2016: The Future of Augmented Reality

Every day we are inundated with information, whether personal details on social networks, recommendations and reviews on customer experience sites, or simply through the efforts of advertisers. Augmented reality attempts to bring that digital interaction to the physical world, allowing us new ways to interact with our environment. Whether through geo-coded event and location based storytelling, data visualization and overlays on physical infrastructure, or in new forms of social and tactile entertainment, augmented reality stands as the next step in human/machine interfaces, connecting our physical world seamlessly to a digital one. This panel brings some diverse people working on Augmented Reality. We will discuss how Augmented Reality is used in Entertainment, how it will change advertising, and how it can revolutionize factory and industrial environments with up to the minute vital data.

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Dusty Wright (@dustywright)

Dusty Wright is a content creator and cultural curator with over 30 years of experience in New York and Los Angeles. He is a contributor to the Huffington Post, former DJ at David Lynch’s Transcendental Music Radio, the former editor-in-chief of Creem and Prince's New Power Generation magazines as well as a writer of films, fiction, and television. He founded the smart culture web and podcasting site in 2005 and became one of the pioneers in the field. He has recently started working for FuelFX, Inc where he is director of business development in AR (augmented reality) and VR in the “edutatinment” vertical. He’s also a critically-lauded singer/songwriter who has released five solo albums and one with folk-rock quartet GIANTfingers. And before all of this he was a William Morris agent.

Miguel Sanchez (@MSanchezsWorld)

Miguel Sanchez is the Founder and Creative Director of Mass Ideation, a Bronx based Digital Creative Agency specializing in Digital Strategy, Design, Motion Graphics and Emerging Technologies. Prior to creating Mass Ideation, Miguel spent 8 years in the New York digital ad world creating high impact animated and interactive experiences for some of the biggest brands in the world. In 2009 he founded Mass Ideation where he took his experience and connections and began to lead teams in creating campaigns for brands like Pepsi, Lufthansa, Coke to name a few. Viewing augmented reality as an emerging technology with a lot of room for innovation in 2011 he created a blog to chronicle and promote the best practices, examples and companies working with the technology. Miguel is now working on a start up that uses the technology to help print connect to digital marketing called Vibrints.com.

Brian Hamilton

Brian Hamilton leads Business Development for the East Coast of the United States for DAQRI and has been at the forefront of emerging technologies for over 15 years servicing the Education, Healthcare, Financial Services, Manufacturing and Entertainment industries. Brian is focused on supporting the wearable and business communities with AR / VR in order to bring a whole new dimension to ideas and to fundamentally transform the way people interact with information. Native to Baltimore, Maryland, Brian holds a M.B.A and M.S.I.S from Penn State University and a B.S. in Economics from the University of Rochester

Anthony Mattana (@anthonymattana)

Hooke Audio Founder Behind Hooke Audio’s mobile 3D audio ingenuity is professional sound designer, composer, musician, and inventor Anthony Mattana. Cited by Live Design Magazine as a “Young Designer To Watch For,” Mattana has had a life-long love affair with sound. His holy grail being the highest quality re-creation of sound possible, he has been led to develop the entirely disruptive technology responsible for Hooke’s Mobile 3D Audio system. Recording binaural sound for high quality playback identical to the way one hears it, in 360 degrees, is only part of Mattana’s objective as Founder of Hooke. Equally important its accessibility. Anyone anywhere can easily experience Hooke’s full dimensional sound. The wave of the future is sound as we hear it — from one ear to another. Mattana is going to make it happen.

Erek Tinker (@erektinker)

Erek is the founder of Pax Solaria and an avid community organizer with an interest in the human side of the future.

A serial entrepreneur, Erek was a partner at The Spry Group - a technology development agency focused on business solutions for businesses in sustainability, research and corporate support. He previously Co-founded Distributed Enlightenment, a pre-YouTube web video content platform focused on technology and politics.

For the past year, he has been hosting Pax Solaria panels with topics ranging from optics, VR & AR technologies to the future of data-driven storytelling, rapid prototyping and building partnerships with local and international futurism communities.

He is interested in the technical, business and cultural implications of new technologies. Having also thrown live music and dance events. He loves bringing together diverse views on interesting topics to stimulate engaging conversations.