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Catherine D Henry: Where XR will take us next | Blend Media

Thea Parnell / over 3 years ago

In our recent webinar, Where Can Immersive Tech Take Us In 2021, Damian Collier, Blend Media Founder and CEO, discusses the future of immersive tech with a panel of esteemed guests that include: Joanna Popper, Global Head of Virtual Reality for Location-Based Entertainment HP, XR Jobs Supporter; Karl Woolley, Global Real-Time Director, Framestore Immersive and IA; Jeremy Dalton, Head of VR/AR, PwC UK; and Catherine D Henry, XR Consultant Enterprise, Media and Advertising.

In this excerpt, Catherine shares with the panel what excites her about immersive tech in 2021, watch the full webinar here.

Catherine D Henry, XR Consultant Enterprise, Media and Advertising: When we talk about immersive experiences, I see that there’s going to be an inversion of what we’re doing. For example, I work with Periscape VR which has put towers up, in a box, that sit in the middle of the floor in an airport and you can put headsets on. This can be transported anywhere, into malls or a store. That plus Cleanbox means that immersive experiences can be transported all over the place but on a smaller scale. 

Art spaces like Art-Tech House and others are merging physical and virtual cultural spaces, and I think a lot of museums and cultural installations, as well as a lot of private franchises, need to look at how they bring that level of entertainment into peoples homes. Before (the pandemic) you had a place where people can physically meet, and I think that will come back, but the awareness has turned people on to thinking we need to create a virtual space where people can meet, or create a virtual experience where we transport people to our worlds when those aren’t accessible. The Tribeca (virtual) Film Festival is a great example of this.

“So I think we’re in a transition phase where people are thinking how can we innovate, expand our offering and potentially raise our revenues - a very interesting inflexion point. Are we there yet, no. I think a lot of companies are still trying to figure out what innovation looks like, what form it should take and looking at their existing resource and trying to balance that out."

The webinar is hosted by Blend Market, the first immersive marketplace dedicated to connecting clients with a global community of thousands of skilled creators and solution-providers with hundreds of relevant skills across the entire Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), 3D and Mixed Reality (MR) spectrum. Find out more about Blend Market here or contact us at hello@blend.media