LAYAR DAY L.A. Augmented Reality Symposium & Workshop

Friday, May 20, 2011 from 1:30 PM – 6:00 PM (PT)

http://layardayla-estw.eventbrite.com/

On Friday May 20, 2011 Layar, the world’s leader in mobile augmented reality will host LAYAR DAY L.A., a full day of hacking space and time in the heart of Los Angeles with Augmented Reality. Join us as we seek inspiration from visionary thinkers and from street-level artists, and help us make some cool AR!

Art in the Street at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA

Meet the Layar team at 10:45am at the Geffen for an informal visit to the Art in the Streets exhibition of street art. MOCA opens at 11am and admission is $10 at the door; just show up! [website]

Workshop: Hacking Space and Time in AR

Layar Day Symposium on AR and Art

Following the workshop, join us from 3:00 – 6:00pm for an afternoon with some of the most visionary and creative minds in augmented reality. We have an incredible lineup of speakers including noted author Bruce Sterling, Layar co-founder Maarten Lens-Fitzgerald, Scott Fisher of USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, and Dutch artist Sander Veenhof. To reserve your place, choose ‘Symposium Attendee’ ticket.

 

Venues:

The LAYAR DAY L.A. workshop and symposium is hosted by Art Center College of Design, and will be held in the Faculty Dining Room at ACCD’s Hillside Campus, 1700 Lida St., Pasadena, CA from 1:30-6:00pm. [map]

The informal tour of Art in the Streets will meet at 10:45am at the Geffen Contemporary [map]

 

Speaker bios:

Bruce Sterling, author, journalist, editor, and critic, was born in 1954. Best known for his ten science fiction novels, he also writes short stories, book reviews, design criticism, opinion columns, and introductions for books ranging from Ernst Juenger to Jules Verne. His nonfiction works include THE HACKER CRACKDOWN: LAW AND DISORDER ON THE ELECTRONIC FRONTIER (1992), TOMORROW NOW: ENVISIONING THE NEXT FIFTY YEARS (2003), and SHAPING THINGS (2005).

He is a contributing editor of WIRED magazine and writes a Wired.com weblog. During 2005, he was the “Visionary in Residence” at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. In 2008 he was the Guest Curator for the Share Festival of Digital Art and Culture in Torino, Italy, and the Visionary in Residence at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam.

He has appeared in ABC’s Nightline, BBC’s The Late Show, CBC’s Morningside, on MTV and TechTV, and in Time, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Fortune, Nature, I.D., Metropolis, Technology Review, Der Spiegel, La Repubblica, and many other venues.

Maarten Lens-FitzGerald is Co-founder and General Manager of Layar. A company at the forefront of the emerging medium of Augmented Reality, with over 1 million users of the Layar Reality Browser, and thousands of developers creating AR experiences on the platform. Maarten started as an Internet professional in 1993. He helped national and international companies take their first steps online. Later he developed permission based strategies and campaign concepts focusing more on the marketing side of things. He moved on to mobile in 2007 when he started Mobile Monday Amsterdam and later SPRXmobile where Layar was born. In 2008 Maarten was diagnosed with cancer and become know as patient 2.0. He shared all his experiences through twitter and his blog maartenjourney.com. Maarten declared himself ex-patient 2.0 in the summer of 2009. Maarten is married and lives with his wife and two cats in Amsterdam.

Scott Fisher is a Professor and founding Chair of the Interactive Media Division at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. He is a media artist and interaction designer whose work focuses primarily on interactive environments and technologies of presence. He is well known for his pioneering work in the field of Virtual Reality at NASA. Fisher’s media industry experience includes Atari, Paramount, and his own companies Telepresence Research and Telepresence Media. A graduate of MIT’s Architecture Machine Group (now Media Lab), he has taught at MIT, UCLA, UCSD, and was a Project Professor at Keio University in Japan. His work has been recognized internationally through numerous invited presentations, professional publications and in the popular media. In addition, he has been an Artist in Residence at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies and his stereoscopic imagery and artwork has been exhibited in the US, Japan and Europe.

Sander Veenhof studied computer science at the VU university in Amsterdam and then graduated at the ‘instable media’ department of the Rietveld Art Academy in Amsterdam. He works at the cross section of these domains. Using his in depth knowledge of emerging technologies to shape works of art that extend our spatial perception as well as wipe out the old fashioned assumption that virtual reality isn’t real. Even though his virtual works incorporate features on infinite dimensions, such as the worlds’ biggest interactive sculpture “Biggar” consisting of 7 billion virtual blocks encapsulating the whole globe, at the same time his virtual creations claim their physical space and moments of time just as real world phenomena, as was the crucial element of the first ever augmented reality flashmob at the Dam square in Amsterdam. In his recent project, Veenhof focuses on transforming the geographically attached virtual space into a multi-user creative environment, thereby allowing viewers to become participants and contributors. The 2.0 principle applied to the shared augmented reality virtual space.

Veenhof creates experimental AR artworks, presents and lectures about his findings and is part of the Manifest.AR collective.

Gene Becker is a leader in emerging technologies that blend the physical and digital worlds. As Layar’s US-based AR Strategist, Gene is responsible for building the creative ecosystem for the Layar augmented reality platform, working with brands, creative agencies, developers and grassroots AR enthusiasts. Prior to joining Layar, Gene was a director at Hewlett-Packard, where he led advanced research and business development for web-based mobile and ubiquitous computing, co-founded a cloud services business, and led worldwide R&D for extreme gaming and mobility brand Voodoo PC. He is the founder of strategy consultancy Lightning Laboratories, a co-founder of the ARDevCamp unconference and organizer of the Ubiquitous Media Studio meetup. Gene studied engineering and computer science at MIT and Stanford, and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.