This day and age, one could be forgiven for being somewhat disillusioned with democracy, but still, come election time, I always vote
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As a woman I feel that voting is the least I can do to honour the sacrifice of people like Emmeline Pankhurst
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One of the reasons I do that without fail is because I figure that, as a woman, traveling a short distance to put a few ticks on a ballot (or even doing it from the comfort of my own home) is really the least I can do to honour the sacrifice of people like Emmeline Pankhurst, who endured and risked so much to earn me that right.

I also figure that if more people experienced and understood some of those sacrifices, they might feel the same, and we’d have much higher turnout rates in every election. And maybe VR experiences like the BBC’s Make Noise can help achieve that.

Throughout the experience you hear audio clips of real-life suffragettes
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It uses a combination of VR and voice-activated technology to encourage viewers to literally follow Emmeline Pankhurst’s advice to ‘make more noise’ to change the world.

“Inspired by the suffragettes who a century ago spoke up for a woman’s right to vote, Make Noise invites viewers to find and use their own voice and consider what it means to speak up in a world that doesn’t value it,” the news release reads.

The narrator – actor Nikki Amuka-Bird – encourages viewers to speak up as voice technology in the headset continuously detects and reacts to every sound they make.

“They’ll need to find their voice and use it to name the women that have inspired them, and to call out the objects that have oppressed women for centuries – changing the virtual environment around them as they do so,” she says

Every sound you make in the experience therefore has an effect in the virtual surroundings as you sing, hum and shout the names of these inspirational women like incantations against indifference and oppression.

The experience uses a combination of VR and voice-activated technology to encourage viewers to literally follow Emmeline Pankhurst’s advice to ‘make more noise’ to change the world
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The experience is available to download for free from the Oculus Store, and will be available on the Oculus Go. It’s also being shown at a number of libraries and literary events across the United Kingdom. At one such event, Helen Pankhurst, Emmeline’s great-granddaughter had the opportunity to try it on and was enthusiastic about how the immersive medium really helped to bring out her ancestor’s story:

“You’re asked not just to look but to use your mind and your voice. I think that focus on the voice and your own engagement with it is incredible,” she said.

Throughout the experience viewers also hear BBC archive audio clips of real-life suffragettes (Edith Pepper, Charlotte Drake, Charlotte Marsh, Mary Richardson, Lillian Lenton, Victoria Liliard, Grace Roe and Elizabeth Dean) explaining how they found their own voice, and used it to change the world.

Helen Pankhurst, Emmeline’s great-granddaughter had the opportunity to try it on and was enthusiastic about how the immersive medium really helped to bring out her ancestor’s story
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Make Noise was produced by BBC VR Hub and Anagram. Its director, May Abdalla, explains that they opted to use bold abstract visuals to make playful worlds and mess with scale so that the aesthetics of Victorian England didn’t get in the way of the story:

“In these strange visual universes the punk attitude of these inspirational women really stands out,” she says. “Each chapter represents the emotional journey of their path to victory; from frustration though finding solidarity and resistance. “We wanted to find a way to really connect the stories of the suffragettes to our lives, and the fact is that standing up for something when people are trying to shut you down is something we all can relate to.”

This article originally appeared on VRScout

Voice-Activated BBC VR Experience Puts You In The Shoes Of A Suffragette via @alicebonasio https://t.co/8LN4VfUwpX pic.twitter.com/GXX0Qu5YDb

— VRScout (@VRScout) December 12, 2018

For companies looking to get into Immersive technologies our VR Consultancy service offers comprehensive support in strategic deployment of Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio on Twitter.

The post Making Noise in VR appeared first on Tech Trends.

For Technology Skills Platform Pluralsight,  bridging the digital skills gap and addressing the diversity problem is all part of a good business strategy.

In as little as five minutes and 20 questions, technologists around the world can measure their current skill level
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“Technology is poised to create a world of incredible prosperity and opportunity or incredible inequity, so our mission is to democratize technology to the world, and by so doing close the digital skills gap,” says Aaron Skonnard, President and CEO of Pluralsight.

In an environment where the typical software engineer has to re-develop their skillset every 12-18 months to keep up with changes in technology, the learning platform that Skonnard founded 13 years ago has tapped into the huge demand for high-level digital skills. A recent report by Stack Overflow showed that developers are increasingly diversifying the way they learn, and that they generally did not evaluate their colleagues on the level of their education but on a well-rounded skillset.

“If you are choosing to be a developer today, you are choosing to be a lifelong learner, there’s no other way to survive.” says Skonnard. “The best developers are the ones who really love to learn and are committed to keeping learning. That’s very true of tech in general, which is what makes this market so unique to us.”

Pluralsight now work with about 40% of fortune 500 companies and boast a valuation of almost $1 billion. Their community of course authors consists of a highly curated group of industry experts working as contractors to generate exclusive content for the platform. “We spearfish for best authors and best teachers in the industry, out of 100 accept only 1 or 2,” explains Skonnard. Their author community is currently about 1500 strong, and they can earn substantial royalties through their content – their top author made over $2 million last year.

Pluralsight works with about 40% of fortune 500 companies
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I met Skonnard at the company’s inaugural Pluralsight Live conference in Salt Lake City. The area is home to a surprisingly vibrant cluster of technology companies, known as “Silicon Slopes,” but a lot of people had travelled from much further afield to be there, including former First Lady Michelle Obama, who herself has always been a passionate advocate for education.

Salt Lake City boasts a vibrant tech ecosystem known as Silicon Slopes
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But in spite of the usual tech conference celebratory mood, the focus of the event was on tackling some the big issues facing the technology industry, and society in general. And in Pluralsight’s vision, the two are fundamentally aligned:

“Bringing together the demand for tech skills and the talent that currently does not have the access to training and resource is the easiest and surest way to break the cycle of poverty. We have to tackle both at the same time and there are no shortcuts,” Skonnard told the 1800 attendees during his opening keynote. “We will create a future for marginalized communities and transform technology learning.”

One of the features announced at the conference that they believe will help towards that goal was Pluralsight IQ, a score (ranging from 0-300) that tells you where your various skills stack up against the global population of developers. There are currently 45 skill assessments available across a variety of subjects, including Angular, C#, JavaScript and Python, with plans to quickly grow the collection.

“In as little as five minutes and 20 questions, technologists around the world can measure their current skill level and receive a verified Pluralsight IQ, which provides a quantified measure of their current skill proficiency, a timestamp that reflects the relevancy of their score and an easy way for them to showcase it.”

Pluralsight currently offers 45 skill assessments available across a variety of subjects, including Angular, C#, JavaScript and Python
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“There’s this guy in Lagos, Nigeria who just tweeted about getting his first Pluralsight score, and he got a 238 in Javascript (he was part of the A-B testing group) And that person now knows they’re in the 93^rd percentile of all Javascript developers globally, and would be considered an expert. This fellow is a great example of someone who like the companies in the US would know nothing about but there’s a person there who could really be a part of closing the tech skills gap,” says Skonnard. And since the test is free for anyone to take anywhere in the world, this creates a large amount of useful data that businesses can tap into: “We can give CIOs the tools they need to tap into all that experience and brilliance that might have been hidden before. And because of how accessible it is, that really plays into the social impact side too.” he adds.

That social impact half of the strategy is called Pluralsight One, a pledge by the company to dedicate at least 1% of its resources (product, time, profit and equity) to help learning, technology and philanthropy through supporting nonprofit organizations to equip the people they serve with technology skills.

Lindsey Kneuven, the newly engaged head of social impact at Pluralsight, believes the high-speed pace of technological change is introducing new types of vulnerability for those who are underserved or impoverished. “Through Pluralsight One, advancements in technology will now provide these same groups with incredible opportunities to solve complex, global challenges and create solutions for a better, more abundant world,” she says.

There are many successful examples of digital skills being leveraged in this way, such as TechHire Eastern Kentucky which taught coding skills to people in regions struggling with the decline in traditional industries such as coal mining.

“The way we’re going to be able to close the gap is by really reaching out to all those marginalised communities around the world where technology can open up a whole new future to them and we want to serve them. Creating the skills in those communities will increase the diversity across the tech industry and bring a whole new set of experiences and brilliance into it. We can give them the tools they need to develop those skills, and technology can open up a whole new future for them.” adds Skonnard.

Although it is easy to see the social value of these initiatives, the commercial benefits for corporations struggling to find the skills to execute on their technology strategy is considerable
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This is far from charity in the traditional sense, however. Although it is easy to see the social value of these initiatives, the commercial benefits for corporations struggling to find the skills to execute on their technology strategy is very considerable indeed.

“Right now CIOs and CTOs are in charge of some of the most mission-critical projects in the world and they’re doing it without any real insight into the technological skills of those people, but now our enterprise customers are going to be able to see all this data from the Pluralsight IQ test through our skills analytics and our channel analytics,” says Skonnard, adding that A CIO leveraging such tools would be able to assess the skills across their entire organisation (and even outside it) in real time, and find specific talents which might otherwise have remained hidden

Skonnard likens this to Moneyball – the story of the Billy Beane – recently played by Brad Pitt in a movie adaptation of the story – the general Manager of the Oakland A’s who propelled his low-budget baseball team to success using maths and science: “This guy was able to discover talent that nobody else in the world knew about but because of the data they could see it and put together a team that wasn’t full of all stars, but because of the data they actually went out and won. So you can think of us as Moneyball for CIOs.”

Pluralsight One is a pledge by the company to dedicate at least 1% of its resources to help learning, technology and philanthropy
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At a time where the dominant business and political discourse often seems to assume that doing good is diametrically opposed to doing well, it’s refreshing to see companies demonstrating this is a actually a false dichotomy. CIOs everywhere have the unique opportunity to do both, addressing their company’s greatest pain points and blockers to growth while at the same time helping to solve the broader societal issues caused by inequality. All it takes is a concerted and proactive strategy that acknowledges the problem, and a strong commitment towards executing it in the long term.

At a time where the dominant business and political discourse seems to assume that doing good is diametrically opposed to doing well, it’s refreshing to see companies demonstrating this is a false dichotomy
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This article was originally published on IDG Connect Website

IDG Contributor Network: How doing good can help CIOs do better https://t.co/xnaLsnUczg

— CIO.com (@CIOonline) September 26, 2017

To find out how to leverage VR/AR/MR in your enterprise, Tech Trends offers bespoke Virtual Reality Consultancy support

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio and @techtrends_tech on Twitter.

The post Closing the Digital Skills Gap and Bridging the Opportunity Divide appeared first on Tech Trends.

Jaunt launches colourful cinematic VR experience to celebrate #PrideInLondon

The beauty of the film is that it truly captures the feeling of being at Pride
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Love Letter from London is a nod to the city’s diversity released to coincide with the London Pride Festival. The four-minute film captures what is described as the city’s “most colourful Pride ever” (which is really saying something!) and hopes to immerse viewers in its jubilant #LoveHappensHere spirit of tolerance and inclusion.

Love Letter from London is a nod to the city’s diversity
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In the film, Tom Daley, the Olympic-medallist who came out publicly in 2013, talks about the experience of attending his first ever Pride. When asked what his personal love letter to the world today would say. Daley says: “Dear world, the one thing in the world that does not cost a penny is love, and I think that is one of the most important messages out there”.

London Pride this year took place on 8^th and 9^th July and smashed previous attendance records drawing more than a million supporters. This is also a historically significant year for the Gay Pride movement in the country, marking 50 years since the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in the UK.

London Pride 2017 attracted more than a million supporters
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Love Letter from London gives those who weren’t lucky enough to make it to the event in person the chance to experience what celebration of LGBT+ looks and feels like; allowing audiences to immerse themselves in the thrill and vibrancy of the festival as if they’re there, walking in the parade and driving on the floats.

“The beauty of the film is that it truly captures the feeling of being at Pride, meaning attendees can virtually return to the parade, and those who didn’t make it last weekend can get a taste of the celebration, in the hope that it’ll encourage them to come along next year,” Jaunt explained in the news release.

The neon feathered production was made by an all-volunteer team in partnership between Visualise and Belong@Jaunt (Jaunt’s diversity team) as well as Whitecoat which contributed graphics and design resources. The production consisted of a five-person field crew operating a stereoscopic Jaunt ONE camera (the first professional-grade stereographic cinematic VR camera built from the ground up) and several other vehicle and body mounted 360 cameras. Presenter and YouTube star Claira Hermet helpfully volunteered both as host and Samba dancer.

“In the world’s current climate we wanted to show how love conquers all, and we couldn’t have done it without the full team effort,” enthused the film’s director Canaan Rubin.

Mayor of London Sadiq Khan – an ardent supporter of Pride and champion of inclusion in the capital – also makes clear his commitment to this year’s #LoveHappensHere Pride theme:

“One of the greatest things about London is that you’re not simply tolerated or accepted by who you are; you are embraced, respected and celebrated. There’s nothing better for me as the mayor of London than to walk in the front of the parade and celebrate what is a great thing about London… you are free to be whoever you want to be, you are free to love whoever you want to love,” Khan says.

Here in London you are free to be who you want to be and love who you want to love. Happy Pride London!! #PrideInLondon #LoveHappensHere pic.twitter.com/UiNVey1cRY

— Sadiq Khan (@SadiqKhan) July 8, 2017

That echoes  the sentiment of other progressive world leaders such as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who marched – together with his wife and children – at Toronto’s Pride parade this year (also sporting a very fetching pair of rainbow socks which read “Eid Mubarak”. I think it’s safe to say that world leaders really showed their true colours at various Pride events in 2017…

When Justin Trudeau marched in Toronto’s Gay Pride Parade, he wore rainbow socks that said “Eid Mubarak” https://t.co/earPehWNuc

— NYT Fashion (@NYTFashion) July 1, 2017

Projects like this continue to show the broad scope, value and potential of VR experiences, and Tech Trends is very much looking forward to seeing how that continues to develop. Watch this space.

For companies looking to get into VR/AR/MR our Virtual Reality Consultancy services offer guidance on how these technologies can enhance and support your brand strategy. 

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedInand follow @alicebonasio on Twitter.

The post A Virtual Love Letter from London appeared first on Tech Trends.

Technology can help drive innovation, but the businesses model of the future needs to be built around diversity.

It’s all too easy to get discouraged when, year after year, reports come out showing that the gender pay gap lingers around like a bad smell (average of 18% difference as of 2016 according to the IFS)

Then you turn to our most innovative industries, such as tech: There you find that 96% of VCs are men, that they only invest 8% of their money on companies Co-founded by women, and discouragement starts turning to despair.

96% of VCs are men, and that they only invest 8% of their money on companies Co-founded by women
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But then someone like Cindy Gallop comes along, painting a picture of the future that’s as hopeful as it is kick-ass, and you walk away knowing that things will change – mainly because the status quo is just bad business, and it’s eating away not only at our happiness, but at our profits. And as she told a rapt audience at FutureFest last weekend – repurposing an infamous anti-gun control quote – “The only thing that can really stop someone with a bad business is someone with a better business.”

The only thing that can really stop someone with a bad business is someone with a better business.
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If you want to design the business of the future, it absolutely has to be gender equal, simply because that is what drives innovation, explains Cindy. Disruption and innovation come as a result of a creative collision between different mindsets, perspectives, backgrounds and insights.

 

“Women are crucial to the future of work and business because there is a huge amount of money to be made out of taking women seriously. They’re a key part of redesigning the business of the future because you cannot drive new-world-order business from an old-world-order place.”

That new world order requires diversity across race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability and age, but gender cuts across all those things according to Cindy. Women are very good at challenging the status quo because they are never it.

“At the top of every industry is a closed loop of white guys talking to white guys about other white guys. And white guys, you will enormously benefit when you break that loop. Because if you start any business today with an all-male-white founding team you will never own the future, if you run any business today with an all-white-male leadership team, you will never own the future. If you want to be the business of the future and you want to make a shit-ton of money doing it, that future is gender-equal and diverse.”

And there are many white guys out there who couldn’t agree more. Journalist and trend forecaster James Wallman recently worked with Yell Business on a report looking at the future of gender equality, and says that although women have been shockingly underrepresented in business in government and in the media, we’re definitely headed towards a more female future,and that’s a very good thing for everybody.

Smart companies like Apple, Etsy, Slack are bringing women into the design and creation process
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We’re headed towards a more female future,and that’s a very good thing for everybody
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“Smart companies like Apple, Etsy, Slack are bringing women into the design and creation process and that’s creating better products, better services, for men, women, for all of us.”

He acknowledges that there are still significant numbers of men who see feminism as an antagonistic movement, perceiving it as a win-lose game between men and women.

 

“That’s nonsense,” says Wallman. “If women do better, men will benefit, and I think we’re going to see a movement emerging – which I call Masculism – that shows those men how equality is good for all of us.”

There are some interesting ways in which technology can help us get to that diverse and equal future too, and one of the most exciting ones is around Virtual Reality. In virtual worlds we’re able to play with different identities and even bypass the issue of gender altogether. Wallman points to the fact that we’ll see a greater variety of gender categories emerging, with people feeling comfortable defining themselves as Pangender, Agender or Polygender, for example.

At the top of every industry is a closed loop of white guys talking to white guys about other white guys
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As we conduct more of our personal and professional interactions in virtual worlds mediated by Avatars which we’re free to shape as we please, the possibilities for bypassing unconscious gender bias are tantalizing, says Wired’s Rowland Manthorpe:

“As we live more in virtual worlds — whether in AR or VR — it will be possible to deflect and undermine strict gender divisions. You might be a woman in the flesh but a man through the AR lens. In the future, our workplaces will be far less affected by our inbuilt biases, the people we hire and work with will be more diverse, and the results will be better because of it.”

Jim Reichert, a Senior Creative Technologist at Microsoft working on HoloLens Augmented Reality projects, is another white guy who passionately champions diversity. He tells me that this sort of gender transcendence is already prevalent evident in Second Life, the original virtual world created by Linden Lab over 13 years ago, and that this is also reflected in the fact that over 60% of creators in that environment are women, significantly higher than in other areas of tech.

“I’ve met so many amazing people in the Metaverse– really brilliant people– and I have no idea what their sex, ethnicity, or country-of-origin is. It’s pretty cool,” he says.

Linden Lab is now is now developing a VR version of this social open-world called Sansar, and when I recently demoed their closed Beta I had some clue that enabling this sort of flexibility is a key part of their design. I met Linden’s CEO Ebbe Altberg in the virtual world, and after a short while it didn’t’ really seem strange at all that his deep male voice was emanating from the lips of a female avatar, dressed in a bright green Godzilla suit. “I don’t even notice it any more,” he told me.

A more diverse workplace will be a much happier one, and that makes good business sense
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There’s a lot at stake here. A more diverse workplace will be a much happier one, and that makes good business sense, since happier people are much more productive, and A LOT more creative.

“As we move from materialism to experientialism, we’re going to look for happiness and identity in experiences rather than just stuff, and what’s going to matter is quality of life,” predicts Wallman.

It’s up to us to make it happen though, and grab life and business by the balls, so to speak. Cindy recommends everybody to take time to identify what their values are. What do you most love doing? And under what conditions do you most love doing it?

“Everything in life and business starts with your values. Design an opportunity, a job, a venture around those values, and it will never feel like work. When you do that you can make your own business model. I did with my venture Make Love Not Porn because I believe the business model of the future is shared value+shared actions=shared profit, both financial and social.”

And that sounds like something that would well and truly “make the world a better place” – a rare occasion when we can deliver the Silicon Valley punch line with a straight face.

The post Designing a Workplace Beyond Gender appeared first on Tech Trends.