Realities360 Conference 2017 – Preview

Realities360 looks really freaking cool. This innovative, hands-on technology conferences allows delegates to experience, discuss and immerse themselves in the world of augmented, virtual and expanded reality tech.

The opening keynote will be delivered by Maxwell Planck, founder of Oculus Story Studio and former Pixar technical director (his portfolio includes work on Cars, WALL•E, Up, Brave, Monsters University, and The Good Dinosaur).

Starting with his work at Oculus Story Studio, Planck will talk about the new opportunities presented by virtual reality technology. VR, he argues, changes some of the rules and expectations that govern our perception of what “content” and “experience” mean. In his address, he will ask how that meaning can shape the type of experiences that you can create with VR technology.

Among many other speakers and discussion hosts, Barry Downes, managing partner at Suir Valley Ventures, a capital fund that specializes in AR, VR, financial technology, and the Internet of Things, will share how he sees these technologies evolving and where those evolutions will take us.

In the closing panel, you will hear from early adopters of AR, VR, and enhanced reality technologies, who’ll put what you’ve learned at Realities360 into context. They will argue that the real potential of such tech lies in doing something different and viewing your work through a different lens.

The Realities360 website explains that “in order to explore the possibilities that AR, VR, and other alternate-reality technologies pose for learning and performance, you first need to understand what it means to experience them for yourself”.

Hence the technology showcase section of the conference, where you will be granted unprecedented access to technologies such as Oculus, Steam VR (anyone else think that Steam’s logo looks weirdly like part of a fidget spinner?) and Google Cardboard, among others.

The future of technology is exciting. It’s going to change the way in which we work and interact with the world around us in ways that we have yet to even start thinking about. Jobs that currently cannot be done by a computer will eventually be automated and put into the hands of robots with artificial intelligence.

The kind of tech that Realities360 is looking at could potentially allow us to reproduce reality to such a high level of detail that the real will be almost indistinguishable from the fake for our relatively limited perception, to the degree that if we can’t or don’t want to travel, we won’t have to. It certainly looks as though it could revolutionize the world of gaming, if nothing else.

The conference will take place on July 26 – 28, 2017 in the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, the capital of the high-tech mecca known as Silicon Valley. The group room book is unfortunately closed but there may still be rooms in the hotel if you book now.