Kadine James: we must work together for inclusion and accessibility in the VR ecosystem

When talking about technologies like virtual reality, usually we like to speak about hardware, software and other technological features, but actually it is also interesting to talk also about all the rest that is around these technologies, about the human factor around them. Regarding this, I had the pleasure of speaking with Kadine James about the work she does in mixing technology with art, and also about bringing more diversity and accessibility in the XR ecosystem. Let me tell you about the work that this splendid woman is doing.

Who is Kadine James?

Kadine James is a technology professional with more than 10 years of expertise in 3D printing, IoT, and immersive realities. She’s based in London, where at Hobs3D creates enterprise solutions (training, dataviz, real estate, etc…) using AR and VR.

But most importantly, she has created a collective, called The Immersive Kind, that is defined as “a multidisciplinary platform for artists, designers, and creatives who are using technology to make the world a better place”. Kadine works every day to highlight projects that use technology for the good, and also to put the spotlight on projects made by women so that to bring more diversity to the tech space.

For all of this incredible work she’s doing, she’s been nominated as one of the top 100 Women Tech in UK for various years in a row.

Art and immersive realities

Kadine told me that she’s intrigued by the mix of technologies together and by the mix of art with technologies. Technologies do not exist in silos, and mixed all together they can offer incredible results. You can think about the powerful mix of AI and XR (e.g. to have a virtual assistant at our service), but also about the mix of 3D printing with immersive realities (e.g. you could model something in VR and then 3D print it… and this 3D printed object could also be an organ scanned through MRI from a patient, for instance).

All of this can be used in a practical way (e.g. for a B2B application), but also just for the purpose of creating something artistic, to let someone express his/her own creativity in an innovative way. Kadine is fascinated by the new innovative way of employing XR in art, but she thinks that there’s still a big untapped potential. “VR should arrive in the hands of the most talented artists of the world so that they can create the next generation of art” she says. Until now, we are still in the early days, and most of the artworks are just re-creations in VR of what is done outside VR. Think about the very famous Ana Zhilyaeva (that I personally love), that paints in VR, extending what is done in 2D to 3D for VR. This is great, but we need to find a new way of doing art through XR, something completely different, that breaks all the currently existing rules of art. But to do that, we need many talented artists to explore this technology.

She’s also working on how to make art enjoyable through VR. This is a very important topic, especially considering the current pandemic: how can people from all over the world visit a museum in virtual reality? How can they admire the paintings in a virtual art gallery? We have some people experimenting with it (Museum Of Other Realities is doing a great job in this sense), but we still haven’t found a valid answer. We have to think about the best way to make art enjoyable worldwide and expand virtually our current physical museums and exhibitions.

The same holds for concerts: Kadine admires the work done by us with the concert of Jean-Michel Jarre, exactly as she loves the concert of Travis Scott on Fortnite or of John Legend on Wave VR. Exactly like with museums, we should think of new ways through which offer live performances, and in this immersive realities can offer something new and innovative. During our JMJ concert, people appreciated the fact that we offered an experience that was impossible to have in real life, with 3D objects and animations all around us in the dancefloor.

A spotlight on accessibility

Within The Immersive Kind collective, Ms James wants to also put a spotlight on the theme of accessibility in XR. These VR concerts, museums, and exhibitions should be accessible to the biggest number of people possible, no matter what their disabilities. And even more, XR should be inclusive enough to let disabled artists create and express themselves.

There is never enough attention on this theme, and as an indie developer and consultant, my opinion is that the reasons are mostly two. The first one is that VR is still a niche, and disabled people in VR are a small niche in a niche. It is difficult to hear their voices since they are not many, so often we developers don’t even know what are all the possible problems that people may have with their eyes, hands, legs, etc… and so we don’t think about implementing accessibility options in our apps. The second one is that small teams working in VR usually are very tight in money, so they target the majority of people because creating a system that lets every person use their systems would be very long and expensive to do, and so it would not be economically feasible. Speaking with Kadine, we agreed on the fact that we could solve these two problems in these ways:

• Putting a spotlight on the voices of people with disabilities in XR, so that everyone in the ecosystem gets to know what are the problems of disabled people in VR, and then we all try to solve them in our experiences;
• Creating something like a big opensource repository, maybe sponsored by a big company like Microsoft, Epic Games, Unity, that offers systems to implement accessibility options out of the box for our indie games. A big SDK that facilitates the creation of accessible programs with ready-to-use components that offer features that can help people with hands or eye impairments for instance. If these tools were directly integrated into the game engines, that would be even better. As a dev, I tell you that if adding accessibility options to my VR experiences just required the little work effort of implementing some components, I would be very happy of doing that for every one of my apps.

Kadine is working on accessibility at 360 degrees. One of her projects that is starting very soon regards musical instruments. Everyone loves music, but if you think about musical instruments (e.g. the piano, the guitar, the trumpet), you’ll notice that they have been designed for people having two hands. How to make people with mental and physical disabilities play the instruments and express themselves through music? She is trying to solve this riddle with the “Accessible Instruments” initiative: people from all over the world can join her quest and create a multi-disciplinary team that re-thinks all the musical instruments in virtual reality so that they can be played by the biggest number possible of people. The purpose is to create a virtual band of diverse and disabled people that can play together with these instruments. She’s looking for artists, designers, game designers and developers for this, and if you may be interested, you can check out the dedicated web page of the project, which should start next month and last around 3 months.

Women in XR

A theme that is very dear to Kadine James is the one of inclusion in the XR space. She says that we need more women in the XR ecosystem, both as employees and as entrepreneurs. And not only women but also people from more cultural backgrounds, more countries, etc…

To do that, there is the need of putting more the spotlight on the work of women in technology, so that they can become role models for other women that want to enter the tech. We need more women that design their own products, so that they can create something that attracts more women in the field: more women-oriented XR experiences attract more women in using XR, and some of these could become XR entrepreneurs that offer their own products, creating a healthy loop. There is also the need of working with big corporates to make them hire more women in the gaming and tech industry in general. Kadine also organizes workshops to inspire female entrepreneurs, to make more women discover immersive realities, and to make female entrepreneurs help each other. This summer she’s organizing a residency program for female entrepreneurs in the industry.

But it is not a matter of men vs women, it is that we have to work all together to create a healthy ecosystem, where all voices can be heard and all good projects can succeed, no matter the gender. I’m happy to say that many women in XR, like Suzanne Borders, told me that in the XR field the cases of sexism are not frequent, but we could all work to make this even better, inspiring more women to enter the XR field to follow their XR dream.

How to become a top woman in tech

Since Kadine is a thought leader in her country, I asked her how is it possible to become like her, for people that want to follow her example. She told me that it is not easy, but it requires to:

• Be curious and always ready to learn;
• Create a great network of people;
• Believe in yourself;
• Exchange information with the network of talented people you created;
• Open your mind and explore as many opportunities as you can;
• Learn how to create stuff and develop them yourself;
• Be bold, be brave;
• Go and make things.

She concluded these suggestions with a powerful sentence that I personally loved a lot: “Knock the doors down. And if doors are not opening go there and make a door for yourself”.

Ethics in XR

Last but not least, Kadine and I talked about the topic of ethics in XR. Ethics is like a Pandora box for immersive realities and there are many themes about which we should talk about, like privacy in XR (we’ll wear cameras on the whole day, who is going to handle all these data?), digital citizenship, digital identity, digital human rights (what things will be people allowed to do to me in XR?), etc…

We need clear rules and in some contexts also clear laws that guarantee the ethics in immersive worlds: now we can live without them because VR is a niche, but what about when it will become mainstream?

A last word

Speaking with Kadine James has been very interesting and I appreciated a lot her strength and her positive attitude in trying to make technology more inclusive. If you want to join her collective The Immersive Kind, stay tuned for the events they are organizing: on July, 28th there should be a new digital event called “The Simple Human Brain Machine” where talented people from all over the world (like Irena Cronin) will speak about AR/VR technologies and their future trends. During these events, you can get in touch with Kadine and enter her great community. Otherwise, if you are not an event person, you can contact her over Linkedin .

Let’s all build together a healthy XR ecosystem! 🙂