VIEW Conference 2018 will host amazing XR talks and workshops

I’m very happy to talk about a very important event that will take place very soon in my city of Turin (Italy): the VIEW Conference.

The VIEW Conference is an annual conference focused on Computer Graphics that is held in my city and that has now arrived at its 19th edition. It is a very high-quality event, with keynotes, workshops, and talks held by people of top-notch importance (Award winners, people from Ubisoft, EA, Netflix, Pixar, and various other major companies). All these talks are focused on:

• Computer Graphics
• Visual FX
• Visual Storytelling
• 2D Drawing
• 3D Modeling
• 2D/3D Animation
• Virtual and Augmented Reality

As you can see, these are topics that interest all of us… and I guess that you, like me, are most excited by the last point 🙂 . Of course the other ones are pretty cool and pretty inherent to AR and VR, too (for instance all the talks about graphics can be useful also for the graphics of XR applications, of course).

Because of various reasons, I have never been able to attend the VIEW conference, but this year I’ve decided that I have absolutely to go there and see if it is so cool as all my friends that went there have always told me. And of course, my will is to report you all that I’ve learned there and also to give you awesome interviews.

Looking at the program and the speakers’ list, I discovered that maybe I should clone myself to be able to attend all the things that interest me.

This is a list of some of the talks that have immediately caught my attention:

October, 25th (Wednesday) – 17.00

“A Sailor, A Pig, and George Melies walk into VR” by Jan Pinkawa

Google Spotlight Stories has always created very interesting immersive content, like the first VR doodle. Mr. Pinkawa will talk about all the storytelling experiments made by Google Spotlight and will give pieces of advice on how to make compelling XR storytelling experiences.

More details

October, 25th (Thursday) – 15.00

“The Next Generation of Animated Storytelling: Baobab Studios’ Journey in VR with ‘Crow: The Legend'” by Kane Lee

We all know Baobab studio for the amazing short VR movies it has created, like Asteroids or Invasion. In this talk, Kane Lee will detail the lessons learned while producing “Crow”. This is another talk about immersive storytelling.

More details

October, 25th (Thursday) – 17.00

“VIRTUAL REALITY: Light, Color, & the Human Visual System” by Don Greenberg

We all want a virtual reality that appears as if it were real and for this, we want more resolution and FOV in our virtual reality headsets. But to make a better virtual reality, we have to understand how the visual system works, both at the eye-vision level and at brain-decoding level. This talk should detail some of these processes to better understand how to trick the brain in believing that what is produced by a computer is instead real.

More details

October, 26th (Friday) – 15.30

“Lone Echo and the magic of VR” by Nathan Phail-Liff

The Art Director of Ready At Dawn (the successful studio behind Echo Arena and Echo Combat) will talk about the power of Virtual Reality as a storytelling medium, detailing all the lessons learned on how to make a compelling and comfortable experience.

More details

October, 26th (Friday) – 17.30

“What is the MagicVerse?” by John Gaeta

John Gaeta is one of the co-founders of the ILMxLAB and is currently SVP Creative Strategy at Magic Leap. So, he is one of the persons that I want to interview the most at View conference. I absolutely hope to be able to speak with him in private, to talk about all his enormous experience with immersive technologies. I admit that a talk with the world “MagicVerse” inside can’t make me excited (my natural answer to “What is the MagicVerse?” is “A lot of fluff”), but this keynote will be interesting anyway to hear about the vision for the future of the enigmatic startup Magic Leap.

More details

Then there are also cool workshops, like:

October, 22th (Monday) – 12.00

“Artist-Driven Immersive Work” by Eloi Champagne and Martin Viau

This workshop is held by two people from the National Film Board of Canada VR, that is experimenting a lot in XR storytelling. This is a class with lots of tips and examples on how to develop a better immersive experience.

More details

October, 23th (Tuesday) – 14.30

“Masterclass in Immersive Sound” by Gianni Ricciardi and Matteo Milani

Where we speak about virtual reality, we immediately think about visuals. But also audio is very important to guarantee immersiveness of the user. This masterclass will be about techniques and tools necessary to create a realistic, addictive sound in VR experiences.

More details

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These are just some examples that I cherrypicked looking at the program. Of course, the ones that intrigue me the most are the two that will be held on Friday, with the Art Director of Ready At Dawn and with John Gaeta of Magic Leap… I really hope to interview them! And of course if you have some questions to you want me to make them, I’m open to your suggestions… just let me know them here in the comments or in my social media accounts!

If you’re interested in the conference as me, you must know that ticket prices are around 200€-300€, and the price depends on what you want to do: the more days you want to enter and the more things you want to do, the more the price raises. If you are a journalist, of course, you can try asking for a press pass.

I really hope to meet someone of you there! If you’re interested in having more info on the conference and in buying the tickets, you can find everything you need on the official website. And if you can’t make it to come here in Turin, well, then stay tuned on this blog for some cool stuff related to the VIEW Conference! I’ll try to do various interviews and also report some amazing info learned during the event. Because of my consultancy job, I won’t be able to be there all days, but I’ll try to inform you as much as I can! 😉

See you at VIEW Conference 2018!

(Header image by View Conference)