E051 - Interview - Monica Arés, former Head of Immersive Learning at Meta, Executive Director at IDEA Lab of the Imperial College London

Interview In this episode I am incredibly happy that I was able to
talk to Monica Ares. Monica is a global leader for Immersive
Learning, XR and AI. Her immersive journey started as Director of
the Dr. William Russell Blake Planetarium in Plymouth, teaching
over 5.000 students annually. To bring the benefits of Immersive
Learning to more people, she went to Amazon and finally to Meta,
where she was responsible to develop VR content with 3rd party
developers to create high-quality VR educational experiences for
the Oculus App Store among other things. She was knee-deep in
the restructuring of Facebook to Meta and the Metaverse hype-times.
Monica takes us along her journey until she leaves Meta, explaining
what the state of XR means for Immersive Learning, and what it ment
for the cause of Immersive Learning when Meta announced the year of
efficiency. "Mark Zuckerberg is a human who cares deeply about
education, he always has. [...] But often times product roadmaps
need to follow what they're good at. [...]. Education is such a
good use-case, it's a hugely scalable market. But it's only
scalable once you can support it." says Monica. Monica just
recently moved to London and took over the role of Executive
Director of IDEA Lab at the Imperial College. AWE Europe 2023 Meet
Monica Arés at AWE Europe on 24+25 October in Vienna! Meet with the
global XR Industry at the most important Conference for XR, Spatial
computing and Metaverse, do business, network, and have a drink or
three with me, as I will also be attending the hole conference! And
as the Spatial Realities Show is an official partner of AWE, I am
happy to be able to give away two two-day tickets. And that's quite
easy! Just send me an email at info@spatialrealities.de. And with
that you will be in the draw to win two free tickets! And if you
don't want to bet on your luck to get a ticket for free, enjoy the
20 per cent discount code as part of this community. Use Spatial20D
to get 20 Per cent of your regular ticket price. Again, use
Spatial20D to get 20 per cent discount thanks to our Spatial
Realities community discount. https://spatialrealities.de
https://www.linkedin.com/in/monicaares/
https://www.awexr.com/eu-2023/