I was invited to join Changemaker’s breakfast roundtable, together with prominent guests like Simon Woodroffe, founder of e.g. YO! Sushi, Yotel, and Yo Home. We had inspirational discussions, sparking and sharing Utopian visions about designing the future of the travel & leisure industry.

Topics included:

• How can new technology drive the future of the industry and what could e.g. AI and Voice do for service? Do we even need human interaction in
  travel and leisure anymore?
• How are hotels responding to the unique one off a kind AirBnB offers, and can they compete at scale?
• How is environmental change affecting the industry?
• How is the industry shifting towards Millennial and Post-Millennial attitudes?

I was invited – as TUI’s Innovation Strategist – to judge the Innovation Mini MBA projects, resulting from the 5-day Google Sprint course that I had myself completed the previous year. My fellow judges were: Nicola Darke, Fionnuala Duggan, Katie King, Jeremy Davies, and Milan S. Lakhani (see image). The design quality, thoroughness, and meaningfulness (most projects provided innovative solutions for social or environmental issues) was beyond expectation.

Course Information: https://www.innovation-academy.co.uk/innovation-mini-mba-2/

I was invited as a speaker at AR & VR World – Europe’s leading technology-driven conference and exhibition showcasing AR, VR and XR as the essential tool for business transformation – to be interviewed about TUI’s multi-person VR experiences that TUI’s Innovation Lab had created as sales & preview tools for TUI stores, and for which I had e.g. produced the storyboards, and had helped train the store agents in VR. I invited Alex Harvey from RiVR (Reality In Virtual Reality) to the event, who had developed the VR content, syncing software (shown bottom-right), and a demo stand at AR & VR World.

RiVR Links:

• AR & VR World Demo Reactions: LinkedIn Post – VR-Demo Video
• Filming of TUI’s 360 videos: LinkedIn Post – 360-Filming Video
• TUI’s VR training: LinkedIn Post – VR-Training Video

I discussed Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) at VR World – a conference with 1000 attendees – in a panel with Artur Fiedorowicz, Michael Kendereski, Rob Lake, and Christina Bechhold Russ, moderated by Francisco Jeronimo, with the topic:
Is the Future of Marketing Virtual or Augmented?

Event Information: https://www.vrworldevent.com/

I presented TUI’s Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) experiences at HANNOVR 8 – Germany’s largest meetup for VR & AR – highlighting how these experiences increase the Sales and enhance the Customer Experience (CX) and Customer Service (CS) at TUI, across different source markets.

HANNOVR Links:

• Speaker Announcement: Facebook – Speaker Announcement Video
• Event Compilation (See min 1:34, 1:29): Facebook – Event Compilation Video
• My Presentation (28 min incl. questions): YouTube – Presentation Video

I was a panellist at Great State’s Digital Transformation event, answering questions about e.g. TUI’s best practice solutions and key blockers to their changes in processes, people, and business culture.

Event Summary: https://www.thedrum.com/profile/great-state/news/the-reality-of-transformation

I presented many Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) experiences, tools and links in my Over The Air (OTA) talk, way back in 2016. My talk was about (how to create) innovative interactions that feel natural and human, almost like conversations with an empathetic and smart friend, who makes your experience more:

• Personal – Content is contextual, fluid, automated, etc.
• Natural – Interaction is by speech, movement, mood, biometrics, etc.
• Immersive – Merging your physical & digital worlds, with you in the centre
• Efficient – Helping you achieve things faster and better
• Entertaining – Making you want more

The talk mentioned many technologies besides AR & VR. This image shows Crayola examples (sources are on slide 44). Since then, my highly-illustrated presentation has gained hundreds of views on SlideShare. It’s called:
Innovative Experiences, enabled by emerging technologies

I presented many Augmented Reality (AR) experiences, tools, events, news sources, and their links, in my Barcamp talk, way back in 2009. This image shows AR example acrossair. My Market / Benchmark Research showed the then-current state of AR. Since then, my highly-illustrated presentation has gained almost 17K views on SlideShare. It’s called:
Augmented Reality (AR) – The Future of Mobile Applications?

The Björk Digital exhibition at Somerset House invited visitors to engage with her work through the latest in Virtual Reality (VR) technology.

I assisted visitors with their VR experiences in the Samsung Gear and the HTC Vive headsets, which felt like a valuable VR User Research exercise, giving me a better understanding of who experiences VR and how, and of the technical issues that can arise (e.g. with Vive sensors and software updates) and how to solve these. The image is a screenshot of the Somerset House event page.

Event Information: https://www.somersethouse.org.uk/whats-on/bjork-digital

I was one of the fortunate 50 attendees, invited to this 1-day event (organised by Good for Nothing, Glimpse, and Friday Future Love), in which we collaboratively developed (and at the end presented) many new projects that can spark and spread convincing and credible stories (around the UK and then the globe) that can change the public’s beliefs, attitudes, and finally behaviours, so that they would welcome, embrace, and follow new strategies and policies that can shift our focus from money to nature, health, and well-being, solve many social and environmental issues, and make our economy and society more sustainable, enjoyable and fair.

New strategies and policies already exist, but can’t be implemented yet, because they currently conflict with the public’s imposed or learned beliefs around status, money, and nature. Stories can change those man-made beliefs.

The outputs of this beliefs-changing story-telling ideation process will be brought together as part of a final strategy document which seeks to secure funding and partners to activate in 2020 and beyond.

Event Information: https://thetrampery.com/event/whats-the-story-with-friday-future-love/