Future Tuesdays present: XR Bootcamp Tuesday 13th April 2021

The event featured:

XR Bootcamp Co-Founder Ferhan Özkan and Emilios Eracleous, Co-Founder and Specialist Recruiter from Immersive Search presented their respective companies mission statements, offerings and provided a survey of the current state of XR employment, recruitment and training in the global market.

XR Bootcamp is the world’s first bootcamp for professional upskilling within VR/AR. XR Bootcamp provides cutting edge education experiences that provide participants with the skills, knowledge and ability to create VR/AR applications and assist companies to bridge their skills gap in XR development. Through intensive on-site and online educational programs, cutting-edge curricula, industry-wide known mentors and lecturers, and a focus on industry portfolio projects, participants get the hands-on experience they need to kick off their XR career or get promoted. As a major global provider of emerging technology software upskilling training, XR Bootcamp's vision is to improve the diversity of programmers and technologists, to ensure computing technology is inclusive field and to increase upward social mobility across heterogeneous backgrounds. 

XR Bootcamp consists of an amazing network of leaders in emerging and immersive technologies extending across innovation, research, development, design, world building and transformation. 

Immersive Search is a recruiting company facilitating businesses across the globe with specialists in XR. Immersive Search’s mission is to provide a support network for professionals seeking to upskill via their training partners, create clear pathways for students entering the XR industry and contribute to the process of making XR technologies safe, inclusive and accessible for the global community.

Ferhan Özkan is leading the mission to create a global ecosystem of XR innovators to be utilised to solve the challenges of industry. His influential journey started when he founded a pre-incubation centre funded by World Bank, guiding 8 start-ups to successful industry exits. Soon afterwards, Özkan established the digital platform Playstore.com for a telco operator distributing games of the top AAA publishers worldwide. The platform continues to become one of the most profitable Value-Added Services overall.  As elected Vice-Chair of the IEEE VR/AR Standards Group, Özkan works on bringing the industry closer, while focusing on empowering the major stakeholders with his expertise and global network. He founded XR First, a global organization that has already attracted over 410 startup clusters and 800 universities from all around the world to join on its mission of the democratization of innovation.  

Prior to Emilios Eracleaous’ role as Co-Founder and Specialist Recruiter for Immersive Search, he was New Business Executive and Regional Accounts Director for the international technical support company RIZE Worldwide Limited, focusing on Europe and Africa respectively. Prior to his posts at RIZE, Eracleouswas Networks Delivery Consultant with Nokia Siemens.

For more information on XR Bootcamp and Immersive Search please follow the links below.

https://xrbootcamp.com

www.immersive-search.com

XR Bootcamp Co-Founder Ferhan Özkan and Emilios Eracleous, Co-Founder and Specialist Recruiter from Immersive Search presenting their respective companies mi...

Future Tuesdays present: Visual Facilitation in VR During the Pandemic with Stéphanie Heckman 30 March 2021

On 30 March 2021, Future Tuesdays hosted visual facilitator Stéphanie Heckman. Heckman with the support of Future Screens NI has pioneered visual facilitation in VR during the pandemic. When the Covid-19 Crisis emerged Stéphanie identified the challenges of facilitating collective working during the pandemic. In response she developed a hand drawn immersive space for collaboration in response to Covid-19. Stephanie has also tested and developed prototypes for generating VR illustrations to support collective working through visual facilitation. 

Stéphanie is a visual facilitator who had observed the unique set of challenges digital platforms pose to a streamlined communication experience. Heckman has pioneered immersive technology to explore visual facilitation in response to the risk of missing nonverbal cues and clues, proper eye contact and attuned ‘turn-taking’ in speech, and everything from gesticulation to the tactility of whiteboards, paper, and post it notes that are employed in collective planning. With VR drawing apps Stéphanie created live streams in zoom and developed immersive worlds for visual facilitation generating new platforms for collaboration during and beyond the Covid-19 Crisis.

For Future Tuesdays Stéphanie took us through her journey with VR and introduced us to her beautiful and inspiring immersive work.  

Alongside her work as a visual facilitator and graphic recorder, Stéphanie is a singer-songwriter under the name Soma Saloli. Hailing from the Netherlands, Stéphanie lives in Belfast where she combines her passions for the arts and the outdoors with academic and professional training in sustainable leadership development.

You can find more about Stéphanie’s work here:

https://www.stephanieheckman.com/  

On 30 March 2021, Future Tuesdays hosted visual facilitator Stéphanie Heckman. Heckman is a visual facilitator who with the support of Future Screens NI has ...

Future Tuesdays Presents: Performance Without Barriers with Zach Kinstner, 23rd March 2021

On 23 March 2021, FSNI Future Tuesdays and Performance Without Barriers hosted Zach Kinstner, CEO of Aesthetic Interactive for a presentation and Q & A about the musical VR programme EXA: The Infinite Instrument. EXA is a programme for HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and Microsoft HoloLens. In the presentation, Zach discussed his experience of developing for the virtual musical environments in Virtual and Mixed Realities.

 ‘Performance Without Barriers’ (PwB) is a research group at Queen’s University Belfast, established in 2015 by Dr Franziska Schroeder in collaboration with the Drake Music Project Northern Ireland. Together, they work with disabled people to identify more accessible and open ways to designing music technologies. They hold a firm belief that music, performance, and improvisation are powerful mediums for expression and communication across difference, as performance can give a voice to individuals in society who are marginalised and remain ‘silent’ because their language or mode of communication cannot be heard. For that purpose, the PwB team is committed to research activities that promote social inclusion through creative performance practice, accessible and enabling technologies, while challenging dominant assumptions or exclusive identities.  

 In 2018, as part of the AHRC/EPSRC funded project 'Immersion and Inclusive Music Technologies’, they joined forces with Zach Kinstner’s EXA: The Infinite Instrument programme, which offers a customisable tool for music interactions in Virtual Reality. It was adopted and re-designed by PwB to be an accessible virtual musical instrument for the disabled musicians who are so integral to the design processes.

 The work of the PwB teams has been showcased at two European music conferences for disability, the Soundform Conference in Hamburg/Germany, and Zukunftmusik in Bern/Switzerland in 2019.

 The agenda-setting research of the group was recognised by the Vice Chancellor of Queen’s University Belfast with the 2020 Prize for Research Innovation!

 Zach Kinstner, CEO of Aesthetic Interactive. A musician and developer who created the musical VR programme EXA, The Infinite Instrument for HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and Microsoft HoloLens who will discuss his experience of developing for the virtual musical environments in Virtual and Mixed Realities.

 Dr Franciska Schroeder is a saxophonist, theorist, and a Reader at the School of Arts, English and Languages at Queen's University Belfast. She is a Fellow of the HEA (Higher Education Academy in the UK). She serves on the peer review panel for the UK's AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) and is a registered expert for the EU's Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Franziska was awarded her PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2006, and has since written for many international journals, including Leonardo, Organised Sound, Performance Research, Cambridge Publishing and Routledge. She has published a book on performance and the threshold, an edited volume on user-generated content and a book on improvisation entitled "Soundweaving".

For more information please follow the following links.

http://performancewithoutbarriers.com/

http://aestheticinteractive.com/#/

FSNI Future Tuesdays and Performance Without Barriers Host Zach Kinstner, CEO of Aesthetic Interactive for a presentation and Q & A about the musical VR prog...

Thrive hosts Changing the Game: A roadmap for digital tailored to Northern Ireland’s arts and culture organisations’ needs.

On Monday 22nd March 2021 Thrive Audience Development hosted a roundtable discussion considering a digital roadmap tailored to Northern Ireland’s arts and culture organisations’ needs. The webinar was hosted by Margaret Henry, Chief Executive of Thrive Audience Development and included speakers Prof. Paul Moore, Director of Future Screens NI; Peter O’Neill, Director of Imagine! Belfast Festival of Ideas and Politics and Maurane Ramon, Communications Executive at Thrive Audience Development.

 The press release states:

When lockdown hit at the end of March 2020, a lot of arts and culture organisations turned to digital so they could continue deliver creativity and offer some hope and respite. Some offered live or pre-recorded events filmed from their living room, others explored complete new ways to present their work. Is there an easy step-by-step process that arts, culture and heritage organisations could follow to kickstart their digital journey? 

Supported by the Future Screen NI’s Rewriting the Narrative project and in partnership with Accidental Theatre and Imagine Belfast, thrive undertook a consultation process to better understand their use and knowledge of digital. Based on the insight they discovered, thrive developed a 5-steps framework called ‘Changing the Game’ that NI organisations can use to assess and create their own digital offer. 

In this webinar, thrive and guests shares details about their research, what they found and the Changing the Game Framework. 

For more information on the participating projects please follow the links below.

imaginebelfast.com

wewillthrive.co.uk 

Future Screens NI appoint 20 Future Creatives

Future Screens NI have appointed 20 Future Creatives who will receive a £5,000 award which is accompanied by mentorship in order to advance their research and development programmes, advance their career ambitions, and to develop cutting edge technical innovations.  Successful creatives include PhD researchers and early career researchers in both industry and university settings including founders.  Successful awardees are engaged in research to advance immersive technologies, medtech, equality, diversity and inclusion, film, and business development.  

The Future Creatives scheme has been designed to enable participants to make a step change in their research and innovation by enhanced leadership and collaboration skills and developing new practices in the field of creativity and technology.  Each awardee has been matched with an industry or academic mentor working at the cutting edge of new, emerging and immersive technologies.