BEHIND THE SCENES

Caitlin Robinson is a South African immersive media producer with an early background in traditional docs for the likes of BBC and Al Jazeera. Her documentary portrait series Watertight is a 3D printed specimen collection of New Yorkers and the homes they inhabit. It premiered at IDFA 2018 and is now in the permanent collection of Futurium – the “museum of the future” in Berlin. Other recent projects include the African immersive docs “Le Lac” (Winner, Best Digital Narrative, Sheffield Doc/Fest 2019), “Lagos At Large” (Forbes 50 Best XR experiences of 2019) and “Azibuye – The Occupation” (Official Selection, Sundance New Frontier 2020). Now, at the Brooklyn-based, Emmy award-winning creative company Scatter, she is building the creative possibilities of the reality capture software, Depthkit, and advancing the medium of volumetric filmmaking through supporting the ecosystem of creators using Depthkit. Scatter has two original productions in the works – Changing Same and Volumetric Histories. Caitlin holds an MBA from NYU Stern School of Business and a Masters in Fine Arts from Tisch School of the Arts.

Rick is a creative technologist with a huge passion for disruptive technologies and has been called “one of the smartest minds in XR”. He is the CTO of Eden, a company he co-founded that makes virtual reality easy to use in business, mainstream and art applications. With over 20 years of professional experience in the digital space, he has built a unique skill set across emerging technologies that makes him a leading expert in the field. Rick started his career creating one of the earliest platforms for online gaming, before smartphones and App Stores even launched. Built for Nokia phones, the platform reached an international audience and amassed millions of app downloads. After this success, he extended his skill set into emerging technologies like 3D printing, robotics, mechatronics, volumetric video, as well as augmented and virtual reality – which is now his focus.

Darren Emerson is a director, writer and producer of VR documentary experiences. He is the co-founder of London production company East City Films. In 2015 he created his first VR documentary Witness 360:7/7, and in 2016 won the first ever Sheffield DocFest VR commission with Indefinite, which was featured in the New York Times. In 2018, Darren was commissioned to create the room-scale documentary Common Ground, which had its world premiere at Tribeca Film Festival 2019. Common Ground won the ‘Best Immersive Storytelling’ award at Sandbox Immersive Festival, the ‘Grand Prix Innovation’ at Festival du Nouveau Cinema, and ‘Outstanding VR Narrative’ at the World Press Photo Awards. In 2020, the BFI commissioned a 360 version of Common Ground to premiere at London Film Festival. In 2019, Darren Executive Produced The Waiting Room VR which premiered at the 2019 Venice Biennale, and won ‘Best Digital Story Telling’ at IDFA 2019.

Yasmin Elayat is an Emmy-award winning immersive director whose work pushes the boundaries of immersive narrative and participatory experiences. Yasmin is Co-Founder at Scatter, an immersive entertainment and software company, where she heads content, production and marketing initiatives. Scatter is recognized for pioneering the emerging language of Volumetric Filmmaking through its original volumetric film productions and its AR/VR creativity tools. Scatter’s first product Depthkit is the most widely used toolkit for accessible volumetric video capture.

A Brussels-based software entrepreneur and WebXR expert. Before becoming an entrepreneur, Leen worked for 10 years with several technology startups in Ghent, London, and Brussels. Since 2011, she has been focused on the democratisation of media across platforms and devices which led her to start LucidWeb in 2016. As immersive computing will revolutionise storytelling, training and education, democratisation will be key. Leen is the biggest advocate of browser-based experiences to be able to reach immersion at scale. LucidWeb is consortium partner of an H2020 funded program XR4ALL aiming to forge a competitive, sustainable ecosystem of European technology providers active in XR. Leen is co-founder of Women in Immersive Tech Europe which counts more than 2000 members across Europe.