The Pitch Room Closing Keynote - Make it Spatial: How to Succeed in XR

XR is no longer the future–it’s here. Hardware is widely available, tools have matured, and AI has removed much of the hard work. XR is now ready for almost any use case.

Conquering the mainstream is up to XR builders: designers, developers, and hackers who master a domain and know their audience so well they create spatial experiences that are irresistible. They shift the center of gravity away from platforms and investors. They own the user relationship. They bring XR to every person on Earth.

About the Speaker:

Ori Inbar is an XR pioneer and visionary who has spent the past two decades building the XR ecosystem as an entrepreneur, event organizer, investor, and mentor to hundreds of XR companies. He is the founder of Super Ventures, an early-stage AR fund, and AWE (Augmented World Expo), the world’s leading XR conference and expo, founded in 2010.

In 2009, Ori co-founded Ogmento and served as CEO; the company was acquired by Apple in 2015. Earlier in his career, he was Senior Vice President of Solution Marketing for SAP’s platform. Before SAP, he joined TopTier Software, where he led the development and product of more than 15 business applications until TopTier was acquired by SAP in 2001.

Digital Twins for Disaster Risk Reduction: A Collaboration Between Academia, Industry and the Community.

The transition from 2D maps to digital twins that incorporate three spatial dimensions (x, y, z) and time (t) as the fourth has marked a giant leap in data analysis and visualization. But how are digital twins being used in disaster risk reduction? In this presentation we introduce the California Hydro Twin Project, a collaboration between the UC Berkeley Center for Smart Infrastructure, industrial partners in Europe, and a flood-prone community in California. This collaborative multidisciplinary project develops a digital hydro-twin to simulate flood depth and water velocity across urbanized landscapes, accounting for hydraulic drag of buildings and other structures, and accounting for assets vulnerable to flood damage.

About the Speaker:

Dr. Anna Serra-Llobet is an environmental scientist who works at the University of California Berkeley Center for Catastrophic Risk Management. Her research concerns global approaches to flood risk management at the interface between natural and social processes. She also teaches a course on fundamentals of Flood Risk Management (LDARCH 229) and a course on Disaster Risk Resilience and Adaptation (ENVECON 7), with focus on different natural and human made hazards. Her research interests are on the use of digital twins and new technologies for environmental planning and climate adaptation, flood risk management policies and governance, residual risk of extreme floods, environmental justice, floods after fire, and nature-based solutions.

Updates on Medical Extended Reality from AMXRA

The American Medical Extended Reality Association is the medical society dedicated to the advancement of XR in the field of healthcare. This presentation will provide an overview of the organizations efforts, what we have already done and what is on the horizon for medical XR, with panelists:

Anna Valutkevich, Publishing Editor - Journal of the AMXRA, SagePUB
Dr. Kate Donovan, Director of Clinical Innovation and Education - Boston Children’s Hospital
Chenzhe Cao, MPH, Principal Technology Strategist - Mass General Brigham

About the Speaker:

Haipeng (Mark) Zhang DO, MMSc, FAMIA, is the President of the American Medical Extended Reality Association. He was previously the Associate Chief Medical Information Officer of Digital Innovation and the Medical Director of the Digital Innovation Hub at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Associate Program Director of the Clinical Informatics and Innovation Fellowship at Mass General Brigham, Palliative Care consultant at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and Instructor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

He is the founder of Palliative Care Fast Facts for iOS and Android mobile applications, the co-founder of Cake, a venture backed company focused on advance care planning, and also founded and was the first president of American Medical Informatics Association Clinical Informatics Fellows (ACIF), the national organization for clinical informatics fellows. He co-founded the Journal of Medical Extended Reality, the first peer reviewed journal dedicated to medical extended reality.

An Introduction to High Reliability Organizing

In 1988, a report commissioned by the US Navy observed that “when organizations operate technologies that are beneficial, costly and hazardous, they are pressed to take on goals of failure-free operations. There is a class of organizations that have accepted such goals and nearly always achieve them.” The findings of this study, and similar ones in nuclear power plants and electric grids, demonstrated that certain organizational features are associated with sustained reliability. The lessons of these “high-reliability organizations” are now in wide application from anesthesia and oil exploration to aviation and wildland fire response. This presentation will briefly introduce high-reliability organizing and its various fundamental concepts and applications.

About the Speaker:

Dr. Peter Martelli’s research focuses on organizational errors and the interdisciplinary application of models, such as High Reliability Organizing (HRO), to promote system safety and reliability. He has worked on various aspects of these issues across industries, including healthcare, wildland fire and emergency response, oil exploration, and civil and industrial infrastructure. He is an Associate Professor of Healthcare Administration and of Strategy & International Business (by courtesy) at Suffolk University, and an Advisory Board member and former Co-Director of the Center for Catastrophic Risk Management at the University of California-Berkeley.

Extended Realities: Dreaming as a Design Framework

Extended Realities: Dreaming as a Design Framework explores immersive experiences through the nature of dreams: spatial, sensorial, and collectively inhabited states where meaning emerges through presence rather than explanation. The talk introduces the real three-body problem of extended realities, centered on the ongoing negotiation between the physical human body and its virtual or extended counterpart, shaped through performative action and attention. Dreaming is proposed as a narrative design framework for XR—one that understands immersive experiences as lived and remembered states, carried forward through memory and shared perception.

About the Speaker:

María Laura Ruggiero is an Argentine filmmaker and immersive narrative designer whose work explores the nature of reality through extended and hybrid media. She is a PhD researcher in Immersive Design at the University of Buenos Aires, focusing on perception, presence, and the habitability of extended realities.She has presented and taught internationally at institutions and festivals including MIT Reality Hack, Berlinale Talents, SXSW, and MUTEK, and is the founder of SeirenFilms and StoryHackers Lab, platforms dedicated to research-driven experiential storytelling from a Global South perspective. She recently opened LÚCIDA, a new research and exploration space in Buenos Aires, developed collaboratively as a platform for experimentation across art, science, and technology.