Immersion 2019, India's first international Virtual Reality Film Festival and Conference, will be held on March 1 and March 2 at Mumbai’s Nehru Centre.

The event, organised by Immerge Knowledge Labs, aims to bring together industry leaders, futurists, creators, enterprise, startups, change agents and technology advocates across speaker forums, workshops, brand showcases and the film festival.

The audience will be able to view content through VR, which is a goggle-shaped eye-pack. It is an interactive computer-generated experience in which the bearer of the VR can experience the audio-visuals as though, they are a part of the simulated environment.

"Virtual reality will either take us into the matrix or make us realise we were in one all along. Immersion is an international forum and festival that brings all stakeholders in the immersive tech space together to ideate, share, explore and celebrate," says Eddie Avil, co-founding director of Immerge Knowledge.

The company believes despite the slow pick up of this technology in the country, the nascent Indian AR/VR market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 76 percent over the next five years, fuelled by demand from business and consumer sectors.

AR is augmented reality. It is, again, an interactive experience, but it is of the real world environment where the objects that exist in the real world are "augmented" by computer generation.

"The movement though nascent has stirred up in India and promises to be big and needs support and a platform like Immersion," Immerge Knowledge Labs said in a statement.

The Immersion Thinkfest, which will feature the speaker forum, have experts in the field lined up. The speaker forum includes Chaitanya Chunduri, Google India's head of AR/VR; Blippar MD Arnav Neel, XR Labs co-founder and CEO Srivatsan Jayashankar among others. The experts will discuss immersive advertising, the future of storytelling among other topics of interests.

First Published:Feb 20, 2019 3:09 PM IST