XR for Change Summit Kicks off Games for Change 2019

With celebrations of Father’s Day still hanging in the air, the XR for Change Summit, the first day of the 2019 Games for Change Festival, opened with a story of a daughter being introduced to video games by a game designed by her Dad.

And with that, Jessica Brillhart, founder of mixed reality studio Vrai Pictures, took the audience in the Tishman Auditorium at the Parsons School through her discussion of spatial relationships and how they relate to content creation and game design, officially opening the 16th Games for Change Festival following welcoming remarks by Games for Change President Susanna Pollack.

The Festival, which Monday featured an XR Immersive Arcade exhibiting more than 20 XR experiences, opened with breaking news on stage as Games for Change announced plans with AARP Innovation Labs (also known as The Hatchery) to create a VR Design Challenge slated to launch in January 2020.

The collaboration will aim to inspire more people to think about how VR games can enhance the quality of life as we age and enable people across all ages to experience simple, beautiful and impactful VR. Developers will be invited to submit a digital game that can demonstrate health or wellness benefits for older users.

Finalists will receive festival passes to give presentations and demos as part of the final jury, live on stage at the Games for Change Festival in New York City in June 2020. Winners and selected games will receive cash prizes and have the chance to be published on the Alcove VR App. Potential entrants can visit the G4C web site and provide contact information.

Elsewhere on Day 1:

Susanna Pollack, Pierre Zandrowicz (co-founder of XR company Atlas V), Tamara Patton (Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security) and Steve Jamison (Founder of Archer’s Mark production studio) engaged in a panel discussion about their narrative VR experience 38 minutes based on the 2018 Hawaii missle alert.

Trailblazing female entrepreneurs gathered to discuss how they are working to bring news visions of XR to life. Featuring Morgan Mercer (Vantage Point), Cortney Harding (Friends With Holograms), Dumeetha Luthra (Take Pause), Skye Von (Howl For Change/little GIANT wolf), and Vassiliki Khonsari (iNK Stories), the presentations showed how each entrepreneur was motivated to launch an XR startup that enable social change addressing areas such as education, mindfulness, inclusion, representation, and user-generated content.

During the Visual Art in the Real World Panel, artists discussed the ability for both audience members and creators to increase the kinds of critical discourses they can engage in by transferring 2D creations to VR. The panel was led by Jesse Damiani (Curator of XR for Change and Editor In chief of VRScout), and included boundary-pushing artists creating ways to experience public art with less censorship: Nancy Baker Cahill (4th Wall) Carrie Able (Visual Artist/Poet/Musician/VR Creator), Marjan Moghadam (LIU Brooklyn), Ken Perlin (NYU), and Sougwen Chung (Artist). The group discussed their processes for showcasing their art to the public, including the funding process to the experimentation phase.

Day 1 closed with an informative keynote from Dr. Walter Greenleaf (Stanford University Virtual Human Interaction Lab) which took a look at how XR is transforming healthcare. During this keynote, Greenleaf examined the XR-enable platforms that are capable of shifting the focus of clinical care hospital and the clinic to the home and the workplace and, via improved analytics, provide tools and systems that enable personalized medicine. He also discussed how XR can be incorporated into wearable sensors that can effectively promote healthy lifestyles.

Catch all of the festival’s action in real time on Game For Change’s Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/gamesforchange/.

Nathan Stevens

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I have always enjoyed playing video games and am a programming team lead for a video game company. I co-founded Gaming Cypher because I enjoy the gaming community and would like to provide the best news service around. Feel free to ask me any questions and I will make sure to get back to you quickly.