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As XRDC approaches, organizers are pleased to confirm that Polyarc's Brendan Walker will be speaking at the October event about the interaction design of the studio's charming PSVR action puzzle game Moss.

His session on "VR Interaction Design in Moss", part of XRDC's diverse Games & Entertainment track of talks, promises some interesting insights. When Polyarc set out to make the game (its first VR effort) using tracked controllers, they established player comfort and approachability as their highest priority.

According to Walker, in creating the game, the team built their world from diorama-size puzzles you interact with in third person, which naturally led to the creation of a mouse as the main character a player would use to traverse the puzzles. These puzzles were composed of simple constrained physics interactions that could feel good even when using controllers with limited tracking.

Dr. Brian Hargreaves teaches courses in mixed reality and magnetic resonance imaging at Stanford, serves as co-director of the university's Incubator for Medical Mixed and Extended Reality, and this October he'll be sharing what he's learned at XRDC!

The AR/MR/VR innovation is just a few months away, and organizers want to make sure this cutting-edge talk doesn't slip under your radar. Dr. Hargreaves' session, titled "Mixed Reality Guidance for Medical Procedures," will show you the needs, challenges and potential solutions for several applications where mixed reality devices can realistically play a role in medical procedures in the next five years.

UBM Tech Game Network, organizers of the 2019 Game Developers Conference (GDC), is now accepting submissions for the 21st annual Independent Games Festival (IGF), the longest running festival, summit and showcase of independent games.

The IGF is part of the Game Developers Conference 2019, which will take place from March 18th through March 22nd at San Francisco’s Moscone Convention Center. Entries for all of the IGF categories will be accepted now through October 1, 2018, with finalists announced in early January 2019.

Finalists will compete for over  $50,000 in prizes and their games will be playable at the packed IGF Pavilion on the GDC 2019 Expo Floor. The award categories include Excellence in Visual Art, Audio, Design and Narrative, each of which will have six finalists, with the winner in each category receiving $3,000. Additional awards include the Best Student Game award ($3,000 prize) which will recognize student developers, the special Nuovo Award ($3,000, eight finalists) which honors the title that 'makes the jurors think differently about games as a medium', and the IGF Audience Award ($3,000 prize) which will be decided by a public vote from all of the competition finalists. Finally, six finalists will be selected for the $30,000 Seumas McNally Grand Prize.

AR/VR/MR innovation extravaganza XRDC is just a few months away, and organizers want to make sure you don't overlook a particularly exciting talk that you'll have access to when the show kicks off in San Francisco this October.

Titled "Risk Assessment in XR Design: Stolen from the Space Program", this XRDC Innovation track talk by game designer and former rocket scientist Jim Toepel aims to show you how the failure-mitigation techniques of the aerospace industry can be applied to individual AR products and the industry as a whole.

This promises to be fascinating, as Toepel will introduce the concept of failure modes and effects analysis in the context of manned spaceflight. After sharing those learnings, Jim will apply them to the broad challenges facing AR platforms and products as well as provide examples on how FMEA guided the design process of Mindshow and his other early AR design efforts with Kinect. It's a one-of-a-kind talk you won't want to miss!

The Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2019 is proud to share five key additions to the Advisory Board of the upcoming conference, which will further bolster its Programming, Business & Marketing, Design, and Production & Team Management Tracks.

The new additions to its Main Conference Advisory Board span creators & contributors to titles such as the Ratchet & Clank franchise, Slime Rancher, The Sims franchise, Don’t Starve & many more. Andreas Fredriksson, Carolin Krenzer, Nick Popovich, Jamie Cheng and Caryl Shaw are the fresh Board recruits for GDC 2019, which takes place March 18 - 22 at San Francisco’s Moscone Convention Center.

The current Advisory Board, which includes such game industry luminaries as Mark Cerny, Rob Pardo, Amy Hennig and others, will be welcoming these new members to help provide their insights into topics that range from the technical (Programming Track, Production & Team Management Track) to the creative (Design Track) and the financial (Business & Marketing Track). Here’s more detail on the new Advisory Board members and their considerable contributions to the world of game development:

In their continuing efforts to make XRDC the premier AR/VR/MR innovation event, organizers are excited to reveal that some of the experts at Osmo will be speaking at XRDC in October about how they found success with their educational mixed-reality games platform.

As part of XRDC's Games & Entertainment track of talks, Osmo staff designer Tony Aube will be presenting a promising session on "Design Beyond the Screen: Mixed Reality at Osmo" that aims to offer something of a postmortem look at the company's failures and successes.

The Game Developers Conference is returning to the Moscone Center in San Francisco, March 18-22, 2019!