All posts by VRTO

VRTO2020 The Flotilla – Final Report

Running A Virtual Conference Around Virtual Reality with Virtual Reality

report written by Stephanie Greenall and Keram Malicki-Sanchez

The VRTO2020 conference is the 5th year celebration of the event created by founder Keram Malicki-Sanchez and his team, including Stephanie Greenall who co-produced the event, Jennifer Chadwick (accessibility officer) and longtime team members Chrissy Aitchison (executive administrator and graphic designer), Joshua Miles Joudrie (tech coordinator and live event consultant). The show has developed an international reputation for testing the outer limits of the new immersive media, and asking the hard questions about the efficacy of the medium of transforming and support the culture, adoption and accessibility, and how it may be utilized across the industrial and private spectrum.

Building Castles In the Sky

Though the COVID-19 pandemic posed a threat to many organizations that suddenly had to pivot online, the VRTO team first took a step back and surveyed the landscape of virtual conference options before ultimately deciding on a multi-platform approach. Through this process, The Flotilla was born. Alluding to the idea that there isn’t one platform to rule them all, but rather that the answer will come by tethering together different spaces, modalities, and people to do what needs to be done.

North Expo hall at the VRTO2020 Flotilla
North Expo hall designed by the JanusXR team at the VRTO2020 Flotilla

JanusXR space for VRTO
JanusXR space for VRTO

Head In the Clouds

The idea, here, was that the various zones of the event would transform, flourish and evolve with the collaboration of the participants, extending beyond Hubs into other spatialized platforms that included JanusXR (thank you Jin, bai, Aussie, Firefox, spyduck and company), Webaverse (Avaer / Adrian Biedrzycki), Altspace (thanks Andy Fidel) and even Second Life (via a special little world designed for VRTO by Melody Owens).

The Flotilla was designed to look like a sky city of Greco-futuristic island linked by magic portals. Each space was circular to foster a spirit of equanimity, collaboration, and intersection, and had no walls or ceilings to create a sense of openness, but not so abstract as to lead to confusion or chaos while affording visually distinct areas for engagement. Additionally, allies and attendees create custom Hubs worlds to whether to the Flotilla, including but not limited to Zachary Talis/Fullbloom from Rochester Insititute of Technology, Matthew Gantt for Trinity Square Video, SM Sithlord‘s Metahood, and Adrien Onsen from Construkted Reality.

Here is a quick explainer video VRTO put together just before the show kicked off to help make sense of it for a wider public:

Participants also experimented by bringing in or modifying their own avatars and objects and this expression of creativity culminated into two “Machinima” challenges wherein the participants were given certain requirements that had to be included to tell a story using the spaces of the conference. These short stories were then screened in the Virtual auditorium to much delight. See the results in the highlights section below.

Creating a Truly Virtual Event

It couldn’t have been a more poignant turn to take a Virtual Reality conference into virtual space. Moreover, it was time to put the money on the table, or as Voices of VR Podcast host Kent Bye put it – to “eat our own dog food.”

The event asked its already registered attendees, who had intended to fly in from Australia, Iran, Mexico, Spain, Ukraine, and China, to instead embark on an experiment that would ultimately span 30 days.

Building on mountains of feedback from the “first wave” events, VRTO noted that there was a) no need to run a traditional 3-day timeline, now that hotels and flights did not factor in the equation b) that there was no need to constrain the visual 3D context to traditional orthogonal space. At the same time, such spaces serve to create focus, scope, context.

So Keram and co-producer Stephanie Greenall, hired T. Shawn Johnson – an experienced 3D architectural modeller, to help them create their low poly, custom designs for the WebVR conference halls, meeting spaces, avatar closets, and art galleries.

VRTO 2020 Flotilla Northwest Hall
Moreover, the producers consulted with many industry leaders, including the aforementioned Bye, Galit Ariel, Liam Brosa, Kathleen Cohen, and many others to understand the frustrations, challenges, and opportunities in hosting an international conference in a spatialized digital context.

Art Event at VRTO2020
Art Event at VRTO2020

The team settled on three platforms on which to build the Flotilla:

  • Whova: Offering a combination of community building options, gamification for engagement, and on-demand video, the app provided a hub for attendees who purchased a Streamer Pass.
  • Boosted Private Discord Server with Customized Bots: An application for iterative conversations via theme-specific text, video and voice channels, it was used as a “backchannel” for voice communication within VRTO’s 3D virtual spaces.  A selection of customized bots and an upgraded server provided a significant boost and functionality to the platform’s performance. Attendees were able to unlock their permissions and access via a single command when they entered the platform.

              You haven’t lived until you’ve designed a Discord permissions matrix!

  • Private Hubs Cloud Deployment on AWS: Accessible via browser, mobile device, or VR headsets the Mozilla Hubs platform allowed Pro Pass and VIP ticket holders, speakers, exhibitors and sponsors the chance to engage and explore the conference in custom 3D virtual spaces.

VRTO was among the first to deploy the freshly-minted commercially available Hubs Cloud solution that became public the same month as the show – June 2020 and deployed on Amazon Web Services.

Mozilla Hubs working with Discord
Attendee Kartik shares his single-screen layout for Mozilla Hubs working with Discord

The 30-Day Social Experiment

The event ran 5 days a week, and ultimately featured over 80 speakers. Thought-leaders from around the world who represent and lead such companies as Ford’s Autonomous Fleet, Digital Domain, Cisco, HTC Vive, Metastage, SPINVFX, Pixomondo, Zappar, 8th Wall, among many others joined VRTO2020 at The Flotilla for this month-long social experiment.

Based on feedback, the conference opted for talks were pre-recorded into 15-minute presentations that served as catalysts for further discourse – that were then made accessible via the streaming app and screened in the Flotilla’s virtual theatre–one of the many virtual spaces.

VRTO Flotilla Auditorium Session
VRTO Flotilla Auditorium Session

Every day the VRTO crew learned more about how to improve the user experience, how to organize such an event, and how to simplify the means of access and understanding it. No small feat and one that is ongoing.

Moreover, the VRTO2020 conference featured a micro summit around the important subject of accessibility in all forms. John Avila, David Parker, Moisen Mahjoobnia, and Jennifer Chadwick spoke on various vectors around these challenges and opportunities. This effort also modulated and improved the very conference of which these discussions were a part.

Ultimately the CCMG/VRTO team shared these many discoveries and learnings back to the various platforms upon which they were discovered – Hubs, Discord, Whova, Janus, and beyond.

Behind the Curtain

Running an event like this for 30 days, involved far more than an elaborate tech demo – it was also about keeping things running on time, being transparent with attendees about the limitations and bugs in the existing tech, updating them when new features were pushed to the live deployment and more.

To get a sense of how the real world aspect of running a conference translates to a virtual one, check out this “shop talk” interview between Keram and his A/V lead Josh and seasons event video tech Grumpy Roadie:

The crew was constantly tuning the spatial audio settings for each room and environment: some favoured media volume over spoken volume (in a theatrical context for example, like the auditorium or a showcase room) while others were the opposite. Signage had to be put up everywhere to remind that playback controls were universal, but the audio was on a per-user level. Room permissions were set for individual rooms – some allowed flying or spawning objects, others were far more restrictive to keep order out of consideration for the content or presenter.

All told, there were many subtle or hidden factors at play to foster different forms of engagement, participation and enjoyment of the space.

In order to honour the event’s dedication towards accessibility, Jennifer Chadwick worked directly with Keram to ensure that all sessions were close-captioned or that a written transcript was available and appended to each session on the conference app. In early tests, the team even had speakers use Google Meet for its live captioning that they then piped into Hubs in realtime or streamed into Discord. Keram shared the very complex routing this required with Kent Bye to help underscore what was needed, was required and was lacking. It was not a sustainable or practical model but served as an important brown-boxing experience.

Show Highlights Include:

There were far too many amazing conversations, epiphanies, group effects over the course of the 30 days to cover here, but here are some moments we fondly remember:

Tyler McCullloch and Seb Bouzac presented  Archiact vs. Archiact, a  fly-on-the-wall discussion series that brought attendees inside the real conversations of a VR game studio

Artist Nancy Baker-Cahill joined us to discuss her activist AR work in the Age of Pandemic, & Civil Unrest (Image credit: morocanrugs)

Tom Emrich, 8th Wall discussed how Augmented Reality will save retail.

Rose Barasa, Strathmore University, shared how VR/AR is being used in Africa and how companies can tap into this growing industry. Image: My Africa: Elephant Keeper

We celebrated Canada Day and 4th of July with Andy Fidel’s GetSocial in Altspace

Galit Ariel and Keisha Howard spoke about breaking the mold – using tech and gaming, to teach critical thinking and skills.

Melody Owen shared her avatar’s travelogue and took us on a tour of a series of social worlds.

As part of VRTO’s Accessibility Summit, Moisen Mahjoobnia spoke about preventing and reducing depression by bring nature to people through VR.

Techgnosis, Creativity, Magic

Among the many interesting intersections that arose at the event, one that stood out was a project by Rochester Institute of Technology grad Zachary Talis, who not only showcased his academic poster around Full Bloom an interactive generative music project for VR but also, utilizing the various platforms that The Flotilla was based on to create an integrated and live collaborative group event.

The project called Fervor in Full Bloom used a custom-written Discord Bot to parse text input by the live audience in response to prompts, to generate musical tones that were then piped into a virtual theatre in the Hubs Flotilla. Check out the video from this experience below


Another highlight were the aforementioned Machina contests that produced three short films created wholly by the attendees who participated. Here they are:

VRTO2020 Machinima Contest 1

VRTO2020 Machinima Challenge 2

I Could Have Danced All Night

Another highlight of the events were the extended Q&As that emerged on Discord following any given talk. These were scheduled into half-hour to one-hour time slots following each presentation, providing ample (but never enough) time to unpack the ideas presented in the 15-minute produced videos. It further fostered a richer interaction among all participants who reliable returned for more each day. By not cramming everyone together like sardines, and by using themed days within four-hour blocks over the 30s days, the content could be savoured and extrapolated at a more leisurely and natural pace.

We want to close by sharing some of the public comments that our attendees shared about the show. Thank you all for being a part of it and making The Flotilla what it became!

VRTO_2020_Flotilla banner

VRTO2020’s Flotilla Is A VR Conference That Convenes International Thought Leaders To Shape Our Spatialized Future

VRTO explores everything from your digital twin at the office to an immersive world that is accessible by all.

Toronto, ON – Virtual & Augmented Reality World Conference & Expo (VRTO), Canada’s premier immersive technologies summit celebrates five years.

If ever there was a time to convene thought leadership around the future of work, virtual presence, and spatialized socialization, that time is now and VRTO is the summit to do it.

The roll-up-your-sleeves-and-sort-it-out symposium will take place on June 6-8 and will explore how these technologies transform the way we engage with data, the world, and each other.

The organization is calling this year’s show “The Flotilla” – alluding to the idea that there isn’t one platform to rule them all, but rather that the answer will come by tethering together different spaces, modalities, and people to do what needs to be done.

VRTO2020 Flotilla

The show will be available on mobile, desktop and in VR to foster social interaction while bringing the thought-provoking presentations and training that VRTO is known for. A key differentiator between VRTO and other conferences that have pivoted online is its aspiration to bridge the terrestrial reality to the extremely active and prolific metaverse that has been flourishing for years via the web and a variety of emerging social VR platforms. Thus the event will take place between several of these spaces, affording a grand tour of the landscape.

From Virtual Humans to the Spatialized Web, Climate and Ecology to the Future of Work, VRTO takes a deep dive into how immersive technology will affect, transform, and advance industries across the board.

“I created VRTO in 2015 to meet an inevitable future where telepresence, platform agnosticism, and accessibility are fundamental to social and economic progress. In 2020, it is clearer than ever before that we need new ways to approach the real and the virtual worlds we now inhabit. The way we process data will necessarily become spatial. The way we manipulate real-world processes will become increasingly complex and remotely piloted,” explains Keram Malicki-Sanchez, Founder and Executive Director, VRTO.

“VRTO is the summit where the people in the trenches come together to exchange these challenges and their solutions in hopes of making meaningful strides towards knowledge that any business, enterprise or individual can understand and adopt for whatever their needs dictate. And sometimes, we have to come at those challenges from unusual and unorthodox perspectives,” continues Malicki-Sanchez.

The future of work means building a true digital face-to-face experience, Elizabeth Bieniek, Director of Innovation, Cisco Collaboration shares her insights on where extended reality developments will change the way we work.

Rose Barasa, Industrial Relations, Strathmore University will discuss how organizations and institutions are applying immersive technologies in Kenya, and how companies can invest and partner with VR initiatives in Africa.

Aditya VishwanathElizabeth Bienek

Featuring an in-depth and interactive summit on Accessibility and inclusion in VR, VRTO will showcase the latest developments in research and design, inclusive storytelling and hardware, and the global movement to create inclusive standards around this technology.

Jonathan Avila, Chief Accessibility Officer, will discuss how Level Access is helping companies make their digital systems readily accessible and enable technology to be an empowering force for those with disabilities.

Focusing on VR solutions for patients, David Parker, Founder & CEO, Wishplay shares learned processes and procedures for providing immersive experiences for those looking to live beyond the limitations of their illness or disability.

Jody Tyree VRTO speakerDave Cardwell SpinVFX

Moisen Mahjoob Nia, OCADU + SMARTlab PhD candidate, presents research on immersive applications that address isolation, mental health, and accessibility issues VRTO 2020 will gather thought leaders from the largest Visual Effects companies in the world who have collectively won multiple Academy Awards, including Asad Manzoor, Lead Unreal Artist, Pixomondo (Star Trek, The Mandalorian), John Canning, Executive Producer for VR, AR, and Interactive, Digital Domain (Marvel’s Avengers Infinity War, Captain Marvel), and Dave Cardwell, Creative Director, SPINVFX (The Lord of the Rings, King Kong).

Applying her deep background in interactive and immersive media as well as distribution, Jody Tyree, Entertainment and Advertising Product Owner for Ford’s Autonomous fleet, explains how she is rethinking the passenger’s in-vehicle experience. No longer do your eyes have to be on the road! Now what?

Christina Heller Kathleen CohenGalit Ariel

Kathleen Cohen, Immersive Strategist, The Collaboratorium will explore virtual beings, digital twins, and the legacy that is your likeness, and Christina Heller, CEO, Metastage will discuss how her Microsoft-partnered capture studios is creating high-resolution volumetric video of some of today’s biggest stars for the next wave of entertainment.

VRTO is your ticket to understanding and designing the very real virtual world we are all inhabiting. We are interested in accessibility, understanding, teaching, learning, and collaboration. Join us at VRTO and upcoming onboarding Meetup events that will prepare you to go down this rabbit hole.

Official conference site: https://conference.virtualreality.to
For tickets, go to https://vrto2020.eventbrite.com/

The Promise, The Power, Perils and Possibilities of Virtual Reality – An Introduction

What is Virtual Reality – “VR” – and Why Should I Care?

Nintendo LABO VR? Facebook Spaces? CNN 360? Now ‘Oculus Quest’ and ‘Valve Index’ – what’s it all mean, Billie Jean?

If you are wondering what all the fuss is about with this thing called VR, but have no real idea what it’s about, this article is for you.

Labo_VR_Kit
Nintendo LABO VR Kit – a poor implementation, but at the very least a broadcast of the idea of Virtual Reality to a wider audience

Who in their life hasn’t, at some point, wished they could fly, or perhaps climb Mount Everest, swim in the great blue hole of Belize, or perhaps explore remote parts of the world unreachable by standard travel?

Or perhaps you wished to become a doctor and wanted to train on your patient’s specific body part many times before you actually faced them, with quivering hands, in the operating room? Perhaps you are a construction worker and want to understand the various design and build stages of a new project long before the first brick or girder has been laid.

Maybe you are far away from your loved ones, friends or co-workers, or possibly a new client, and you have always felt that normal telephone or even video conferencing isn’t quite the same a being in the “presence” of the other. Maybe they are dead and you wish to stand in their presence, one more time. Or many more.

All of these things are possible with the new medium of Virtual Reality.

Seeing is Believing

This medium is one that truly must be experienced first hand in order to fully grasp its power and potential, and to understand why it has become the tech world’s buzz word for the past five years (writing this in 2019, the holy year of Blade Runner), attracting massive investments from Facebook, Microsoft, Intel, Qualcomm, HTC, Apple, HP, Acer, ASUS, AMD, Nvidia and many more.

What is the difference between “VR” and the media we already know – like radio, television, and even 3D movies?

Inward, Within

Imagine that, instead of simply the width of a widescreen TV, you also extend it vertically. Now imagine that the experience surrounds you completely, on all sides. And when you turn your head or lean forward or back, or lean side to side, the horizon, or the floor, the floor or horizon maintain their position.

Now also imagine that because of this effect things feel as though they have an actual dimension proportional to you. So a table looks and “feels” as though it is in front of you at the correct size and scale. Of course – you could enlarge it or shrink it down if the application allows, but for the sake of my explanation – imagine that it feels correct – a 1:1 size to your own body.

Now imagine that you could walk all the way around that table and that it would maintain its size and position, even while you encircle it. Your brain is fooled very quickly into believing that it might be real.

In fact, it only takes a minute or two, before you have completely become unaware of what is happening outside of the headset you are wearing to experience this.

More Than Meets the Eye

Now, privacy issues aside, imagine that anything could be created or represented inside of such a world – a fully interactive world that can convince your brain, and the vestibular system that helps you keep your internal sense of position, movement and balance, that it is present.

You could, instead of showing children boring pictures of the pyramids at Giza, put them INSIDE of the pyramids, where they could feel the enormity and layout of the these marvelous, ancient tombs.

You could bring the classroom to any city, town, village, forest, mountain, time, in the world or civilization and give them a memory that they could feel as if they were there in person. Using satellite imaging, photogrammetry, volumetric technology, machine learning and computer vision, almost any part of the world can be extruded into a three-dimensional location you can fly through. Some authors have used Google Earth VR to virtually visit the locations they write their novels about, never having set foot in the place, while being so convincing that their friends ask them why they didn’t stop by for tea.

VRTO - Child using VR - photo by Christian Bobak
VRTO – Child using VR – photo by Christian Bobak

With this incredible power to create spatialized, embodied experiences, comes great responsibility of course. Just as we are able to amuse, astound, educate and impress others with the media, we can also wound, terrify, scar and indoctrinate them.

The Problem With Empathy

In the early stages of VR, many wistfully referred to it as an ‘Empathy Machine” – with the positive connotation that it might help us to feel something – perhaps compassion and sympathy, for others in less fortunate positions. Of course, this is a risky assumption to make, for it could just as easily create “empathy” for dark and evil ideologies. Empathy, of course, means to understand another’s situation, feelings, and motives.

VR could be used for real torture, and it could be used to train the next Olympic champions.

Furthermore, though videogames may be full of violence, many academic studies have shown that such acts do not, in fact, have a correlation to real-life acts of violence. In fact, for many, they can serve as a healthy examination of feelings, a way to vent stress and anger, and also learn methods for managing failure and frustration while also building camaraderie.

Out of Body Experience

Does this change, however, when we are inside of an embodied experience? The data would suggest that no, it would not make us more violent, but it might make us more affected by the acts of violence. We may, for example, process every zombie we kill differently in VR than in a traditional TV frame. We may hesitate, before we fire our weapons at people in VR, than we would playing Call of Duty or Borderlands in traditional TV frames.

There is a lot of data that we take in every day that we are not conscious of. Though we see and hear and smell thousands of things every day, our prefrontal lobe only registers some of these data. VR and 360-degree video are similar – by surrounding us with data, we are processing more information than we necessarily register at first. But the body remembers, and so does our subconscious. What experiences will we create the will remain with the receiver, perhaps for a lifetime?

Perhaps more importantly, what could YOU share about YOUR experience? What can we learn, from you? What part of your dream could you transfer, so that others, now or not yet alive, could better understand about the human experience?

After 5 years of rapid iteration, jagged market awareness, failures and successes, in 2019 we have moved from clunky and cumbersome setups to all-in-one, wire-free (“tetherless”), self-contained and motion-tracked VR that can be had for the Facebook-subsidized price of only USD$400.

And yes, a pair of them will empower you and your loved ones to simultaneously experience these worlds in tandem from your living room, without the need of a desktop computer, tripods or other complex setups.

In 2015 I created the FIVARS Festival of International Virtual & Augmented Reality Stories to investigate how this new media could be used to tell stories in new ways. In 2016 I created the VRTO Virtual & Augmented Reality World Conference & Expo to explore the ethics, best practices and industry that would define these media and advancements for future generations.

I hope you will join me at these events in Toronto this year, 2019, to learn more.

Keram Malicki-Sanchez
Los Angeles, April 30th 2019