2019 Sonar+D Festival

If I am honest I love music but have never been part of the music scene. That changed when I attend the Sonar D+ Festival. Sonar is an electronic music festival in Barcelona with a growing conference attached, called Sonar D+ that explores music, creativity and technology. While the music festival is world renown and popular, the conference is still under the radar. At this point, it is the perfect combination of seeing and hearing from those at the cutting edges of arts, technology and innovation that let's you meet and have conversations with people with whom you would ordinarily not have the opportunity to engage. I'm going to review some of the more mind-blowing and mind-bending insights from the conference:New Frontiers in Spatial Computing. I was most interested in the presentation given by Timoni West, Director of XR Research at Unity Labs. We used Unity at the Petrie Museum to develop most of our applications which deployed 3D images couple with augmented reality and other gaming functionalities. The first statement that grabbed my attention was: "Game engines are world engines" - yes, a bit of PR, but in world where gaming is ubiquitous is not hard to imaging the game engines like Unity will be the place where our future worlds are designed. What's the next horizon for Unity: providing tools that allow designers to understand gravity within in virtual reality. They are also working on my multi-player functionality, which in my mind could aid collaborative international exhibition design within a gaming platform. She also spoke about creating wireframes for Magic Leap glasses and potential of 'edge computing' - rendering content in PC and streaming data to a phone (at the edge of the network) and machine learning to aid creation of content in Unity.