18 Feb 2/19/19 – Gabo Arora

Posted at 11:29h in Events, Past Lectures, Uncategorized by

In conversation with:

Gabo Arora

Hacking XR Speaker Series

Tuesday | February 19th | 1:30 – 3:00 PM
MIT Open Documentary Lab | E15-318
MIT Campus, Wiesner Building, 20 Ames Street, 3rd Floor, Cambridge MA 02139

Pioneering Emerging Media

How does one create compelling and relevant immersive experiences? VR/AR are quickly expanding. In less than 4 years, this nascent field has seen focus shift from 360 videos, to interactive CGI immersive worlds, to 6 degrees of freedom and explorations of AI. To kick off this new 2019 HACKING XR SPEAKER SERIES, we will take a look at what it takes to create relevant experiences with emerging platforms, in discovering the work of VR pioneer Gabo Arora.

Heralded by the LA times as “game-changing” and “transcending all the typical barriers of rectangular cinema”, Gabo Arora’s widely acclaimed virtual reality documentaries have all premiered as official selections at major film festivals around the world. Gabo is an award-winning immersive artist, filmmaker and Founder/Creative Director of LightShed, a content, technology and research studio collaborating with the industry’s leading creative pioneers and entrepreneurs focused exclusively on emerging technologies currently known as VR, AR and AI. He is also a professor at Johns Hopkins University, where he leads and is the Founding Director of the new Immersive Storytelling and Emerging Technologies (ISET) program and lab.

A native New Yorker, Gabo holds honors degrees with distinction from NYU and Johns Hopkins University. His mother tongue is Punjabi, he is fluent in Hindi/Urdu, French, Italian and Spanish. He is a Davos World Economic Forum Arts and Cultural leader and was nominated for a term-membership at the Council on Foreign Relations by Francis Fukuyama. His work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, nominated for an Emmy, awarded a Cannes Lions, a Sheffield Doc/Fest award for best documentary, a Lumière Award, two Webbys, and has been featured in the New Yorker, BBC world service, the British Film Institute’s Sight and Sound magazine, Fast Company, New York Times and covered widely in the Guardian, Vice News, Wired, TED, NPR and PBS Newshour.