Matthew Dias Announced at VRARA Boston Chapter President

We are thrilled to welcome Matthew Dias as the VRARA Boston Chapter President!

Matt first developed a passion for AR while working at a digital agency in Boston, creating interactive mobile apps for visitors in public venues.  He later founded Lingar, a mobile AR app for museum goers with curated digital content, activated by geolocation and object recognition.

He then joined Australia’s JigSpace, as Director of Sales and Marketing for North America. Highlighted annually for ARKit in Apple’s WWDC, JigSpace is a creator platform for enterprise clients to easily deploy interactive 3D and AR product demonstrations.

Matt currently serves as a Mixed Reality Solutions Specialist for SphereGen Technologies in New Haven, CT providing interactive training programs for manufacturers using the HoloLens.

When he’s not in the Industrial Metaverse, he is an advisor to Reading XR, a company on a mission to improve literacy rates through early intervention by harnessing the power of eye-tracking systems in the HoloLens 2.

“I look forward to helping to grow VRARA’s Boston Chapter community by connecting and building relationships with thought leaders in spatial computing. Arguably, Boston has some of the best minds, and innovators in the AR/VR ecosystem and fostering collaboration between individuals, intuitions and brands to advance our industry will be foremost.”- Matthew Dias

Call for Speakers! VRARA Enterprise Summit at LiveWorx Taking Place on June 10th in Boston

More info about the Summit and sign up to Speak here

The VRARA Enterprise Summit will take place on June 10th at LiveWorx in Boston. The full-day event will bring together the best thought-leaders in VR/AR from across the globe. Presentations from industry leaders will include VR/AR in the Enterprise, Training, 5G, and much more.

VRARA is the VR/AR Association, an international organization designed to foster collaboration between innovative companies and people in the VR and AR ecosystem that accelerates growth, research and education, and develops best practices and guidelines. VRARA has over 4200 companies and 25,000 professionals registered, over 50 chapters globally, and 20 industry committees. VRARA programs & initiatives are designed to accelerate anyone’s growth, knowledge, and connections.

LiveWorx is the world's most respected digital transformation conference for the enterprise. Experience the most innovative and disruptive technologies — VR/AR, IoT, machine learning, blockchain, robotics and more. 6500+ technologists are expected. LiveWorx is June 10-13.

More info about the Summit and sign up to Speak here

Join NYC Media Lab for networking events to learn about the Verizon 5G EdTech $100k Challenge. RSVP Today!

Submit your application here

Imagine a hologram teacher, who can beam in to educate on lessons they are experts in. Imagine 5G-enabled VR that can help students with diverse learning needs engage. Imagine high speed capabilities that encourages students to connect to peers worldwide. The Verizon 5G EdTech Challenge is a nationwide open call to find cutting-edge educational technologies that will transform middle school education. 10 Challenge winners will each be awarded a $100K grant, and will partner with Verizon to develop and test their solutions in the 5G environment starting in spring 2019.

NYC Media Lab invites you to join several upcoming information and networking events. There, you'll meet leadership from Verizon, learn about the potential of 5G, and explore how to craft a proposal. 

Join us in NYC:

Thursday, November 8th (6PM-8PM) at Alley Powered by Verizon. RSVP: http://bit.ly/AlleyNYC

Friday, November 9th. Ideation Session at The New School. RSVP: http://bit.ly/5GEdTechIdeation

Join us in Boston: 

Tuesday, November 6th (6:30PM-8:30PM) at Alley Powered by Verizon. RSVP: http://bit.ly/AlleyBoston

Thursday, November 8th (4:30PM-6:00PM) at Harvard Graduate School of Education. RSVP: http://bit.ly/HarvardGSE

Join us in Washington DC:

Wednesday, November 7th (6PM-8PM) at Alley Powered by Verizon. RSVP: http://bit.ly/AlleyDC

Start the application today...

Let us know you're interested in the Challenge. On Verizon 5G EdTech Challenge application page, submit your team, organization or university details. It'll only take a couple minutes: 

https://www.5gedtechchallenge.com/pages/application.html

Get your Company Featured in our VR AR Ecosystem Reports

VRARA's 50+ Chapters are producing industry reports on the regional VR/AR ecosystems to promote companies and organizations involved with immersive technologies and media from NYC to Sydney, across the world.  The reports will be promoted by VRARA and our partners reaching potentially a 1M audience. 

Would you be interested to have your company featured in these report or sponsor the report? If yes, then let us know at info@thevrara.com 

Each report will specifically highlight the following:

• Size of the local ecosystem market

• Number of relevant companies in the ecosystem

• List of companies and company info (size: number of employees, revenue; vertical, customers)

• Reasons why company is based in the local ecosystem

• Needs and hopes from and for the ecosystem

If you have any questions or are interested in being featured or sponsor, please reply to this email or email info@thevrara.com

Join us for the Mixed Reality Experience at the Smart Manufacturing Experience event in Boston

For discounted conference passes, email info@thevrara.com

The Smart Manufacturing Experience will be held from April 30 to May 2, 2018, at the Boston Convention Center.

Interactive experiences

The Mixed Reality Experience put on by the VR/AR Association, PTC, and Mechdyne will let you engage with virtual, augmented, and mixed reality technologies to see how machines, systems, and data can be integrated. VR and AR demonstrations will show applications of machine learning in live factory analytics, virtual machines, and modeling and simulation.

Workshops at the Smart Manufacturing Experience will expose attendees to technologies from the show floor, as well as innovations in additive manufacturing, automation, and more.

Speaking of the show floor, exhibitors will also be presenting small group sessions called “Knowledge Bars.” This allows people to ask questions and get answers that directly connect available technologies to their needs.

The Learning Lab at the Smart Manufacturing Experience will include presentations on trends, business cases, and new products that can benefit businesses.

A team competition will enable students to design a Mars Rover to carry out two missions: carrying a payload over rocky terrain and carrying a payload over sandy terrain. The team with the most creative logo will be recognized.

Preview the AR/VR Content at LiveWorx Conference

More info here

Learn about the competitive advantages that AR, VR and MR offer (including enhanced sales & marketing efforts, improved service margins, optimized manufacturing operations and streamlined product design) and best practices to implement them in your organization at LiveWorx. Below is a sampling of the content you'll find on AR/VR technologies this year:

AR Strategy for Differentiating After-Sales Support
Monday, June 18th | 11:30am - 12:15pm
Learn how OCME, an Italian machinery producer in food & beverage processing, defined and validated an AR strategy to transform their after-sales business, making it more profitable and competitive. In just four weeks, OCME developed and launched two PoC projects: the first leveraging AR with rich 3D content for the Microsoft Hololens, and the second for RealWear HTM-1 with Assisted Reality where 3D augmentation is not presented at all.

3 Takeaways To Deploy AR Projects On Time and Under Budget
Monday, June 18th | 2:30pm - 3:15pm
You will see live demos and videos of select deployed AR projects and participate in a lively interactive discussion.

Bringing AR to Your Business: How Hard is It?
Tuesday, June 19th | 9:00am - 9:45am
Many companies are either at the start of their AR journey or are figuring out how to get started. How can you accelerate the process? And, how hard is it to take and repurpose your existing content– CAD, documents, data– and generate usable AR experiences? This session will provide an overview of Fujitsu’s first steps on their AR journey. Discover how AR is an important and scalable part of their business strategy and how easy it was to implement solutions using Studio.

Pioneering Digital Transformation in the Chemical Industry: A Praxair AR Story
Tuesday, June 19th | 3:15pm - 4:00pm
Praxair, the third largest gas products company in the world, operates in a mature, hyper-competitive industry. Praxair formed “Praxair Digital,” to drive digital transformation across their enterprise. Praxair focused their initial AR strategy on leveraging ThingWorx to proactively identify potential failure points, determining if they could more quickly service their equipment, and understanding if they could make their service technicians more effective with less training. Applicable to any industry, this session will share leading best practices for identifying high-value AR use cases, securing buy-in from key stakeholders, building a business case for AR, deploying AR technology and identifying new AR opportunities for the business.

Lessons Learned: Bringing AR to the Enterprise
Wednesday, June 20th | 11:30am - 12:15pm
Join panel members as they discuss their implementation of augmented reality, specifically what use cases they targeted and why, and how they brought AR into their businesses. If you are getting started on your AR journey, then this panel is a great way to learn from others.

Recap of VRARA Boston Chapter Event

By Mike Festa, VRARA Boston Chapter President

BOSTON – Feb 7th: The Boston VRARA chapter kicked off with a launch event hosted at the Wayfair global headquarters. Despite a snowstorm, there were about 70 prospective members in attendance. Crazy Dough’s pizza was well received, and beer was flowing from the Wayfair taps.

Johnny Monsarrat fired up the crowd with his talk on AR gaming and building the successor to Pokémon Go. He built his first gaming company, Turbine, back when the internet was the new thing and now he wants to do it again utilizing the next platform, AR.

Shrenik Sadalgi, mixed reality apps team lead at Wayfair Next, explained why the largest online retailer of home goods wants to get in early on the action for AR and VR. These technologies are going to revolutionize the way that people shop from home and is going to increase the speed at which this segment shifts online, away from brick and mortar.

John Werner, a VP at Meta and organizer for AR in Action, showed how the first annual AR in Action conference was inspired by TED talks and created more than 70 videos. That event drew in more than 1,000 people and put Boston on the map as a capital of all things AR.

Mike Festa, chapter president, ran through the benefits of VRARA membership and spoke about how we are going to connect our well established local community in the VR/AR space to the rest of the world. In addition, he highlighted that Boston is a hub of cross functional technologies (biotech, education, architecture, defense, e-commerce) that will all be able to enhance their workflow through the adoption of VR and AR.

At the end of the night, there were several demos to try. Some of the devices include the Meta 2 headset, Google Tango in the Phab 2 Pro, the Occipital Bridge headset, the Oculus Rift, the HTC Vive, and a custom built 3D scanner for rapidly digitizing products. We hope that everyone had a great time and look forward to the next event: Boston VR meetup on February 22nd.

More photos here.