Movement in VR when not at roomscale is tricky and can often cause motion sickness in players. Siblings Martha and Henry Megarry will go through their experiments with different input techniques for the HTC Vive in their quest to solve this problem. They’ll talk about their successes and failures of using virtual ski poles to fly, using a Dance Dance Revolution mat as a controller and more! Try out their creations at the end of the talk (equipment/space permitting.)

Takeaways: Attendees will learn about what works and what doesn’t work for movement in VR. They will gain inspiration and techniques that they can use in their own VR projects.

Attendee Skill Level: Minimal- we will be showing/explaining everything we are talking about

It’s too easy to look at AI and immediately go to the extremes. AI will replace our jobs! Machines will take the fun out of marketing! What’s next? Creative spots? The same thing happened at the dawn of the Web, and look where we are today. Marketing AI is essentially providing horsepower to work that marketing people never wanted to do anyways, from sifting through massive amounts of data to develop real-time business intelligence or establishing dynamic audience targets that media planners can execute against. Hear from people who are actually using AI to better their work.

Takeaways:

• Practical, near-term uses of AI vs. the broader, unproven claims
• Currently available technologies for AI
• Organizational efficiencies gained through use of AI

Attendee Skill Level: Data and marketing analysts

With the launch of iOS11, millions of people across the globe now have access to amazing augmented reality capabilities, and Apple will continue to build a business on its framework, ARKit. But for developers and teams, there remains a lack of knowledge for how to practically and efficiently take advantage of the technology. In this session, we’ll share recent case studies on how we developed and launched two ARKit apps from prototype to public application. We’ll also share a practical tutorial on using ARKit with Unity and adapting 3D models for use in AR. Finally, we’ll share our thoughts on the future of AR app development, and showcase some up-and-coming cross-platform development tools to take advantage of both ARKit and Google’s ARCore.

Takeaways:

• Basic understanding of how ARKit / ARCore is working
• Awareness of the (increasing) approachability of building AR experiences
• Understanding what applications AR well suited for
• Effectiveness of a simple prototype to explain or sell idea to stakeholders

Attendee Skill Level: Intermediate

You have a great idea for a product, but you are not sure it is something people will use. Your idea also happens to utilize emerging technology, so users may have a limited mental model, or no mental model for your product. How do you know whether or not you should build it?

In this session you’ll learn how UX research can help you gauge the likelihood of use, and how feedback from users can help you make your product even better. Whether you’ve got an idea, a prototype, or a minimum viable product, this session is for you. Through research tips, as well as industry and Target Corporate research examples, you’ll leave with new tools to help you better understand what your product means to users.

Takeaways: By the end of the session you will know:

• How to pull apart the awe factor of new technology from a user’s true likelihood of adoption and use
• Types of questions to ask to understand how to evolve your product
• Observation versus conversation: when to use which research method

Attendee Skill Level: This session is appropriate for all skill levels, although some familiarity with research is encouraged.

According to eMarketer, 35.6 million Americans will use a voice-activated assistant device at least once a month— Continue reading “Practical Frameworks For A Voice-Enabled Future” →

In 1985, TOMY released a toy robot called Chatbot. Just a simple toy, it never got to fulfill its true destiny as a conversational, artificial intelligent, chatbot—until now. In this talk we bring this robot kicking and screaming into the 21st century. First, we replace its dusty, cold-war era circuits with internet-connected microprocessors, then we give it a brain running on a Node.js server that performs speech recognition, speech synthesis, and language understanding to make it a true chatbot. While you may not have your own Reagan-era robot to recreate this this temporal violation, you’ll learn how to build AI-powered Node.js apps for any century.

Takeaways:

• Node.js and hardware
• Using REST-based AI Services
• Building Chat Bots

Attendee Skill Level: Intro JavaScript or Node devs

Websites are seldom built with accessibility in mind. But increasingly, tech giants from Apple to Google are focusing on using artificial intelligence techniques to tackle obstacles faced by people with disabilities. This session will look at how AI is already impacting digital accessibility and what’s in the works at present. We will also take a look into how AI could automate and simplify digital accessibility in the future.

In this presentation we will cover:

1. Ways in which artificial intelligence is being used to improve the digital experience, and lives, of people living with disabilities, now and in the future.
2. The use of AI focuses on accessibility testing to reduce the level of effort with built-in standards, and keep everyone consistent.
3. The use of AI focuses on generating test code or pseudocode automatically by reading the user story acceptance criteria.
4. Codeless test automation, would create and run tests automatically on your web or mobile application without writing any code.

Takeaways:

At the conclusion of this session, participants will come away with:

• An understanding of how artificial intelligence is being used to assist those living with disabilities by companies.
• Insights on how artificial intelligence will impact accessibility testing now and in the future.
• A grasp of the challenges and triumphs with utilizing artificial intelligence in accessibility testing.

Attendee Skill Level: Introductory. This session is aimed at members of a web development team, both technical and non-technical, who want to become familiar with how AI is focusing on accessibility for people living with disabilities as well as its impact on accessibility testing.