That was the Places _ VR Festival 2020 – see you next year!

For the second time after 2018, Bochumer Straße in Gelsenkirchen was the meeting point for the German and European VR industry last weekend, as well as the meeting point for many VR enthusiasts from near and far. Impressions and impressions of the three-day event can be found in our blog post.

Save the date:
Places _ VR Festival 2021: 16 – 18 September

That was the Places _ VR Festival 2020 – see you next year!

For the second time after 2018, Bochumer Straße in Gelsenkirchen was the meeting point for the German and European VR industry last weekend, as well as the meeting point for many VR enthusiasts from near and far. Impressions and impressions of the three-day event can be found in our blog post.

Save the date:
Places _ VR Festival 2021: 16 – 18 September

Experience VR

Our Speakers

Over 25 experts with interesting lectures

The speakers of this year’s festival will be presented to visitors on two stages. In the studio, strong impulses and updates from research and science will be presented. The stage offers a platform for practical applications and a possibility to get in touch directly with business innovators.

Besides the possibility to watch the speakers live, the lectures from the studio will be shown at the live streaming stations throughout the festival area.

Our Speakers

Over 25 experts with interesting lectures

The speakers of this year’s festival will be presented to visitors on two stages. In the studio, strong impulses and updates from research and science will be presented. The stage offers a platform for practical applications and a possibility to get in touch directly with business innovators.

Besides the possibility to watch the speakers live, the lectures from the studio will be shown at the live streaming stations throughout the festival area.

Program-Highlights

Creative _ Places

Creative _ Places

The project Creative _ Places offers the space and the stage for creative experiments and wants to enable artistic exchange and innovation. Six VR artists form a living and working community for one week in the creative quarter Gelsenkirchen-Ückendorf - an exciting quarter of the Ruhr area, which releases a lot of new energy. The highlight of the week is the presentation at the Places _ VR Festival: the perfect stage for creative minds from near and far.

30 exciting adventure stations at 25 surprising locations in the neighbourhood

In the whole quarter around Bochumer Straße in Gelsenkirchen-Ückendorf, visitors of the Places _ VR Festival will find the festival’s programme partners with their experience stations. Whether in the old shop, the pub or the start-up office – here you can discover and experience virtual reality!

  • “VR in Germany needs to evolve. The industry is growing and changing faster than any other. With VR slowly reaching mainstream adoption and AR maturing we cannot allow european countries like germany to fall behind.”

    Vladimir Ilic
    Vladimir Ilic vrhuman
  • "With our contribution to Places 2018, we felt that our VR project and the team were in the right place. The uniqueness of the event through the effective positioning in a suitable location brought added value from our perspective."

    Prof. Chris Wickenden
    Prof. Chris Wickenden Founder of skip Institut für angewandte digitale Visualisierung
  • "These contacts that develop are worth their weight in gold and the resulting development of a network was and still is essential to grow as a company."

    Marc Flören
    Marc Flören Co-Founder & Managing Partner von pointreef
  • "The Ruhr Area is an exciting region for start-ups. The industrial heart of Germany still beats here - come and make the heart beat faster!"

    Oliver Weimann
    Oliver Weimann Managing Director of ruhr:HUB
  • "Virtual Reality offers an incredible number of possibilities, especially in the field of museums and culture. Especially when it comes to knowledge transfer, a VR experience simply stays longer in the memory and thus offers real added value. We are happy that there is a Places Festival again this year, because we can present our applications to many people here."

    Lukas Kuhlendahl
    Lukas Kuhlendahl Co-founder of Weltenweberei
  • "The creative industry repeatedly offers pioneering solutions for society, business and politics - this is nothing new, and yet it cannot be emphasized often enough and made visible with particularly successful examples: Like with the places_ Virtual Reality Festival. Here it becomes clear, what positive effects creative ideas and actors, as well as innovative technologies can have on a district, even a whole city, and thus in the long run also on the economic development of a region."

    Claudia Jericho
    Claudia Jericho managing director of Creative NRW
  • "When a colleague drew my attention to the Places _VR Festival, I thought the event was a great opportunity to develop a VR project together with students from the Faculty of Architecture at Bochum University of Applied Sciences. I approached the event with relatively low expectations and saw it as a public platform for the students to present their projects. All the more I was pleasantly surprised when a multitude of interesting networking and cooperation opportunities arose during the festival days."

    Waldemar Jenek
    Waldemar Jenek Lecturer - University of Applied Sciences Bochum / Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane Australia
  • The desire to create a new medium together was also evident in the Creative _ Places residency, where we lived, worked and finally developed an exhibition together for a week. Versatile initiatives like Places are, in my opinion, extremely important for the community and for the further development of XR itself. I am happy about the opportunities and projects that have arisen and will arise from the contacts of the Places and I am especially looking forward to the 2020 festival!

    Farina Hamann
    Farina Hamann Bremersiv Community & Mitarbeiterin von NextReality Hamburg
  • "Places 2020 was my second and maybe even my best. Not necessarily because our team won a category but because it felt like coming "home". That sounds a bit corny, but the feeling of coming back to the location, seeing familiar faces again and experiencing how the whole festival has developed and knowing that you were and are a small part of it, was a great experience for me personally. I will be back in 2021 and look forward to seeing new projects, collecting new ideas and meeting people who share the same passion. Of course, I'm also looking forward to the hackathon again and the 24 hours of sleep deprivation, the amounts of wakefulness you'll get into and the spontaneous ideas you'll still have at 5am and the stress of getting them in by noon."

    Daniel Brück
    Daniel Brück Hackathon participants since 2018
  • "After receiving the award last year, we were invited to MEDICA by Andreas Pinkwart and were able to present ourselves to an international audience. It was also exciting to get to know the other innovators in the field of VR."

    Daniela Schumacher
    Daniela Schumacher Winner of the Startup Pitch 2020