Industry Nights: Careers in XR (Virtual and Augmented Reality)

About Industry Nights

UBC Industry Nights is a networking series and career building experience sponsored by the Centre for Student Involvement and Careers.

The event is designed to provide students from all faculties with an opportunity to engage their interests and curiosities, test assumptions, and learn about the world of work. It is focused on creating value for all participants, by bringing together faculty, alumni, students and employers to discuss a specific industry including related research, current trends, events, challenges, opportunities and more.

About Extended Reality (XR)

XR is a catch-all phrase that encompasses technology like Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR). From communications to e-commerce to healthcare, the AR/VR economy is all-encompassing and growing rapidly, increasing by 10 times in 3 years to reach $300 billion globally by 2024. The number of jobs in this sector is expected to increase to 23 million by 2030.

With the rise in interactions with AR/VR within our daily lives, this emerging sector is becoming a new reality for job seekers. Vancouver is an AR/VR economic hub, with the second-largest AR/VR ecosystem in the world. As the metaverse virtual landscape continues to expand, companies will be hiring for all aspects of the economy that augmented and virtual reality technology will support.

Attend the virtual event to hear about:

Career opportunities in extended reality
Firsthand experiences of industry professionals
How you can build a career in this field

Keynote session

About the keynote speaker

Dr. Patrick Parra Pennefather is a researcher, disruptor, award-winning composer, and designer of asynchronous, synchronous, in-person, blended and hybrid instruction.

He has mentored multi-disciplinary teams that co-constructed scalable digital prototypes with over 50 companies and organizations in games, mobile dev, Mixed Reality, VR, AR, education and the arts.

Patrick has facilitated human-centred workshops for EA, Riot, Microsoft Games, and many others in the xR space as well.

He’s published research focused on AR, VR, MR, in Arts, Medical, Educational and Immersive journals and as chapters in books. In addition to being an Assistant Professor at UBC Theatre and Film and a founding member of the Master of Digital Media (MDM) Program, he designs and teaches micro-courses to support upskilling for employees and students.

About the session

The keynote will focus on sharing what you need to learn to work in Extended Realities.

This keynote will provide useful tools and strategies to increase your opportunities of transitioning into various career paths by directing the knowledge you learn from the courses you are taking and further self-managing the skills you acquire beyond those courses. Patrick will draw from key twenty-first century competencies, persistent networks within the xR industry, provincial and federal trends, and experience from mentoring students on immersive and mixed reality project-based courses.

Industry panelists

The following panelists will be available at the event:

Jerry Medeiros, Head of Education at Circuit Stream
Corey Wong, Product Manager at Nextech AR Solutions
Ghazal(Q) Jenab, Product Designer at Llamazoo & Hammer and Tong
Debi Wong, Founder of OrpheusVR

Connect with representatives from Mantis XR, Centre for Digital Media, Circuit Stream, Clirio Technologies, Cognitive3D, Aequilibrium, Horuseye Technology, Strawberry Fields Interactive and more. Check back later in 2022 for more confirmed panelists.

Industry Nights sponsors

This event is sponsored by Circuit Stream and UBC Extended Learning, in partnership with XR Development with Unity.

About Circuit Stream

Circuit Stream is recognized as the industry leader of Extended Reality (XR) education. Thousands of people and Fortune 500 companies around the world have taken Circuit Stream courses, workshops and private training to build and advance their XR careers and projects.

If you have questions

For more information about the event, please contact the Centre for Student Involvement and Careers.