Inaugural European Immersive Computing Summit Puts Italy On The Map For VR & AR
One of the presenters, Luca Prasso, shared his vision of the potential future of VR/AR. Prasso has has 30 years of experience in tech and digital media, including as a supervisor at Dreamworks during the production of Shrek. Now he works as UI/UX Prototype Engineer/Designer at Google Daydream Labs, a small rapid prototyping team tasked with looking 1-to-3 years into the future and finding aligned, innovative use cases for VR and AR. He described a process in which someone from their team would pitch a concept on a Monday, and by the following Friday a usable prototype would be in existence.
The event also spotlit more niche-focus presentations, such as Marco Mortillaro’s discussion around directorial techniques in VR gaming. In particular, Mortillaro, lead game designer of Milan-based Forge-Reply, presented his company’s approach to creating a seamless 3rd-person player experience in their Playstation VR game Theseus–sharing insights around camera placement, avoiding motion sickness, and the “consistency of gaze” method for transitioning between scenes in VR games.
The diverse range of speakers continued after a lunch of delicious Italian cuisine and a perhaps-too-early-for-this glass of wine because…“when in Venice…” A representative from MSI spoke about the future of their hardware, and a startup developer showed off his AR app to not only help people learn how to draw, but to aid muralists and street-artists with scaling up their images in real time.
And this was the beauty of EICS. Yes, it’s an event that singlehandedly put Italy on the VR/AR map.