Match XR 2021 was bigger and better than ever – but it couldn’t have become that without our Communications and Production trainee, Iida Toimela.
Text by Iida Toimela
Hi there! I’m Iida Toimela, and in autumn 2021 I worked as a Communications and production trainee at the Helsinki XR Center.
I had previous experience with events in the fields of IT and gaming, so of course I had to apply when I saw that Helsinki XR Center was looking for a trainee. I didn’t have to come from very far either – my Metropolia Culture Management degree program is located just on the other side of the Arabia Creative Campus.
Making Match XR 2021
As a Communications and production trainee, my main task was being a part of making the Match XR 2021 event happen. This year it was bigger than ever, held over two days and in three different locations: in VR Pavilion Finland on the AltspaceVR platform, as a YouTube stream, and as a small live event at the HXRC venue. This was a great experience for me, since hybrid or entirely virtual events might be the future of event management, after all.
While I had experience with event production, the XR field itself was mostly new to me. While I started out merely googling terms and companies, by the end of it I ended up understanding the basics of metaverse, knowing the top dogs in the Finnish XR industry, and even knowing a thing or two about the hardware!
The other part of my internship was what I call “Adobe bootcamp”: learning new tools and creating materials with them for both social media and the live venue.
Just so things wouldn’t get boring, I also spent time editing the stream videos and adding subtitles to them. While it’s a lot of work, it’s great to get to contribute to accessibility like this! You can watch the videos on the HXRC YouTube channel, or simply check out the one below:
Afterword
Metropolia students! I would like to see more interest from you towards HXRC, because this is an awesome way to get in touch with a future industry. And it’s so closeby, too!
As I said before, I expect events to become more hybrid versions of themselves – maybe using augmented realities, maybe cirtual venues. Culture managers should be on top of that. So, come check out the Helsinki XR Center, try out the different headsets, and learn about the new possibilities!
The HXRC team after Day 1 of Match XR 2021.
Photo by Lauri Tiainen.
To see previous news about our trainees’ projects, head over to the Trainee news section.
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