Pt.4!? Make sure you’ve read Pt.1, Pt.2 & Pt.3 first as I continue to look back over the past 9 years I’ve spent in and around VR, as I prepare to start a new role.
Events
One thing I hadn’t ever considered or really wanted to do earlier in my career was be front and centre, out there in front of cameras or press, promoting titles or the studio. I was much happier in the QA basement or behind a project management task list, getting things for others to talk about made on time, within budget and scope.
VR though ignited this passion in me and a desire to tell everyone and anyone who would listen about it. And so I became the figurehead, spokesperson and external face of the studio over a period of a few years, mostly initially driven by the Radial-G KickStarter in 2014, as someone had to promote, demo and make people aware of it to try to make it achieve it’s goals (it didn’t, more later).
One of the things I love as much as VR is beer so it made sense to use a nearby public house as a testing practice ground to start being able to talk about VR to a crowd of (mostly) interested locals. So with slides in-hand and some PCs and DK2s and GearVRs setup, I gave my first talk about VR (history, how it works, use cases, future etc) to a room of about 20 people upstairs at the Elephant & Castle pub in Lewes, on a cold drizzly night in Feb 2016.
Turns out, speaking in front of people isn’t so bad when you’re passionate about the subject and whilst I got better at rehearsals and being a bit more scripted, most of the time I ran with the topics adlib depending upon the connection to the room at the time. I pride myself on my no-bullshit approach though, don’t ask me to sell things or push marketing speak. Honesty, truth, transparency and validation is key to winning the audience over.
With my first talk under my belt, I went all in for the next one, being asked to give the keynote opening presentation to set the scene for TOMTech Storyhack event, as part of Brighton Digital Festival, at The Old Market theatre in Hove. Suddenly there were about 100 people in the audience and I had a stage, but more about that later.
As of today, I’ve given 50 talks and been on 40 panels since 2013 (plus all the rest) but nothing has yet matched the talk at IT.Weekend 2018 in Kyiv, Ukraine. The biggest stage and audience, flashing lights, smoke, mirrors and a 360º central rotating stage speaker “reveal” section made it a surreal experience. I pulled a reveal stunt, mimicking the well-known Ready Player One Wade Watts *sic headset photo, ruined by the fact that the ops team started my slides on the second one, so it ended up making no sense. And the fonts were wrong (don’t use unique fonts in slides for talks folks). My heart goes out to all the amazing people I met there in Ukraine, I hope you get your country back soon.
2018 was also the busiest year to date for events, where for a period of time we were doing two a week on average (this included client internal demos and discovery sessions). This was peak excitement around the next evolution of VR to a degree, with standalone devices being prototyped and dev kitted out to the studio.
Despite seeing a massive drop off this year, mostly because I’ve been saying “No, have you got any women on your manel?” to a lot of organisers to give other voices a chance of being heard, the tally sits at 400+ for all the interviews, podcasts, quotes, blogs, talks, panels etc. I’ve just been trying to educate and evangelise the potential benefits of immersive technologies but it did amuse me to be listed as 12th most influential person in VR at one point, apparently higher than Palmer Luckey and John Carmack. Gotta farm those hashtags people.
I started off years ago working for an elearning company and sometimes had to go to Learning Technologies show in London each year. I never really enjoyed it as it wasn’t my area of expertise (at the time QA) and LMSes and metrics tools are pretty b-o-r-i-n-g. When I left that world to move into the games industry in early 2000s, I thought I had left all that behind, gleefully. It’s kinda funny then to see ourselves return to the show for the past 5–6 years, in ever-bigger-booths and presence. It’s become the biggest event for the studio, generating a large proportion of the leads for the following year for projects and new clients, so pretty important too.
I love it now, I can ignore all the LMSes still and focus on the company booth. LT22 was my last face-to-face event for the studio, back in May this year (unbeknown to me at the time) and it was also our greatest, and my best organisational result. [EDIT: Turns out it wasn’t, as ended up having to attend Learning Live 22 in mid-September too.] Having a booth built for us for the first time felt like such a luxury after years of schlepping up to London in a van full of TVs, stands, desks, banners and whatnot. This year, overseeing the build (& being politely told to go get some lunch i.e. fuck off out their hair), just seeing it come together and everyone else’s faces as they rocked up with laptops and headsets ready to go, was a fantastic feeling and sense of accomplishment.
As I write this, knowing it will go live late September / early October, am organising and working with the lovely peeps at Creative8 once again to build a smaller version of the booth for World of Learning 2022, where the studio team minus me will be running the Immersive Learning Zone. Be sure to go say hi if you’re attending on the 11th or 12th of October.
Ultimately though events are about one thing for me — community, and the VR community has grown, shrunk, changed and morphed over the years from the early DK1 days, but I love it and the members who consider themselves part of it, no matter their area of focus.
I sadly had to miss out on the first couple of Oculus Connects as at the time, the studio / team was small and so was the purse. Being in the UK, it was simply too greater cost at the time to pay for flights, hotels etc without knowing beyond knowledge, what would come of it. It still smarts a bit that I had to miss OC2 due to cost but we bought a gaming PC and DK2 for Craig Charles. I did get to see Red Dwarf being filmed though and meet the legends of the show, so swings and roundabouts…
I did get to go to OC3–6 and am sad that the pandemic has made them all virtual since, even this year still. The physical Connects were always more than just meetings, talks and learnings, it was a chance to meet with the rest of the VR dev community, share stories, make connections, and meet face-to-face many you’d only ever chatted to over social medias, especially being UK-based and travelling to the US for them.
From meetups with a few people to day-long events with 100s of speakers, VR events have always been great fun, getting to meet and see what people are working on, experimenting with and sometimes, secret behind-closed-doors stuff. The very first VR Brighton meetup in 2014, where I backed the Altergaze KickStarter for a 3D-printed Google Cardboard with amazing lenses, where there definitely wasn’t an Oculus Rift HD Prototype, to a later meetup where Tim Aidley showed his DK1 // PS Move modded setup to create a very early roomscale exploration experience, those early days were magical. Also getting to try out Oculus Touch for the first time, trying out the HTC Vive VK1 and TheBlu (my first genuine sense of presence in VR), trying out Santa Cruz, playing batshit VR game tech demos on the expo floor, these are just some of my favourite things.
We will continue to in-fight over terminology no doubt and it is more welcoming now than it was. But there’s still a lot of work to do for inclusivity, diversity and equality. I’ll continue to do what I can in my new role once I understand the boundaries a bit better but I’ll continue to call out manels and all white male speaker line-ups though.
