#BerkleeXR

Yesterday I attended the inaugural Berklee XR summit, held on Feb 7th 2018 at the Berklee Media Center, here at Massachusetts Ave in Boston, part of the Stan Getz Library. The all-day event was envisaged by our estimable Berklee colleague and XR Professor Lori Landay. XR is a catch-all term (Cross Reality, or Extended Reality) and it refers to “technology-mediated experiences that combine digital and biological realities”. Augmented Reality (AR) is adding virtual objects to the real world, typically through a smartphone camera (Pokémon Go being a well-known example); Virtual Reality (VR) is creating an entire immersive world for the user to experience, usually via first-person headset technologies. VR is particularly used in games such as Doom VFR but also in non-gaming contexts, including medicine, education and law (not to mention dance).
As promised to the delegates on the day, I’ve listed below some of the urls we collected, from listening to the artists, colleagues, presentations and exhibitors. If you were there and you think I’ve missed any, please contact me here or @joebennettmusic and I’ll be glad to add to the list.
As this is a WordPress blog, I was pleased to learn that the platform natively supports 360 stills, so I’ve embedded one below from the event (Insta360 One camera).
[vr url=https://joebennett.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/tempimagedatafile.jpg view=360]
The urls are interpolated as links within the day’s schedule, or pasted at the time of day they occurred.
XR: general discussion and panel

• Kathy Bisbee, Executive Director, Brookline Interactive Group; Cofounder, Public VR Lab
• Kathy Trogolo, CEO/Cofounder, Fasility
• Sara Remsen, Cofounder, Waypoint AR
• Sarah Wolozin, Director, MIT Open Documentary Lab
• Moderator: Lori Landay

Motion Capture and Real-Time Animation in XR

• Stacey Fox, Smithsonian and MSU Journalism / Artist
• Susy Ferrer, Noitom Perception Neuron Motion Capture
• John Martin, Reallusion Animation

Demos and startups

• Hoverlay.com – AR interface for collecting digital objects in the real world (e.g. business cards or leaflets at a conference)
• ROTU: VR Music Game, with Jason Parks, BostonVR
• Noitom: lightweight and affordable motion capture system.

Immersive Sound & Music

• Steve Pardo, Lead Audio, Harmonix; Assistant Professor, Electronic Production and Design, Berklee
• Loudon Stearns, Associate Professor, Contemporary Writing and Production, Berklee
• Jeanine Cowen, Professor, Film Scoring, Berklee

(here’s the full session in 360 video)

Mixed Reality: Berklee live with High Fidelity (VR World)

• Ryan Downe Karpf, Cofounder, High Fidelity; Musician and Audio Engineer
• Philip Rosedale, Cofounder, High Fidelity
• Joyce Bettencourt, Mixed Reality Tech

Performance by Artist Christen Lien, Viola, Motion Capture, Visualizations

• Introduced by Joe Bennett, Vice President for Academic Affairs—Strategic Initiatives, Berklee
• Motion capture by Noitom; Visualizations by Lori Landay

Additional URLs that were mentioned today

• https://www.berklee.edu/focused/ice
• http://stelar.edc.org/
• http://immerse.news
• Webxr.io
• http://voicesofvr.com/ podcast
• https://www.meetup.com/Women-in-the-Next-Realities/ – Boston based group for women in XR
• https://mindshow.com/
• https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/hololens
• http://www.androidpolice.com/2018/02/04/webvr-now-webxr-device-api-supports-augmented-reality/
• https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2016/07/12/pokemon-go-get-outta-here/there-are-dangers-to-not-living-in-the-real-world
• Publiceralab.com
• http://www.latino.si.edu/LVM
• https://www.noitom.com
• https://neuronmocap.com
• https://mocap.reallusion.com/iClone-faceware-mocap/
• secondlife.com (and what it is becoming)