you will remember something based on what your brain was doing when you saw it. In another project, players shoot a Nerf gun at a moving target mounted on a Roomba to demonstrate that you can enhance performance on real-world tasks by recreating them in VR and changing sensory input.
2:30 pm – 3:00 pm
Jed Ashforth, Founder, Realised Realities
Invisible When No One’s LookingJed Ashforth, former PlayStation(R)VR Immersive Experience Specialist at Sony Interactive Entertainment, firmly believes that User Experience is the most important commodity in the world, and so all VR developers should learn to become invisible when no one’s looking so that we can change the future like before. Yep, it’s that old story again. Join Jed on a unique and surprising trip into the future of the VR user experience.
3:00 pm – 3:30 pm
Sol Rogers, CEO, Rewind:VR
Panel: Immerse UK and Innovate UK Discussion Looking At How We Can Keep Ahead Of The GameSol Rogers, CEO, Rewind VR
Matt Sansam, Digital Lead, Innovate UK
Martin McDonnell, Founder, Soluis
Matt Sansam, Digital Lead, Innovate UK
Martin McDonnell, Founder, Soluis
3:30 pm – 4:00 pm
Coffee Break and Networking
4:00 pm – 4:30 pm
Resh Sidhu, Creative Director of Framestore VR
4:30 pm – 5:00 pm
Dr Faisal Mushtaq, Cognitive Neuroscientist and Academic Fellow in Health Engineering, Leeds University
The challenges and opportunities for virtual reality: a human factors perspectiveIt is well known that the majority of approaches to human computer interaction (e.g. use of established technologies such as PCs, tablets and laptops) can place pressures on the human visual system and promote poor ergonomics. Virtual Reality (VR) technologies pose a qualitatively different set of challenges for the human user and this presentation will describe one such issue identified by psychologists at the University of Leeds. However, unlike current mainstream technologies, VR presents an opportunity for humans to interact with computers in ways that were previously unimaginable. This presentation will describe the benefits of placing humans at the heart of software and hardware development to help realise the potential of the VR revolution.
5:15 pm – 5:30 pm
Wrap Up!
5:30 pm – 10:00 pm
PARTY! Riverside Terrace @ The BALTIC
Sponsored by Bluegfx
