EARS HELSINKI 2015 / Part 1

EARS – Europe-Asia Roundtable Sessions is a platform supporting creative industry collaboration between Europe and Asia. A place for creative professionals from different cultural settings to meet, connect and share ideas. EARS on Helsinki, took place on August 27-30 in YLE Pasila, catered a blend of keynotes, roundtables and networking sessions with topics ranging from virtual reality to Asia’s festival boom. Tailor-made sections are featured for design, music, performing arts, literature, marketing and media.
Thursday morning, EARS on Helsinki 2015 Reception. Photo by Hemmo Rättyä


So happy to receive a beautiful tote bag and a free sauna seat cover sponsored by Lapuan Kankurit


I signed up to this conference as TAMK Media student, because cross cultural topics had always been on the top of my interest list. On top of this, Virtual Reality is featured in one of the sessions and I made this trip a part of my thesis research. The conference was opened by Finland’s Minister of Education and Culture, Sanni Grahn-Laasonen, who announced that there are 31 countries participating in EARS! With such diverse participants, I am sure to make full advantages to make some new friends and get as much learnings out of it as possible.


The first keynote session I attended is by Dong Il (Dillon) Seo, ex-partner of Oculus Rift, a company revolutionizing virtual reality headsets and one of the main influencers in the South Korean gaming and start-up scene. Dillon Seo shared his insight on how the VR head mounted display works, as latest Oculus Rift headset will be driving full HD content at 60 to 90 frames per second. He encouraged creative industry professionals to creative better and high quality VR content and shared the basic features of making immersive VR content. The features are head tracking, stereoscopic 3D, wide Field of View (FOV), positional tracking, high resolution display and spatial 3D sound. In this session, I learnt about the huge market opportunities for creating virtual reality content, and was inspired to make creating virtual reality content as my thesis topic, focusing on non-gaming content. What a great day to finally confirm my thesis proposal!


Dillon Seo sharing insights on VR opportunities.

Immersive virtual reality content is heavily depended on hardware technology.


After the keynote sessions, many keynotes and roundtables sessions are held simultaneously and I managed to catch Sanna Lukander, Vice President of Rovio’s Learning unit, which she shared about criterias of fun learning, and how Rovio localized their business in China, which they bring Angry Birds Playground to the world. In the afternoon, I was surprised to learn about Finnish animation company, Anima Vitae has set up a studio branch in Malaysia and I was really happy to talk to Petteri Pasanen, CEO of Anima Vitae Oy about his experience in Malaysia over a beer during the evening party! The first day of EARS conference ended with refreshing drinks and food on the 7th floor of Yle Pasila main building with live performance from Korean singer-songwriter, Sunwoo Jung-A.



Petteri Pasanen, award-winning animation producer giving introduction about Anima Vitae during roundtable session 'Crossover'.

TAMK Media lecturer, Carita Forsgren (right) putting on Samsung Gear VR headset with Dillon Seo (left) guiding her.


Continue with EARS Helsinki 2015 / Part 2 here.

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Curious about what happened in the conference? Look at the pictures captured on the 4-day EARS conference.

Stories by 
Student of 12MEDIA
TAMK Media and Arts
Tampere University of Applied Science

Location: 00100 Helsinki, Finland

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