In December 2016 a new venue opened up in London, UK called the Realities Centre, focused on promoting virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) technology. THe last couple of months have seen several conferences and hackathons taking place and now the venue has revealed its latest events. Taking place in March 2017, the Realities Centre will be hosting another conference and hackathon, this time dedicated to artificial intelligence (AI) and VR.
Held on 16th March will be the AI+VR Conference, featuring an evening of discussions exploring the two fields, namely how AI machine learning and natural language processing can be used in VR. Speaking at the event will be Rob Whitehead, co-founder and CTO of Improbable, whose talk will be on ‘A high level introduction of the AI and VR industry’. This will be followed by Phil Westcott, European ecosystem leader at IBM Watson with a talk on ‘IBM Watson in IoT & VR’ and James Ravenscroft, CTO at Filament looking at ‘Building smart avatars in VR games with NLP’. The night will be rounded off with a mixed panel discussion featuring: Raz Schwartz, Research Lead at Oculus Rift, Edward Miller, Co-Founder of ScapeAR and Westcott.
Then from 18th – 19th March will be the AI+VR Hackathon, where small teams are given a topic on the first morning and then have 24 hours to build a VR application using AI. Entrants will have support from AI and VR specialists, answering any queries they may have. The mentors will be: Dr. Harish Narayanan, computational science Ph.D, Lead Engineer at @Edgefolio TensorFlow & deep learning teacher; Mihai Suteu, Data Scientist @Status Today, working in research on Machine Learning, Neural Networks and Time Series; Ph.D Daniel Duma, based at Alan Turing Insitute, expert in Natural Language Processing and data retrieval, and Shaun Dunne, Co-founder at Studio Zero.
For further information on the two events and to register head to AI+VR Conference or AI+VR Hackathon. VRFocus will continue its coverage of Realities Centre, reporting back with any further announcements.