“I really enjoyed it; especially Keiichi Matsuda’s talk which was excellent.

Keiichi makes these amazing videos of his dystopian view of the future of augmented reality. All shot from first person perspective, usually of quite mundane things like going to the supermarket or boiling a kettle, but then adds a layer of strangeness over the top. So you might be transported into a field while your kettle boils but you can still see it floating there and counting down to when your tea is ready.”

“He also looks at the effect it will have on society, and the things that will go wrong; for example, your headset gets hacked when you’re trying to call customer services. Augmented reality seems like the real game changer to me – putting a computer between you and your perception of the whole world means everyone will be in their own private reality. I had a chat with him afterwards. He says he’d potentially be interested in working with an ad agency on something(!).”

“There was also another talk by a VR games studio that was very interesting. It was all about the challenges of making VR games vs. normal games. Simple things like everything feeling like it’s the wrong size when they imported their original games’ 3D objects. Realising they always have to have a horizon in view or you feel weird. Loads of little things. I think the most interesting part of it is similar to Joe Chen’s talk in that nobody really knows what they’re doing yet. They’re all just working it out and getting it wrong before they get it right. For that reason, it’s a really exciting time to get into VR; it’s the time for creative experimentation!”