At the end of this month, the Immersive Tech Week will take place in De Doelen in Rotterdam, organized by VR Days Europe. Rocking Reality will report on this event on site, and spoke with initiator Benjamin de Wit prior to this. “We want to explore VR storytelling.”
Benjamin de Wit, initiator of the Immersive Tech week, originally trained as an actor. “I played with Toneelgroep Amsterdam for six years. When I stopped acting I became active in the online world. At one point I put on VR glasses, and I immediately saw an analogy with the stage. It is an artificial world in which the audience is not looking at me, but where I am the audience. This turns everything upside down, this is the future!”
That idea first led to the idea of making a theater performance with VR, but that eventually became a full event, the first edition of the Dutch VR Days in 2015. “VR has been used in all kinds of disciplines for quite some time, so we could we bring people together from various sectors, from healthcare and art to industry and science.”
Progressive
Initially, the Dutch VR Days were set up as a one-off event, but the influx was so great, with visitors from ten different countries, that new editions soon came into view. “In that world you have to deal with very innovative, progressive people, I wanted to do something with that. And that became organizing a moment for those people to meet each other.”
In recent years, this has grown into an event that covers the full breadth of the field, from industries to art and museums, with practical applications, established providers and start-ups. “The common thread is the desire to investigate VR storytelling.” This year, for example, will focus on two creative projects involving film and dance.
Church of VR
“Creativity and innovation are the driving force behind the event, and we want to cover the subject in its entirety,” he says. For this, visitors can go to sixty substantive sessions, or the Church of VR, where 24 creative works are shown. There is also a funding market where talent is linked to funding. There is also a playground that is open to the general public. “Due to the Metaverse hype, now is the time to go beyond just business to business.
Benjamin de Wit has been working on this subject since 2015, which makes him one of the pioneers in the field of VR in the Netherlands. He himself is a bit more modest about this: “At that moment I even thought that we were already too late!” He has seen the market change considerably in those years. “The most important change in my view is free roaming, so moving through space with good hand and eye tracking.”
Expanding
According to him, a limitation is still the relatively clumsy hardware, such as large headsets. “Progress in this area is still limited. Distribution can also be improved. But what you do see is that in areas where VR has existed for some time, the applications are only getting more and better. It may be slow, but it continues steadily, it is expanding more and more, especially in professional applications.”
The Metaverse will also be discussed in Rotterdam. “But actually that has always been a subject of the region, but it was not called that at the time. So the concept of interconnected worlds is not new.”
He concludes: “I hope that after visiting the Immersive Tech Days, people will realize that much more is possible than they previously thought. Me That they go home with a sea of possibilities and inspiration, whether it’s for an operating room, the police or a game. It’s fundamentally different from working on your phone or computer. It is a new media universe.”
