Conference Expanding Realities VR/AR/MR
ON SITE Bertha-Benz-Saal Tuesday, May 06, 17:00

Story as Software: How immersive storytelling can lead to real world social impact

Immersive and XR strategist Adipat Virdi has a passion for using immersive storytelling to create real world social change. His session will be an overview of the process he went through in building these storyworlds and a suggestion for a framework that filmmakers, creatives and artists alike can use to allow audiences to inhabit their stories.  Adipat’s social impact work has explored, amongst other topics, forced marriages and honour crimes, biracial family dynamics and the refugee experience. By placing empathy at the centre of immersive experiences, he invites audiences to live through others’ perspectives and challenge their own beliefs to reframe the lens through which they see the world.

Adipat Virdi

Adipat Virdi, Immersive & XR Strategist

Over the past 20 years, Adipat has delivered bespoke experience blueprints for various clients in the retail, automotive, healthcare, fashion and entertainment sectors, including Charlotte Tilbury, Virgin Atlantic, Nike and Cinesite, amongst many others.

He has built effective, immersive storyworlds, both for IP and for his own content, where he aims for real-world social impact. His productions across film, TV and theatre challenge audiences to confront their own views about issues including forced marriages and honour crimes. Adipat’s work has played at Edinburgh Film Festival and was a finalist at the Sundance New Frontier Story Lab.

Having originally studied Architecture and having practiced Socio-Spatial Analysis, Adipat switched to focus on more creative and entertainment-based studies, ultimately leading him towards immersive storytelling and experience design. He has achieved MAs in Design Strategy and Innovation, Advanced Architectural Studies and Screenwriting.  On the merging of space and story, he explains, “I've always worked on the liminal edge of storytelling and experience design and find myself exploring this at the nexus between tech, strategy and innovation.”

A world-renowned XR expert and popular speaker, Adipat has worked with several major organisations to develop and promote the creative potential of immersive for enterprise.