Carlos Monteiro – Gigoia Studios
ABOUT: Carlos Monteiro is a multimedia Designer, painter and music composer. Founder of Gigoia Studios, focused on Fine Arts games for museums and VR galleries. Also founded the indie studio Star Palm Games, for sci-fi themed games.
Sam Watts – Make Real
ABOUT: I’ve been working at Make Real, based in Brighton, UK since early 2013, when I joined for fixed term contract to deliver a large scale multi-channel projected construction site management training simulator to BLSC in Melbourne, Australia. Once that was complete, we took receipt of our Oculus Rift DK1 headsets from the Kickstarter that ran in 2012 and I saw an opportunity to help the company pivot from virtual environments to Virtual Reality-based training, learning and development content creation.
Simo Herold – Kontactlab
ABOUT: I’m originally from Finland, but did my Bachelor’s in the Netherlands and China, then a Master’s in Design in Japan. My background and 10+ years of experience is in design and I’m dealing with the visual aspect of things at Kontactlab. Kontactlab is an art technology studio. I like pop-art, design, discovering new places and food. I’m also an avid fan of trance, techno, progressive and things electronic music (not EDM though) – these give you a good mood, atmosphere and energy to create something exciting (together with some coffee + milk). I tried VR content a few years back, but was not that hyped at the start, perhaps it was the content or story that was not strong enough, but then not long later after the first VR experience when I was shown a cartoon story (can’t remember the name) on a Oculus Gear VR; it was simply mind-blowing. I think it had to do with the content and the storytelling method. The visual side of the objects,
characters and etc. in the story was done so well it felt something I cannot put in words here. “How did they manage to do that!?” was my reaction. A wow-moment. I think it was at that point when I really got excited about VR and the possibilities it can have.
Diesel – The Edge
Diesel – The Edge: At a height of 150 metres at the heart of New York, users have to make their way along a ledge and take a perfume bottle out of the wolf’s mouth. The campaign is deployed all over the world in shopping centres.
Peter Maddalena – VRCraftworks
ABOUT: My interest began in the mid 1990s when the PC graphics revolution was started by a company called 3dfx with their Voodoo range of cards. This allowed 3d gaming to take off. People could now experiment with stereoscopic effects essentially rewriting game code and using red blue glasses to give a in and out of screen effect. One of the first games to take advantage of this was Doom and Quake 1, which at the time was awesome with fireballs coming out of the monitor!
Philip Oloo – SPACIALISTS
ABOUT: Growing up in Kenya, I watched as the country and my own family dealt with a lack of infrastructure. We sometimes lived without electricity and often bathed on a rock in the yard using a bucket full of rain water. It was out of this scarcity of basic facility that I developed a love for architecture, but my passion for VR didn’t come until much later of course.