As Chairman and Chief Brand Officer of American manufacturer Wendell August Forge, Will Knecht is charged with leading the strategy and future focus of his company.
He is passionate about the future of our phygital world, the blending of the physical and the digital to offer compelling, immersive brand experiences.
Winslow Porter is an award-winning director, producer and creative technologist specializing in virtual/augmented reality as well as large-scale immersive installations. Winslow formed the pioneering, new media studio the New Reality Company in 2016, creating the critically-acclaimed cinematic VR experiences Giant and Tree. Shortly after, he was named Adweek’s Top 100 creatives as digital innovators and a designer-in-residence at A/D/O. In 2018, Tree won the Lumiere for Best Location Based VR Short as well as 7 other notable awards after being shown at over 100 notable conferences and festivals such as TED, UN General Assembly, Davos and Gardens By The Bay. He is currently a Cultural Leader at the World Economic Forum, a mentor in residence at the New Museum Incubator, an adjunct NYU Tisch professor, a founding member of the Onassis Institute’s ONX art/tech accelerator, as well as a creative director and creative tech consultant at R/GA Global. Winslow’s new immersive AR experience Rainforest, which received an Epic Games MegaGrant, transforms participant’s settings into their own private jungle environment to elucidate pressing concepts and concerns of sustainability and conservation. Winslow is also an artist in residence at the Smallhold Mushroom farm in Brooklyn, creating Forager, an immersive experience of the life-cycle of a mushroom, featuring the first volumetric time-lapse inside a game engine.
Founder of ReadyPlayerGolf.com the oldest and largest charity event in the Metaverse. An annual gathering where industry friends get together, play some cooperative games, and raise funds for a worthy cause. This year it\’s the Children\’s Cancer Research Foundation.
Also, Head of Metaverse for McKinsey & Company
Daria Fedko is CEO of WE/AR Studio – a Ukrainian XR studio recognized as one of the world’s top 25 AR/VR companies & Intel’s official partner in AR/VR solutions.
Additionally, Daria is a Technology Ambassador of Ukraine at the World’s Leaders Summit, where she builds a tech-oriented community to drive innovation and share the experience among different verticals.
Today, Daria works with the leading brands providing them with custom-made AR/VR solutions for their needs. Her company also helps businesses to migrate to the Metaverse and keep up with the times in the coming era of Web3.
Additionally, Daria has been invited to speak at global events such as Laval Virtual 2022, XR Global Summit, AWE Nite Amsterdam, VR/AR Global Summit, and others.
David Alan Smith Smith is the CTO and Founder of Croquet Corporation, developing the Croquet Microverse platform.
Smith is a computer scientist and entrepreneur who has focused on interactive 3D and using 3D as a basis for new user environments and entertainment. He built his first HMD in 1986 to study telepresence control of a remote robot arm using a Dataglove.
Smith was a Senior Fellow at Lockheed Martin, where he focused on next generation human centric computing and collaboration platforms. Before that, Smith was the chief architect of the Croquet Project, an open-source virtual world collaboration platform where he worked with Alan Kay (Turing Award) and David P Reed (created UDP, co-created TCP/IP) and Andreas Raab (Squeak Smalltalk co-developer).
In 1987, Smith created The Colony, the first real time 3D adventure game/shooter. Smith developed Virtus Walkthrough in 1990, the first real-time 3D design application for personal computers. Smith also co-founded Red Storm Entertainment with author Tom Clancy and co-created the Rainbow Six game franchise. David gave the keynote address at IEEE VR 2017.
20+years in executive and sales leadership roles at companies including LinkedIn, Rogers Communication and Bell Media. Extensive experience in the online advertising, ecommerce, fintech and immersive industries driving revenue and developing partnerships. Association involvement includes IAB Canada, Canadian Marketing Association and the Canadian Lending Association. Since 2018, Gary has been leading revenue and partnership development for start-up and scale-up businesses in areas including mobile video/podcast advertising and XR/VR/AR. Providing advisory, strategic sales, partner management & development services. Passionate about sales and selling. A start-up and scale-up veteran. Gary enjoys the challenge of bringing new solutions to market and connecting C Suite executives with solutions in immersive entertainment, online learning and marketing.
Ginna is an experienced VR DP and 360 experience content developer. She enjoys finding new and interesting vantage points for cinematic VR. To date, she has set up cameras on rickshaws, canoes, temples, ferries, cars, balloons, spomeniks, and the occasional migrating zebra herd. In addition to her work with VArtisans, she is also the Director of Content with Conscio VR.
Han Kim is an attorney in the Entertainment, Technology and Advertising Practice Group at SheppardMullin.
Han’s practice focuses on transactional entertainment matters that span from the cutting-edge intersection of technology and entertainment to traditional entertainment industries. He advises clients on business transactions related to music, television, feature film, podcast, metaverse (VR/AR), blockchain/NFTs, esports and games.
Forward-thinking and entrepreneurial by nature, Han works closely with companies, talents, producers, and entrepreneurs that disrupt, and bring innovations to, various entertainment industries. Han provides added value to his clients’ work by structuring novel business models, presenting practical risk management solutions for their operations, and leveraging his industry relationships.
As the Head of Community at Spatial, Jake is leading a community of artists, designers, and creators, as well as a vast network of partners, in building a metaverse for culture. He has worked in the space for nearly a decade, helping everyone from Fortune 500 enterprise & consumer brands, to individual creators, create engaging augmented & virtual reality experiences for their audiences. Now at Spatial, which is at the unique intersection of the metaverse and NFTs, is building the community of the next generation of the internet and global connectivity.
James Kaplan is the Co-Founder and CEO of MeetKai Inc., a Conversational AI and metaverse company shaping the next-gen of artificial speech intelligence. He founded the startup with Co-Founder and Chairwoman, Weili Dai, after becoming frustrated with the limitations of current automated assistants. Kaplan has had a true passion for AI and coding since he was six and wrote his first bots at only nine years old, including the first Pokemon Go bot and many others still popular to this day.
Now his pioneering work puts MeetKai in competition with the largest names in tech. MeetKai Inc. was listed by Forbes as a “Tech Company Leading the Way” and has powered AI solutions for more than 20M people around the world. Kaplan studied Computer Science at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, CA and currently resides in the Los Angeles area.