Andrew Wright is the director and Lead Education Consultant at iTeacher, Creator of the EDUmetaverse. With 25 years classroom experience he is an international speaker and innovations specialist, based in Sydney. For the last 8 months he has been building worlds and teaching in the Metaverse.
Thomas Wallner
Liquid Cinema Inc is a Toronto-based, software and platform development company dedicated to exploring and defining the evolving language of immersive storytelling in 2D, XR and desktop formats. Liquid Cinema’s mission is to democratize the WebXR creation and distribution pipeline.
Liquid Cinema is led by multiple Emmy award winning producer and director Thomas Wallner who brings over two decades of experience leading creative and technical teams to produce cutting-edge, internationally awarded work for television, film and interactive/digital media and games.
Adrian Biedrzycki
Avi Bar-Zeev
Avi Bar-Zeev has been at the forefront of XR and The Metaverse for over 30 years: first launching Disney’s groundbreaking Aladdin VR ride in the early 90s, crafting Second Life’s 3D worlds and co-founding Keyhole (Google Earth) mirror-earth 3D browser around 2001. He co-invented Microsoft Hololens in 2010, helped defined Amazon Echo Frames in 2015, and then contributed at Apple on undisclosed projects.
Since leaving Apple, he’s consulted privately for top XR companies and investors. And he’s taken a more public stance by writing and speaking publicly on important issues like privacy, biometric sensing and mental autonomy, targeted and future experiential advertising, DEI and harassment in XR, and various open Metaverse/web3 architectures.
Most recently, he is a founder and President of The XR Guild, a new non-profit membership organization that seeks to support and educate professionals in XR on ethics and most positive outcomes for humanity.
Craig Evans
Robin Hunicke
Robin Hunicke is the CEO and co-founder of Funomena, an experimental game company working in AR, VR and traditional console & PC gaming. Focused on pushing the boundaries of gameplay and connection through new platforms, Robin is most well known for her work on Journey, The Sims, Luna and Wattam. She is also a full professor of Game Design at UC Santa Cruz, in the department of Performance, Play and Design.
Lara Lesmes and Fredrik Hellberg
Space Popular is directed by Lara Lesmes and Fredrik Hellberg, both alumni of the Architectural Association in London (2011). They founded the practice in Bangkok (2013) and have been based in London since 2016. Space Popular creates spaces, objects, and events in both physical and virtual space, concentrating on how the two realms can blend together.
The studio has completed buildings, exhibitions, public artworks, furniture collections, and interiors across Asia and Europe, as well as virtual architecture for the immersive internet. Clients, collaborators, and commissioners include national institutions such as MAXXI – National Museum of 21st Century Art, Rome, Italy; The Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design –ArkDes, Stockholm, Sweden; Royal Institute of British Architects, London, UK; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, South Korea; as well as independent galleries such as MAGAZIN, Vienna, Austria; and Sto Werkstatt, London, UK.
Lesmes and Hellberg both have extensive academic experience having taught architectural design studio since 2011, first at INDA, Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, since 2016 at the Architectural Association in London, and since 2020 at Daniels, Faculty of Architecture, University of Toronto. Their current MArch design and research studio at Daniels investigates visions for civic architecture in the immersive internet.
James Jensen
James Jensen is an entrepreneur committed to working with leading-edge technology and eager to solve
problems surrounding how we interact and engage with each other in physical and virtual worlds. He is
the previous creator and co-founder of the world-renowned virtual reality company The VOID. Within
the last 25 years, James founded and managed several technology companies in video streaming, social
networks, mobile games, and creative services. He has partnered with Disney, Sony Entertainment, FOX,
MGM, Intel, Microsoft, SyFy, Dreamworks, and MTV through those ventures.
He is now launching a new form of virtual reality, called hyper reality, in the form of the multi-sensory
entertainment company JUMP. JUMP will allow people to come as close to jumping and flying as the
real thing, but without all of the risk.
Jin
Lifelong passion for decentralized and p2p technology. I\’ve been in VR since DK1 was released and building web based VR experiences for 7 years. I\’m interested in the standards and file formats that become the glue for the next version of the internet. Everyday I think about how the metaverse can be less friction and more freedom.
Bryan Mehr
Started in Business in the Print Industry and always had an interest in different tech to compliment the print work we did. Got in to Augmented reality many years back now, which led me to learn how to actually develop it. I\’ve since worked as a developer and in several other capacities in the industry and am excited by the endless opportunities to be creative.