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Mindtrek 2018

In this post, I will be talking about my experiences from the two-day Mindtrek tech conference, which I had a chance to attend. I listened to different speeches about immersive tech, open world, and smart city during these two days.

Day 1
The first speech that I attended to was a keynote speech from Amanda Cosco: Augmented and Virtual Reality Changing the Fashion Industry. She spoke about different aspects of how VR and AR are currently used in different fashion brands to enhance shopping experiences and give a chance to save time and resources on shopping. The speech was quite interesting for me, especially when it came to what the future of a virtualized fashion industry might be. The most fascinating aspect was that it will be possible to go shopping in a VR environment for example to New York without even leaving home.

Amanda's Cosco keynote speech.

The next speech I attended to was about Gamification, which was one of the academic speeches. It was too advanced topics for me though since it was more business oriented. However, I found it interesting on how an extended mobile app with a public display can encourage walking, which was one of the topics there. 

The next speech was one of the smart city topics: How to Connect Cities Digitally? The case of Finland and Estonia. The speech had quite an analytical angle to it and was mostly about Estonia's technological achievements in cities. It is impressive on how Estonia has managed to technologically grow in past couple of years. As the speaker mentioned - now it is even possible to marry and divorce with electronic ID online. There are also driverless minibusses under development, which will be tested soon in Tallin and might be the future public transportation in Estonia. Since I am from Latvia - the neighboring country - it is interesting to see how much more technologically advanced Estonia is than Latvia at this point.

One of the speeches I was looking forward to was Microsoft's open and secure cloud platform for new digital services, however, I was a bit disappointed that this speech took more of an advertising angle. Nonetheless, I learned that Microsoft is investing more and more resources for open source technologies, which I believe will encourage some large-scale technology advance in the next few years.

The last speech from the first day I attended was The role of AI in City Planning. It was only 15 minutes long speech, but I got an insight about what aspects are used in planning a new project for a city (such as the behaviour of citizens, air quality, traffic etc.), which AI would be able to handle quite independently in a very near future.

During the breaks, I went around a couple of stands to learn about different companies and the most interesting one to learn about was Elias robot, which helps students to learn foreign languages in an engaging way.

With the Elias robot.






Day 2
The day started with some sad news that the president of Liberland will not be present for the Liberland: Decentralised Autonomous Government speech. However, another representative gave the speech and it was the most entertaining (and hilarious) speech of the event for me. Liberland is a country founded in 2015 by Vit Jedlicka and has around half a million citizens. It is located between Serbia and Croatia and is 7 square kilometers wide. The only country, which has recognized Liberland is Somaliland at the moment. Before the event I did not hear about this country, however, the whole concept about creating your own country was quite fascinating to me. Liberland is making quite big plans for the future and I am curious to see what will it become in the next few decades.

The second speech I went to was From 30 Days in VR to Xdays in XR, where the speaker told about his experiences of being in a virtual environment for 30 days. This speech was one of my favorite ones and it was engaging to listen to experiences that the guy went through and revelations after doing the experiment. After hearing the speech I believe that VR and XR will soon be a helpful tool in minimizing immobility in everyday life.



Overall the experience of Mindtrek was quite positive for me and it was beneficial to be in an environment of professionals. My goal was to learn about what is the current news in technology, especially immersive tech since I did not know much about it.  The only objection of this event is that it was too business oriented and in my opinion not as suitable for students as for professionals in the field.

To conclude, here is a piece of art from my fellow students, which was inspired by Mindtrek:






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