IN REALTIME
Laval Virtual 2019
By Romain 16-05-2019
Laval Virtual, what is it?
A once-a-year and global event in the Mayenne county
Every year, the county seat of Mayenne becomes a globally reknown showroom. For more than 20 years, an association has been organizing there Laval Virtual : a staple for businesses and researchers all around the world developing “immersive” technologies : from virtual and augmented reality, and all the associated needs to 3D capture techniques and storytelling.
With an impressive exhibition area of 9000m2 and more than 300 exhibitors, the show can be visited in two stages : Three days dedicated to professionals with more than 200 speakers, then two days dedicated to the general public with a spectacular transformation of the stands allowing a more adapted content, especially for children!
In addition, for the second year in a row, an artistic component, orchestrated by Judith Guez and featuring free installations throughout the city, is attracting the curiosity of the general public.
Opening of the Recto VRso exhibition with the Mayor of Laval
First year in immersion
It is the passion and curiosity for this fast-growing field that pushed Romain, our Creative Technologist, to leave for 5 days of immersion from March 20 to 24, 2019.
With no less than 30 conferences, dozens of demos, a stroll through all the stands and artistic facilities and more than 700 photos, the amount of information collected is colossal and deserves to be shared.
Restitution
Open Knowledge in af83's office
Romain presented an Open Knowledge, over a lunchtime period, to share his teachings and his vision of Laval Virtual in the form of a photo report.
The slides are available here
A Meetup at the Pavilion
In addition, he is leading a Meetup cycle at the Pavilion (partner of the event) which is a space dedicated to virtual reality located on the ground floor of NUMA Paris, through its association CogLab, NeuroTechX Paris.
This "Mixed Reality and Cognitive Sciences" cycle is composed of 4 evenings, the 3rd episode was partly focused on a feedback from the Laval Virtual. And the last evening is in preparation for the end of May.
Poster of the 3rd episode of the Meetup cycle Mixed Reality and Cognitive Sciences.
Experiments in mixed reality
It is not uncommon to hear the vocabulary related to virtual reality in the open space, or to observe certain moments of experimentation. We talk about the challenges to be met in terms of user experiences within the Designers team and the very rapid technological evolutions (software and hardware) that generate passions.
Romain follows in particular the OpenXR standardization by the Khronos group and popularized by the Mozilla Foundation via the framework aframe which is Open source and multi platform. A state of mind dear to af83.
One of the conferences also demonstrated this, presented by Philippe Coval, member of the Samsung Open Source group.
Présentation de Philippe Coval “Use case : From Web of Things to XR using Open Source”
Reflections on the future of immersive technologies
One of the last conferences presented an overview of the results of the "Visionaries Think Thank", following a 2-day workshop that brought together the leading thinkers invited this year to Laval and led by Marie Leblanc.
This reflection group examined the evolutions and challenges to be met in immersive technologies, in particular the ethics of a particularly powerful mode of interaction to generate empathy. We will develop this aspect in a future blog post.
