Let’s meet at some of my next XR events!

For the next six weeks, I’m going to be involved in some industry events and I would love in this time period to connect with as many people as possible. So maybe it’s also the right occasion to connect with you…

Everything will start with my participation at the Gatherverse next week, where I will be a virtual speaker in a fireside chat with the famous Christopher LaFayette. We will speak about the status of XR and what we can expect from the future (maybe in the next 5 to 10 years…).

After that, I will virtually be at the VRAR EXPO CHINA 2024 in Shanghai, together with speakers from companies like Pimax, Microsoft, BOE, JBD, Rokid, etc… In the speakers’ list, I also saw my big friend Nikk Mitchell from FXG. I would have liked to travel there (and hug Nikk), but logistical issues forced me to stay here in Italy and so I will be there only virtually. But if you attend the event in China and like my speech, feel free to connect with me over WeChat or Linkedin, so that we can evaluate collaborations.

After these two events I will attend remotely, I will actually start traveling and at the end of this month, I will be back in the wonderful Helsinki, Finland. I have been invited to the XR Game Jam, where hopefully I will be able to give some support to the young developers willing to build an XR game. It will be a good moment to connect again with the Nordic XR scene because the event will see participants not only from Finland but also from nearby countries like Estonia and Sweden. The good thing about going to Helsinki in May is that hopefully, I’m not going to freeze like when I went there in December.

In mid-June, I will instead travel to the US to attend AWE, the most important event of the year for XR people, which this year is going to happen in Long Beach, Los Angeles, from 18 to 20 of June. Since I have to take a long trip from Italy to California, I’m going to stay some more days in the United States. I will go for a few days to Silicon Valley, then take an internal flight, attend AWE, and stay a few days more in LA. The plan for me in the US is to meet some XR friends, but also make new ones. I would also absolutely love to visit some of the most important companies in the Valley, but I know this is not easy at all. At AWE, my goal is to take a picture with Palmer Luckey: it’s crazy that it’s 10 years I’ve been in this industry but I’ve never seen him in real life. I’ll try to chase him and I hope my dialogue with him will be less embarrassing than with John Riccitiello. I already imagine stopping him after he goes on stage and saying “Hey Palmer, I’m Tony, the Skarredghost, maybe you’ve seen an article of mine sometimes” and he just looks at me and says

and then he goes away.
I have high expectations for my trip to the US, so I hope you will help me in making it wonderful.

When I’ll depart from the US I won’t be back to Italy, but I will stop in Berlin, where I will be a mentor in the XRCC hackathon. I’ve never been to Berlin, so that’s going to be cool. This new hackathon seems pretty intriguing and I know the organizers are going to bring some very smart members of the XR community there, so it’s going to be great for me ad all the participants to connect with lots of interesting people.

After that, if all these trips do not kill me, I will go back to Italy and eat some good pasta again.

I’m trying to make the most out of this “Skarredghost on the road” tour, and I hope you can help me with that. What I’m mostly looking for is:

• Making new friends in the industry, having meaningful chats, and enriching each other with our knowledge.
• Visiting interesting companies. Bonus points if I can visit at least one big corporation like Unity, Google, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, etc…
• Try new devices and interview XR people for my blog. Bonus points if I can try some really mind-blowing futuristic prototypes
• Finding collaborations for my business, so companies interested either in having support on the development of an XR application or in the definition of their XR strategy
• Eating potatoes. Because Potatoes are love, potatoes are life.

Please reach out to me if you think we can meet and do interesting things together! My agenda is filling up but I’ve still some slots available. I can’t wait to meet you all of the community and discuss about how much VR is dead… 😛

(Header image by AWE)