Upswell 2018

For the 2019 Upswell conference, Games for Change produced an XR Immersive arcade that explored how XR can serve a community/mission by building awareness, funding, training, business, and enterprise verticals.

Featured Experiences Included:

Children Do Not Play War (GO Campaign)
Children Do Not Play War is a cinematic Virtual Reality tale of the war in Uganda told through the eyes of a young girl.

Girl Icon (Malala Fund, Milaan Foundation)
Meet Rani, a Girl Icon who’s part of a growing movement of fearless girls leading change in their communities.

Mercy (Mercy Ships)
Edith is a 14-year-old living in the village of Centre Lobo. Edith travels by foot through the jungle to have a life-transforming surgery.

Send Me Home (Lonelyleap)
Rickey Jackson spent 40 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit and was only released after a key witness recanted testimony. Now, Jackson has thrown himself into making the most of his life, asking the rest of us to reflect on our own lives as well, in this deeply personal, 360-degree film about time lost and time regained.

AVEnueS (Accenture Interactive)
AVEnueS is an interactive virtual reality learning experience around a typical scenario social workers face when performing in-person follow-up interviews.

Undersea (Magic Leap Studios)
Relax and observe underwater life in a dynamically generated coral reef biome. Distinct vistas and creatures, presented in a photo-real art style, provide an opportunity to feel a sense of presence and connection between creatures and the environment.

These Sleepless Nights (Lightshed)
These Sleepless Nights is a mixed reality installation that uses cutting-edge spatial computing technology to allow visitors to listen, connect and engage in new ways with those on the frontline of America’s eviction crisis.

Last Whispers (Emblematic Group)
An “immersive oratorio” featuring recordings of extinct and endangered languages from around the globe, both sung and spoken.

RE-ANIMATED (Jakob Kudsk Steensen)
RE-ANIMATED brings back to life the Kaua’i ʻōʻō bird, which went extinct in 1987. The work re-imagines our relationship to natural history.

Unsung (Movers and Shakers)
Our solution is to use augmented reality to digitally create monuments that represent the voices of marginalized communities (women, black, brown, queer, trans). We aim to highlight both contemporary and historical figures to be placed in public spaces. To that end, our team is creating a catalog of augmented monuments for augmented reality tours in different cities. Some examples include Serena Williams, Colin Kaepernick, Odetta, Daisy Bates, etc.

Feed Our Future: Tech and the End of Hunger (World Food Programme, Millenium Art, Katapult Communications)
This AR experience takes viewers to three countries – South Sudan, Bangladesh, and Jordan – to learn about the challenges of real-life beneficiaries and discover how the WFP is using technology to solve them. In each experience, the viewer is presented with information about the country’s current geopolitical challenges and the exorbitant cost of food.

G4C also hosted a Creator’s Lounge at the event. This space allowed attendees to connect with project creators on site, facilitating dialogue between these creatives and the community, which might want to learn from their experience.