09:00 AM - 09:55 AM
At the heart of every successful Augmented Reality(AR) experience, is solid storytelling that leaves the user with an emotional connection to the brand. Consumer demand for a personalized experience and emotional realism to content has been a major driver for AR experiences. However, capturing lifelike, digital recreations was limited. Volcap enables AR to break free from the frame and into fully immersive worlds, creating authentic, realistic experiences for the user across multiple verticals including entertainment, sports, training, enterprise, gaming, and more. How do you tell your brand story in AR using VolCap? Join our panel as they discuss how AR has taken the reins using VolCap to create personalized experiences for consumers, while providing brands with the ultimate immersion.
10:10 AM - 10:35 AM
Within USA TODAY NETWORK's DNA is the desire to innovate how the organization tells stories. Since 2018 USA TODAY's Emerging Technologies team has developed over 40 highly engaging and interactive augmented reality (AR) experiences, exploring complex, historical, and trending news topics. Recognizing an opportunity to improve the core user experience within the app's framework, the team leveraged engagement analytics and external user testing to develop a robust and intuitive user onboarding sequence, resulting in a 3x increase in average time spent per user.
A few media-rich AR experiences that include the updated framework are “Seven Days of 1961: A Dangerous Ride on the Road to Freedom,” "Champions of Women's Suffrage,” "Accused: The Impending Execution of Elwood Jones,” “Attica: A Prison Uprising 50 Years Later,” and many others. The Emerging Technology team has also implemented accessible designs to meet their audience's growing expectations for new and inclusive forms of premium interactive experiences.
Will Austin, the Senior Designer of Emerging Technology, will explore the evolution of UI/UX to foster a deeper understanding of AR amongst casual consumers. He will also share insights and case studies on USA TODAY's onboarding challenges, new instructional design, and its vision for the future of premium interactive editorial experiences.
10:40 AM - 11:05 AM
Leverage your passion and skills for gaming to change the world! Do you like creating incendiary fights with fire demons or finding ways to uncover story secrets, or how about stealing artifacts from spaceships while avoiding robots? Then join Robin Moulder as she shares insights and lessons learned from game development to creating XR applications for enterprises.
11:10 AM - 11:35 AM
MetaVRse is a low-code 3D creation platform for the future of human communication, collaboration, commerce and culture. Launched at AWE 2020, the MetaVRse Engine has been used for training and marketing for Fortune 500 organizations. TheMall.io is a 100m sq ft virtual retail and entertainment destination built on the MetaVRse Engine. We will be showcasing the new features of the completely re-built v2.0 while building a multiplayer experience real-time.
01:05 PM - 01:55 PM
There are many great, functioning examples of virtual environments in the Metaverse. And still there is not a clear reason WHY we are building and creating so frantically as if somehow, the Metaverse gates were about to close.
It's interesting that there are very good, affordable devices out there for consumers to get into The Metaverse, but usage data suggests that even hardcore amers aren't spending a long time in headset. With this panel, we will explore:
• The way that creators are thinking about the future of storytelling
• The psychology of The Metaverse - why will consumers care?
• Elevating the human experience
• How storytelling will evolve and the tools required to produce a different kind of narrative
• What is myth and what is real relative to The Metaverse
02:05 PM - 02:30 PM
Learn how to use Unity’s XR Interaction Toolkit to build AR/VR applications with a common set of inputs that work across different platforms. Get a hands-on look at how to get started with a sample project, and find out what’s new in version 2.0, including some upcoming 2.1 features.
02:35 PM - 03:00 PM
Athena examines the correlation between the states of being outlined in Matthew Ball's 7 core attributes of the metaverse and the state of doing in the 10 Principles of Burning Man. Many XR company leaders talk about the need to responsibly and consciously build the metaverse. Athena outlines how our communal effort will create a foundational fabric for creative collaboration the metaverse.
03:05 PM - 03:30 PM
What XR experience draws you in? What's throws you out? Good User Experience keeps the users in the “Flow” state while the bad one makes the users nauseous. In this talk, I will share with you the dos and don'ts of UX design for XR.