VRDays Europe 2020: an in-depth look at the VR/AR/MR conference
Movements in XR (or Cross Reality)
October 13, 2020We reviewed VRDays Europe 2020, the tech conference
VRDays Europe 2020 has been a 3-day conference and exhibition on VR/AR/MR, creativity and innovation held on November 4-6 this year. Because of Covid, all the events were moved online and LIVE streamed - which sounds about right for a conference about VR.
I virtually ttended all three days of the conference and was overall satisfied with the experience. As the CTO of an AR-powered software (Scotty.Expert) I loved to experience such widespread enthusiasm for the topics! I also am a demanding AR/VR expert and a tech geek, so here is my overly in-depth review of the event.
The platforms and the tech powering it
The main platform used for the event was Imagina.io which allowed the users to see the schedule and the speakers’ profile. The conference counted several stages. VRDays TV was the main one with LIVE video-streaming powered by Vimeo and accessible through Imagina.io.The organization also used Zoom for its “Immersive Funding Market”, a virtual meeting place to find investors, which featured live pitching sessions and 1-to-1 meetings, the latter only available upon invite.
The conference used two VR platforms. One is Laval virtual world by Virbela - accessible by a desktop app - which hosted the roundtables and the meetings with the sponsors. The other one is AltspaceVR with a dedicated track on philosophy and VR.
To be completely honest I wasn’t all too pleased with Imagina.io as it automatically set the French language for my profile (the conference is organised and usually takes place in Amsterdam so I’m not sure why the French came up) and took a bit of work to switch it to english. This was not the only case in which I found myself lost and I must say that the UI of it all was a bit confusing.
Fig. 1
Focus on VR spaces
I have two different kinds of experience and feelings with the used platforms.
Laval virtual world
It is a desktop application that brings you into a 3d virtual campus. From a menu on the left you can jump from one virtual stage to another or you can just walk into the world. In this world, you could attend the following sessions: - the awards session
- the thursday night beach party
- the roundtables: each one was about one of the topic discussed earlier in the mainstream live channel
- meetings with the sponsors
I’m not sure that a desktop application may be the right tool for engaging attendees, but I know that there aren’t so much alternative tools right now - also considering that not everyone has a VR headset.
AltspaceVR
In AltspaceVR stage took place more philosophical discussion like “the future of spirituality and community” pretty interesting listening about meditation and VR by evolVR a community of VR meditation. I like AltspaceVR so much because I can follow the session with my Oculus Quest and feel immersed and present into the conference.
Topics breakdown
The conference focused on several topics about the various applications of VR nowadays; I can group them in the following:
- Art, education and museum
- Healthcare: from training to rehabilitation and mental health disease treatment
- Training and simulation for enterprise and the future of work
- Virtual conferencing
- Research: talking about interaction in XR and haptic devices
- XR gaming
- Virtual being
- Sex
I tried to have a full picture of the event, but eventually focused on the topics that were more related to my work for Scotty.Expert and personal interests in particular, enterprise and research topics. Here are some highlights: First of all, I really enjoyed the format of the main stage with several short preregistered videos about the track topic with comments from the presenter and his collaborators that were LIVE on the stage. It was the right mix of prerecorded and LIVE content that managed to keep the attention span of the attendees high.
I particularly liked the categorisation made by one of the speaker about the different type of XR applications: - training
- collaboration
- design
- visualisation
The human existence in a VR world and our social presence in virtual spaces is still a point of reflection. I invite you to follow the research made by Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab, their presentations was really full of interesting ideas. On a more negative note, I found that haptic devices that were presented are still at a prototype stage. I’ve seen several videos, but no one of them persuades me that these devices are ready to be deployed in production in the industrial field. However, I was quite impressed by ORVAMU a software for emergency training in VR, I found it is really useful, for instance, for triage tasks.
It is widely recognised that the issues with XR devices remain with the storage, the download and rendering time of the 3d models. During a panel one of the speakers proposed an interesting architectural solution with edge computers that host 3d models and are connected with 5G to XR devices on the field. Let’s see the image below.
One panel touched on the pandemic. It posed a question: what does the future of remote working look like? The discussion inferred that we will never come back to the old version of the workplace. So we have to imagine a hybrid situation in which we should be able to restore some habits virtually - even the coffee break at the vending machine will have to be reinvented to fit the digital transformation.
Conclusions
VR Days Europe 2020 was an interesting conference full of strong and in-depth contents. I found it useful for my work on enterprise solutions with XR. My favorite statement of all the conference was about the future of work: “we have to talk about human capital, not human resources”. We have to make a shift in our mind before adopting XR technologies, but we haven’t a lot of time, rather it could be late. So hurry up!
