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Schedule 2021

Schedule of Talks, Workshops, and Events

Please note time zones. Talks will be available in 2D, 3D and in an archive following their presentation. Schedule subject to change, check back frequently for updates and added information.
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  • Day 1 - Wed June 2, 2021

    June 2nd, 2021

  • How do you make money from XR and Digital art? Are NFTs the worst thing to happen since the internet? Pyramid scheme or not, the cryptoart space has seen a significant boom in 2021 along with a massive backlash against cryptocurrencies and NFT artists due to environmental and other reasons. Join global artists and developers in this 2 part panel discussion focused around digital artists traversing money making avenues, new creative economies and the NFT phenomenon; the good, bad and the ugly, with particular attention on the environmental impact of blockchains. The first hour will be focused on the Digital/XR art economy with Michelle Brown, Sutu Eats Flies, Jose Andres, Estella Tse and Manu Vision.
    Communities & Creative Economies

  • In the second hour, Rafael (from Tezos NFT marketplace Hic Et Nunc) and MOON HMZ plus others will join the panel to talk specifically around NFTs, from the basics of getting started, to concerns over energy impact and inefficient smart contracts and how artists from outside the Western ecosystem have been engaging with art on the blockchain. Join global artists and developers in this 2 part panel discussion focused around digital artists traversing money making avenues, new creative economies and the NFT phenomenon; the good, bad and the ugly, with particular attention on the environmental impact of blockchains. The first hour will be focused on the Digital/XR art economy with Michelle Brown, Sutu Eats Flies, Jose Andres, Estella Tse and Manu Vision. In the second hour, Rafael (from Tezos NFT marketplace Hic Et Nunc) and MOON HMZ plus others will join the panel to talk specifically around NFTs, from the basics of getting started, to concerns over energy impact and inefficient smart contracts and how artists from outside the Western ecosystem have been engaging with art on the blockchain.
    Communities & Creative Economies

  • Keram interviews the Mozilla Hubs team about a crazy year and where the popular WebXR platform is headed next.
    Communities & Creative Economies

  • Artur will take us on a guided tour of the Crypto based virtual world Somnium Space.
    Communities & Creative Economies

  • Social Creative Virtual Worlds and Multi-Species Worlding: I am actively exploring and building in as many social creative virtual worlds as possible. While this has been my methodology, the goal is to learn the mechanics of building in each and choose the best tools (ie worlds) with which to present my thesis work. I have been building galleries as a way to learn about the cultures and limits in each world. Though virtual worlds have existed since computers, starting with chat rooms and expanding into 3 dimensional spaces, SCV worlds are exploding at the moment. I have been making lists of worlds and their attributes. The other side of my research is to do with Jacob von Uexkull's concept of the umwelt as an embodied form of perception experienced by every form of life - and Merleau-Ponty's concepts around worlding which similarly explore embodied perceptions and voices of different species and how each has their own way of "singing the world." My idea is to use these virtual worlds as staging spaces for installations exploring concepts around multi-species worlding with 3D collages and sound trees - as it feels that new human made virtual worlds are opportunities for reinvention and re-imagining of realities and are resonant and exciting in their organic states of emergence and failure.
    Communities & Creative Economies

  • Day 2 - Thurs June 3, 2021

    June 3rd, 2021

  • Morning welcome and announcements with Keram Malicki-Sanchez and Stephanie Greenall

  • The Web is going 3D at a lighting pace, and we are running short on talent in the space. This talk should help answer questions on the basics of where to start in the 3D revolution. Heavy focus on the tips and tricks I use to help things run smoothly, even on mobile.
    Hardware and Software Development Workshops

  • Creating 3D content has traditionally been very difficult, but thanks to VR and machine learning, this process has become MUCH easier and quicker. In this talk, we'll be discussing why VR and ML is better, what VR tools are available, and how to use them to create production 3D assets for games, animation and education.
    Hardware and Software Development Workshops

  • Working with Infinite Variation: The Creation of Spin Mode in Synth Riders Join Senior Developer Justin Dopiriak of Kluge Interactive as he discusses the design and development of Spin Mode in the VR rhythm game Synth Riders. As a procedural transformation compatible with any game map, Spin Mode would need to work with all game content, official and custom, past, present and future; and the potential volatility of any post-release changes meant that it needed to be done correctly the very first time. Learn how the team overcame the challenges of designing, developing, and testing a feature that would produce thousands of iterations on the existing official game library alone with no room for error.
    Hardware and Software Development Workshops

  • As humans Enter the "Age of Avatarism" with 3D Scanning as a first step to onboard their journey into the Metaverse, our innate need to document and archive one's form, behavior, beliefs, experiences, and wishes will carry us forward into the Virtual World of tomorrow. We are moving beyond the Selphy into the domain of the "Depthy", and beginning to capture our Volumetric Experience, constructing our virtual embodiment, our future will defy time and space of corporeal existence. This talk will show, describe and examine the fascinating and irresistible trajectory of this inevitable next phase of human evolution into the VR Metaverse of tomorrow.
    Hardware and Software Development Workshops

  • Day 3 - Fri June 4, 2021

    June 4th, 2021

  • Morning welcome and announcements with Keram Malicki-Sanchez and Stephanie Greenall

  • The Alice Lab's interdisciplinary research-creation applies a deep commitment to the open-endedness of computation as an art material toward technologies of biomorphic intelligence within immersive mixed realities. It also builds upon the vision of VR, by its pioneer Jaron Lanier, as a medium of collective improvisation. We are focused on endogenous worlds, co-constructed from within, enacted with whole bodies, and populated by more responsive, curious, and playful behaviours, to share a different conception of the cohabitation of human and artificial beings. The invitation is to become part of an alien ecosystem rich in networks of complex feedback, but not as the central subject. Although these worlds are computational, we draw our inspiration from the sense of open-ended continuation and the aesthetic integration of playful wonder with the tension of the unfamiliar recalled from childhood explorations in nature. We believe computation is not intrinsically utilitarian, nor in opposition to nature; we see it instead as a material means to plunge even more deeply into what nature is, and find our place within it.
    The Art of Experience Design

  • A candid and inspiring interview between Charles Babb and Keram Malicki-Sanchez on the experiences that help us create unforgettable, uncompromising, powerful experiences and the process method towards achieving the goal.
    The Art of Experience Design

  • Microsummit and Developer's Panel
    The Art of Experience Design

  • Story Stacks and Game Pillars, the Champions of Until You Fall's Game Design Rhythm Game? Exergame? Roguelite? Definitely Neon. All of these things describe Schell Games' award-winning VR sword fighting game Until You Fall, but it took a lot of work to fine-tune the player experience. Dave Bennett and Jesse Schell will take you behind the scenes to discuss the critical guidelines and processes behind designing Until You Fall.
    The Art of Experience Design

  • Max Noir has been fighting to learn how to succeed on a day-to-day basis, while trying to survive the damages and pain caused by living with Chronic Lyme Disease & a seizure disorder, for almost a decade. To her surprise, the use of Virtual Reality technologies has become a crucial piece to the wellness puzzle, in strengthening her mental and physical wellness over time. Learn about what it looks like to live life with chronic illness, and gain an understanding of the potential that VR software has to dramatically improve the lives of people living with debilitating physical, and mental obstacles. Discover resources and join a new, growing community of professionals interested in utilizing and developing VR technologies for day-to-day quality of life improvement, as well as accessibility.
    The Art of Experience Design

  • Day 4 - Sat June 5, 2021

    June 5th, 2021

  • Morning welcome and announcements with Keram Malicki-Sanchez and Stephanie Greenall

  • A informative discussion on the way that the out-of-home entertainment sector incorporates the latest XR developments in their future.
    Live Events VR+AR

  • We will discuss and explore the future of hybrid live events, bringing the virtual and physical events together. Essentially bridging the entire global communities together through cutting edge technology.
    Live Events VR+AR

  • Are you looking over the precipice of app development? Ready to go down the rabbit hole of immersive technology? 360, binaural, Unity, UDP, TCP/IP... SOS? So... You're an 'art', you have just a little money, you don't have much time, what do you do? Toasterlab is here to help! Over the last few years, the Toasterlab Mixed Reality Atelier has been diving deep into the exploration of the intersection of mixed reality technologies and live performance. By "boosting" 16+ live performance with equipment, expertise, and consultation to partnering projects and earning many hard lessons on our own, we have seen what can happen when virtual and augmented reality, motion capture, live streaming, geolocation get integrated into live art and what you must ask along the way. This session shares what we've learned in this time, particularly how you make effective decisions about what is feasible and in scope whether you're a solo artist with a couple pennies to rub together, or you've got a big grant... from $500 to $500,000 we'll help you to make the unknown unknowns known in planning for technology as an artist.
    Live Events VR+AR

  • The art of performing for pre-recorded vocal performance or motion capture in VR has been around for a while but the art of performing live with the players of a VR experience is a more recent skill, more connected to the worlds of immersive theatre and improv than film or video games. This talk will demonstrate the value a live performer can bring to a VR project and the moments of magic they can create as well as the pitfalls and challenges of this new area.
    Live Events VR+AR

  • Day 5 - Sun June 6, 2021

    June 6th, 2021

  • Morning welcome and announcements with Keram Malicki-Sanchez and Stephanie Greenall

  • The need for a robust and realistic platform for simulating complex surgeries for the purposes of training as well as patient education has long been established. From the common practice of using anatomical models to the more recent usage of virtual reality headgear, surgeons have employed a wide spectrum of technologies in an attempt to both prepare as well as communicate the complexities of each procedure to their patients. The existing technologies, however, have presented challenges by the lack of patient-specificity as well as the need to wear headgear that removes the surgeon and patient from the surrounding world. In this talk, Xenco Medical Founder and CEO Jason Haider will speak about and demonstrate the world’s first glasses free holographic surgical simulation platform, HoloMedX. Built with a holographic light-field display and a gesture-recognizing sensor, surgeons are capable of loading patient data from CT and MRI scans into the HoloMedX software, which instantly translates the slices into interactive holographic anatomy. Surgeons are also capable of adding holographic implants that match all of Xenco Medical’s spinal implants and can perform an entire simulated spine surgery in holographic space. The talk will highlight the technology behind the HoloMedX system, the applications of HoloMedX in healthcare, and will include a demonstration of the platform.
    Mind and Body

  • In VR, medically scanned, digitized human bodies become semi-transparent volumes that we can walk around, dive into, and interact with. These translucent data bodies can be combined with other kinds of personal identity, biometric and social data, thus promising new and powerful ways to represent and contemplate our digitized selves. In this presentation, Marilène Oliver and Walter Ostrander will present two VR projects made with medical scan data called My Data Body and Your Data Body that are currently being developed as part of the interdisciplinary art and science research project Know Thyself as a Virtual Reality. My Data Body seeks to make visible and manipulable all the data that humans as individuals now endlessly generate and are responsible for, whilst Your Data Body troubles how we interact with, and are responsible for, the data of others. Both works ask questions about the aesthetics and ethics of data ownership, privacy and automation. In My Data Body the viewer is presented with a prone, passive figure as data processing site. Mac terminal, Facebook and Google data is written into cross sections of the body, passwords and logins run through veins and arteries, organs can be extracted and used to leave emoji or hashtag trails. Your Data Body presents rows and rows of scanned body parts that users can pick up and manipulate. Depending on whether the scan was downloaded from an open source database or was donated, either an automated voice recites the scraped web data from the repository or a chatbot trained on various data usage agreements and digital charters converses with the user. Making these VR projects is allowing the team to refine and develop a suite of open source software tools (for Unity and 3D Slicer) which, accompanied by a set of ethical guidelines and datasets, will be made available to other researchers and artists by the end of 2021.
    Mind and Body

  • Dyscorpia gathers artists and thinkers in visual art, design, contemporary dance, medical humanities, virtual reality, sound creation, computer science, and creative writing in order to question what it means not to know the limits of our bodies. Dyscorpia is not science-fiction. Dyscorpia is historical time and biological time entangled. It forces past and future in a deadlock, so the present can be squeezed inside out for you to see. Now in its third year, Dyscorpia 3 is being hosted in a digital twin of the galleries where the first Dyscorpia was mounted in 2019, allowing artists continue interrogating the increasingly complex intersections of the body and technology.
    Mind and Body

  • Keram interviews author Regine Gilbert about designing digital applications with inclusivity and accessibility in mind.
    Mind and Body

  • We live in a 3D world, a multisensorial world. Where scent technology meet XR is, I believe the next frontier: the future of Human-Machine Interaction. I explore this frontier, and question how to engage audience, drive emotion, enhance immersion and in short, transform Human experience.
    Mind and Body

  • Day 6 - Mon June 7, 2021

    June 7th, 2021

  • Morning welcome and announcements with Keram Malicki-Sanchez and Stephanie Greenall

  • Expeditions into the uncanny valley. Andrew will be discussing the DDH pipeline developed by cream and SIRT. Cream Digital as a small IDM production lab spun out of Cream productions we were looking to build VR interactive experiences that modeled the formula Cream has been following for years producing in adventure TV. (Wild Things, Survivorman, Weapon Hunter) These shows rely on celebrity hosted adventures. The key thing with the promise of celebrity in VR is the virtual characters need to be as authentic as possible. We soon learned that producing accurate 3D digital doubles of real people is extremely challenging and expensive endeavor and then maintaining a high degree of likeness and fidelity when you need to optimise said characters for platforms like the oculus quest... it becomes next to impossible. This is when we decided to test out a concept of baking video as texture back onto a model and began a 3 year applied research project at SIRT. In this talk we will demonstrate the results discuss how this approach is a cost effective solution and more broadly where accessible digital doubles and avatar technology is headed.
    Virtual Production

  • Decolonizing the Past: Reimagining the Future is a live presentation with three recent graduates from the OCAD Digital Futures Program. The three pieces discussed explore the use of virtual reality to reimagine various themes to look at cultural and historic issues. Virtual Reality is applied to reimagine diasporic discourse, history and memory, and futurism narratives. Our Home and Haunted by Nadine Valcin is a 10-minute linear virtual reality experience, using photogrammetry and point clouds, that examines the colonial histories embedded in the names of a number of Toronto spaces. Activating Indofuturism by Priya Bandodkar envisions a largely unexplored futurism discipline for India, Indofuturism as a means for Indian people and their descendants to respond to their postcolonial world, and to present-day societal challenges in India by applying various contemporary digital media technologies. Future through Memory: Virtual Storytelling in Toronto’s Chinatowns by Lilian Leung explores a community-based approach through interactive documentary and virtual reality techniques to recreate and reimagine a Chinatown of the future and memory. The three presenters will discuss their work in a conversation moderated by Immony Men, an assistant professor at OCAD University and co-director of the Public Visualization Lab.

  • What goes into building and using a VP stage stage for a large production… during a pandemic? Zack and Asad will chronicle PIXOMONDO’s journey to not only build one of North America’s largest virtual production stages, but all of the photoreal content that goes with it — spanning the shift to WFH, the introduction of game-dev philosophies to a VFX studio, all the way to the implications of the above for the future of visual effects.
    Virtual Production

  • Sustainability, Ecologies and the Blockchain, with NFT Happy Hours daily.

  • Day 7 - Tues June 8, 2021

    June 8th

  • Morning welcome and announcements with Keram Malicki-Sanchez and Stephanie Greenall

  • Virtual reality (VR) has the ability to completely transform how people learn. Implementations for VR training have greatly matured over the past few years. Enterprises have been forced to adopt it to provide the best training for their employees. To take full advantage of VR training, it needs to be connected to the rest of the organization and included in the employee’s daily learning experience. This presentation will walk through the three stages of scaling VR training: implementation, measurement and distribution. The successful deployment of VR training will depend on support from stakeholders and solving real business challenges. This presentation will also take an in-depth look at our case study with a medium-sized power utility company in the US where we increased knowledge retention by 59% and compliance by 40%.
    Enterprise, Analytics, Training, Commerce

  • Nikk Mitchell entered China 14 years ago with no money, and no specific direction for what was to come next. Flash forward to today, he is the CEO of an award-winning, multi-national VR production studio called FXG. Nikk speaks fluent Mandarin Chinese, and meets with important government officials & creatives on a daily basis; but there was a huge learning curve that he needed to master in order to get to where he is. Learn everything there is to know about the Chinese XR Ecosystem, including where it's been, where it''s headed, and how you can get involved!
    Enterprise, Analytics, Training, Commerce

  • THE FUTURE OF LEARNING IS IMMERSIVE. This belief is at the core of Lumeto’s Involve XR platform; a technology that has been built to empower instructors and training organizations to migrate their scenario training programs in to the virtual world. Immersive learning will revolutionize how we train for high-risk jobs in the healthcare and public safety fields, and how we most effectively arm doctors, nurses and first responders with critical skills best learned through practice. This talk will give a glimpse into what the future of healthcare simulation and training looks like, and the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead.
    Enterprise, Analytics, Training, Commerce

  • VRTO attendees show off their final presentation based on the workshop in immersive media live performance led by Dasha and Ari in this Flotilla finale!
    Enterprise, Analytics, Training, Commerce

  • Sustainability, Ecologies and the Blockchain, with NFT Happy Hours daily.

  • July 20th 2022


  • We haven't found any session that matches you're criteria

  • July 21st 2022


  • We haven't found any session that matches you're criteria

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