Upcoming events to round off the year

Executive summary

Welcome to your weekly briefing on the metaverse and spatial computing. Here are your snippets to sound smarter in meetings this week:

• Top story: Here are the upcoming events to round off the year (more below).

• India report: What can we learn from its first XR summit? (more below).

• Event: The Immersive Wire and City, University of London are working together for another networking event on 27 November. Come along!

• Competition: immersive insiders, in collaboration with Meta, ShapesXR, and IDEO, is organising the Global XR Design Challenge from 2 December to 13 January, featuring a $10,000 prize pool.

• Other stories: Niantic introduced the Niantic Spatial Platform, consolidating its Lightship and 8th Wall tools and services for Unity and web, while expanding solutions for various business applications (more stories below).

Top story

India’s first XR Summit - What’s the significance?

• Bigger conferences help to bring people together to collaborate on ideas as well as network. Bigger events dedicated to XR are a good hub for trading and business. With that in mind, the first XR summit in India was a big step.

• The Virtual Reality Centre, XTIC, and IIT Madras hosted India’s first academia-industry-supported eXtended Reality (XR) Summit, at the IIT Madras campus. The keynote for this summit was delivered by Steve LaValle, co-founder of Oculus, alongside other XR leaders.

• The conference is also important because XTIC is India’s first Research & Product Innovation Centre just for immersive technologies, and the conference builds on that specialism. It is working towards creating an innovation corridor to support AR, VR, and MR innovation for IIT Madras projects and selected students, helping with their entrepreneurial activities.

• Local experts say that IIT Madras is uniquely positioned to lead this summit, thanks to its cutting-edge Haptics Lab and the IoE Centre for VR and Haptics, both based at IIT Madras. It looks like the conference landed well, and we will see if it becomes more of a mainstay with time.

Written by Nikunj Sethi, India Reporter at the Immersive Wire

Also, I will be attending Stereopsia and Immersive Tech Week in December.

• Immersive Tech Week will be between 4 - 6 December, and I will attend to give one of the opening talks.

• Stereopsia is from 9 to 11 December, and I will be co-MCing the awards with Muki Kulhan.

• Will I see you there? Drop me a note at tom (at) immersivewire (dot) com.

Other stories

• Cavrnus expanded its Spatial Connector to support .NET and JavaScript, enabling developers to integrate multi-user collaboration, content synchronization, and real-time communication into various applications.

• immersive insiders, in collaboration with Meta, ShapesXR, and IDEO, is organising the Global XR Design Challenge from 2 December to 13 January, featuring a $10,000 prize pool.

• Niantic introduced the Niantic Spatial Platform, consolidating its Lightship and 8th Wall tools and services for Unity and web, while expanding solutions for various business applications.

• NiGHT launched a crowdfunding campaign for MeRCURY, an immersive diving mask aimed at changing perceptions of the ocean, following showcases at Sundance and the Paris Olympic Games.

• RealWear acquired Almer Technologies, a Swiss company known for ultra-compact AR headsets, with strategic and financial backing from TeamViewer, aiming to enhance wearable AR solutions for industrial applications.

• Resolution Games launched Spatial Ops, a mixed reality first-person shooter, now available on Meta Quest devices, including the Quest 3S, and as a Campaign Edition on PICO headsets.

• Tom Emrich will publish The Next Dimension, a book on AR and business growth, on 27 November.

• Virtuleap introduced Cogniclear VR, a virtual reality-based cognitive assessment tool designed to detect and monitor cognitive impairments through real-world task simulations.

• VITURE, a manufacturer of XR glasses, partnered with Best Buy to offer its products through the retailer's online platform in the United States.

Note: The Immersive Wire is run by Tom Ffiske, who also works within Accenture’s metaverse group. The contents of the newsletter should not be regarded as Accenture’s views.