Trevor Flowers

For over twenty years I have turned ideas into products in a variety of technical organizations ranging from low level systems programming (Be) to high level ubiquitous computing research (Xerox PARC). I have found success in many roles in growth startups including individual contributor and CTO.

Brendan Bradley

Brendan Andolsek Bradley is a multi-award winning actor, writer, director and producer known internationally as “America’s Scrappy Storyteller” (AR Post) with 100+ IMDb credits, 50M+ views online and a leader in the virtual theater movement performing using groundbreaking XR/VR tools.

Brendan established The Integrative Technology Lab at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts to foster the next generation of multi-disciplinary live storytellers and during the pandemic, he began releasing free tutorials and case-studies for adopting ubiquitous streaming tools for live performance, including a customizable virtual theater in your web browser that allows anyone in the world to get back “on” stage for free. More at brendanAbradley.com/futurestages

Blair MacIntyre

Blair MacIntyre is a Professor of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, where he has explored socio-technical issues surrounding AR and VR for more than 20 years. He has built authoring toolkits for media designers, deployed room-scale and handheld games and experiences, built AR-enabled web-browsers, helped lead the design of WebXR, and run online conferences using immersive social VR.

His experience spans all aspects of building, deploying, and evaluating AR and VR tools, systems, and experiences. He has been doing research in augmented reality since 1991, is actively involved with numerous conferences and workshops, speaks and consults regularly, and has published over 100 academic papers in the field.

Julie Smithson

Julie Smithson’s personal mission is to ‘inspire and educate people to think and act in a socially, economically and environmentally responsible way’.

It is through this lens as co-founder at MetaVRse, a 3D Web game engine for Business & XR development company.  Julie is leading enterprise companies to digitally transform and educate ways to immersive and remotely train users of the product/service. Julie guides her team to translate instructional language, interaction behaviors and curate knowledge testing gamification for businesses.  

Julie’s leadership is focused on transforming training & marketing into immersive experiences using technologies to design Web3 solutions, integration implementation and deployment to produce growth benefits, cost savings and human efficiencies.

Julie is also co-Chair of XRWomen.com , a global group of women who meet every Wednesday and learn about the applications of extended realities.  The group works to advocate, inspire and build communities aimed at inclusivity of gender equality, race and ethnicity in the digital sector and beyond.  

Julie is the host of the XR For Learning podcast. Julie also leads XR Collaboration, a coalition supporting human connectivity through digital presence in platforms building communication and collaboration.  Julie is also founder of XR Ignite to support the innovation and entrepreneurship of our communities. She also sits on panels and in leading conversations about interoperability standards and alignments with Khronos Group and MetaTr@versal.  

Previous to MetaVRse, Julie was Co-Founder of Emulator, the World’s most advanced DJ system, which won the prestigious 2011 DJ Mag Innovative Product Award.  She scored a $500K deal on the hit TV show Dragons’ Den. 

Julie is the co-host of the WebXR Summit series and a renowned speaker on XR and Produced TEDx Toronto (2010) and introduced coding in VR at Canada Learns Code (2017). She is past-President of the VRARA Toronto Chapter and Former Chair of the VRARA Education and Student Committees. Most recently Julie presented with the YPO, Harvard and 1Society about changing the way we learn and teach using spatial technologies. 

Chris Wilson

Chris started working on web browsers in 1993 when he co-authored the original Windows version of NCSA Mosaic, worked on Internet Explorer for fifteen years at Microsoft, and joined Google in 2010. He is currently Web Standards Tech Lead on Chrome.

Dave Hill

Hi, I’m Dave Hill. I’m an Engineering Manager at Oculus/Facebook Reality Labs, supporting the Oculus Browser team and focusing on the web developer ecosystem as it relates to our headsets and our browser. Prior to joining Oculus, I spent time at Microsoft working on HoloLens, and on Xbox Kinect before that.

Before that, I spent a bunch of years working in game development working on gameplay, graphics, and engine programming.

Jacob Rossi

Jacob is the Product Manager for the web platform at Oculus, leading the product development of Oculus Browser, WebXR, and Progressive Web Apps for all of Oculus’s VR devices. Jacob has helping develop browsers, web standards, and developer tools at Microsoft, the W3C, and Oculus for over 12 years.

Evo Heyning

Evo Heyning has been creating immersive experiences that bridge real and virtual worlds for more than 20 years. As an interactive showrunner and production strategist, she has worked on media projects ranging from launching the Affordable Care Act to producing more than 500 hours of livestreaming events during the pandemic. Her work focuses on metaverse media and the creative potential of volumetric and virtual production.

Evo passionately shapes the future of the open spatial web to connect people and groundbreaking, applicable ideas through collaborative technologies. Through her company Playable Agency, Evo provides early stage production strategy and creative worldbuilding that expand reality.

Evo was awarded the 2022 Poly for Community.