Boise is fortunate to be home to the great celebration of music and lifestyle that is the Treefort Festival. This years effort turned out to be the most successful yet with over 18,000 attendees of the various music offerings and satellite subforts.
The IVRC was excited to participate in this years Hackfort expo and the event programming was top-notch. Director Janessa White pulled in some amazing technology talent to share their experiences with Boise's local techies. Speakers included Kathleen Cohen (Collaboratorium, DreamWorks Interactive, IBM), Shannon Norrel (HP, Apple, Microsoft), Ann Lemay (Bioware, UbiSoft), Brian McLean (LAIKA), Devolver Digital and many other worthy contributors.
There were many great speakers, panels and discussion groups. Hackfort attendees were treated to some great insight on both the future of where technology is headed as well as strategies for implementing solutions in our current world. Topics ranged broadly from AR/VR industry advances to video game mechanics to robotics and stop-motion animation. Such a diverse range of topics created a truly inviting environment for the participants and a great creative atmosphere.
While the high quality programming was a main focus of Hackfort, it shouldn't be overlooked that we have a rapidly growing community of tech experts. Hackfort is a wonderful opportunity for our community to come together and collectively promote our products and expertise to peers from Boise and beyond. It was great to see the developing camaraderie between all the companies that were featured in the Expo area including HP and their Omen computers, VYNYL, Curious Media, Ponywolf, VRigami, Citizen Scientific Workshop and others. David Cleverdon of 360 Immersive noted that the "participants enjoyed viewing training and educational content and were surprised at the difference that being able to view that content utilizing virtual reality made to the overall experience." His company filmed a 360 degree video walk-through of Treefort to give interested people a sense of what the festival offered.
The IVRC is grateful to have been a part of the experience in addition to teaming up for this Spring's Immerse-A-Thon, a VR focused hackathon. The Grand Prize winner was announced at the festival and we are happy to congratulate Boise Code Works for their outstanding achievement! In summary, Hackfort 2017 was a great success. Janessa and her team deserve a round of applause for bringing together a great group of people and organizations. We're looking forward to next year and an even bigger impact!
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