A six-month journey across Europe by our RDI Lead and Technology Expert, Santeri Saarinen, filled with XR events, panels, and collaborations. This post highlights key discussions, groundbreaking innovations, and meaningful exchanges that shaped the immersive technology community in 2024.
Text and images by Santeri Saarinen
After coming home from Brussels and Stereopsia, I can finally relax after an interesting 6 months spent in different events around Europe. I’ve been luck enough to be invited to multiple excellent panel discussions, have had the chance to sample interesting new content and devices, and most importantly, have had multiple great exchanges with friends old and new.
I would like to thank all of the organizations and events that invited me, and the great people I had a chance to collaborate with!
All started in the middle of June in Tampere at the Imagine The Metaverse event, where I gave the opening keynote on the history and future of immersive technologies. With Tampere leading the charge on city level plans for introducing these technologies in multiple fields, it was a great opportunity to start this journey from my home town.
In the end of June I traveled to Munich for the Festival Der Zukunft, where I was invited by Wolfgang Kerler to participate in a panel with the topic “Unveiling the Industrial Metaverse: Revolutionizing Manufacturing with Europe in the Lead” together with Sebastian Becker from Blockchain Bundesverband, Annika Hauptvogel from Siemens AG and Heiko von de Gracht from KPMG. Our discussion was, and the examples from the industry brought great ideas to the front.
From Munich, I continued to Tampere to CHI PLAY 2024 through collaboration with Shiva Jabari and Oguz Buruk to participate in a panel on the topic of “Identity in New Realities: Future trajectories for forming identities and social lives in extended realities”, ending the industry event on the first day of CHI PLAY with Ella Dagan from Google, Ansgar Depping from Meta, Nikoletta Zampeta Legaki from Rovio and Mattia Thibault from Tampere University. Though our panel suffered some reduction in size due to last minute emergencies, the conversation was still excellent, showcasing how real panel discussions have participants riffing on each other’s comments instead of just 1on1 Q&A with the moderator.
After Tampere, it was time for Vienna. First, I was invited by Melanie Krautwald from Business Finland to the Finnish-Austrian Innovation Night to moderate a panel on “Integrating Metaverse technologies in the industry” in the most beautiful residence of the Finnish Ambassador Nina Vaskunlahti. I was happy to lead the discussion through our slightly hurried timeslot, but still managing to get everyone involved in the discussion, which continued over food and drinks later on. I was joined by Alissa Burova from Tampere University, Matthias Grabner from AI Austria, Harald Sehrschön from Fill and Markus Wiedemann from Varjo.
The activities in Vienna continued at Augmented World Expo EU, in a great panel on “XR Ecosystems Punching Above Their Weight” together with Luis Bravo Martins from XRSI Europe, Cederik Haverbeke from XR Valley and Madara Kalnina-Kalnmale from VRARA Baltics Chapter. Our discussion highlighted the colorful advances that the smaller countries around Europe have been working on around immersive technologies and how we should collaborate across borders to make Europe stronger together.
For me, November started with a trip to Warsaw to join the Horizon4Poland event, where I participated in a panel discussion on “Are VR & XR the Technologies of the Future” together with Dominika Duda from Venture Café Warsaw Foundation, Andrzej Horoch from Connected Realities, Jakub Kraft from Unicorn VR World, Marcin Spiewak from Lukasiewicz – PIT, Rafal Siejca from Mazer Inc and Patrick Bourdot from EuroXR. This was probably the longest panel discussion I’ve ever participated in, stretching around 2 hours, but on the other hand there topic was interesting enough to keep everyone’s attention over the period. And if I counted correctly, we ended up with more audience than we started with.
After Poland, it was time for our own event as MatchXR came around. We started the activities with the grand opening of our Immersive Sustainability Lad, with our honored guests Tom Furness from Virtual World Society and Ilona Lundström, the Chair of Metropolia’s Board of Directors. I was able to take more of a background role, mainly hosting our friends and making sure everything ran smoothly during the seminar of Necoverse project, organized by Ilkka Rytkölä from Meyer Turku, Seppo Tikkanen from DIMECC and Mika Luimula from Turku UAS, and the Finnish-Swedish XR Workshop organized by Jeannette Spühler from Vinnova and Jani Jokitalo from Business Finland.
During MatchXR itself, we had excellent demos from a lage number of companies like SeeTrue Technologies, HTC Vive, Virtual Dawn, Ikkio, Doublepoint, Fynd Reality, Formlös and many, many others. Our seminar programme also attracted large audience during the day with interesting discussions on trustworthy AI, Privacy in the XR field and sustainable gaming industry. Highlights of the nights were fireside chats on startup funding landscape by Urho Konttori from Distance Technologies and Petri Rajahalme from FOV Ventures and on path of XR for better tomorrow by Tom Furness and Damon Hernandez from Mixx Reality.
After MatchXR, it was time for the last leg of the journey. First I made my way to Rotterdam for Immersive Tech Week, where I participated as a mentor in the IMPULSE program organized by Federico Anselmi and the rest of his team, meeting with many interesting companies. I also participated in a panel discussion titled “Strategies for Building, Scaling and Funding Immersive Ventures” together with Leland Hedges from Pico XR, Rob Whitehead from Improbable, Silke Schmidt from XR Hub Bavaria and Lars Crama from Up! Rotterdam, moderated by my colleague from XR4Europe BoD, Sönke Kirchhof from INVR.Space.
From Rotterdam, I went straight to Brussels for Stereopsia for a double booking. Firstly we had an excellent discussion on the Finnish Metaverse Strategy with Jani Vallirinne from University of Oulu and Christoph Runde from Virtual Dimension Center. Even though this was not the first time I was discussing the topic, it still opened new avenues to consider and exciting questions from the audience as well. Finland is still leading by example in this field.
On the other hand, HXRC was invited to showcase our GameRAT project on a shared booth for the EMIL-XR project. With the brunt of the work done by our development team leads Juho Puurunen and Emmi Isokirmo, I was freed to roam around the event looking for new contacts. After Stereopsia, we were invited to visit VRT broadcasting company in Brussels through our collaboration in the Future Media Hubs network. Thanks to Robin Rymenans and Gregg Young for showing us around.
Along with all the panels the best part of this past six months was meeting with many old colleagues in the field as well as many new friends, with whom I was glad to have excellent conversations on various topics. Shout out to Isabel de Peuter-Rutten, Jeremy Dalton, Ricard Gras, Michael Barngrover, Ori Inbar, Juha Pihanen, Matti Gröhn, George Campbell, Muki Kulhan, Atilla Arda Besen, Jonathan Hale, Oliver Schreer, Camille Donegan, Alina Kadlubsky, Dace Campbell, Fredrik Trella, Anders Carlson, Rigmor Baraas, Maxime Leroy, Liya Safina, Kevin El Haddad, Alexandra Gerard, Alexandros Vigkos, Adelina Dinu, and all of the other people I forgot 🙂
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