Last week, we attended an event, Virtual Laval, in Laval in Normandy, France for the first time. We had intended to visit last year, but we failed as an Air Traffic Controller’s dispute in France led to the cancellation of our flight. This year, another dispute occurred in the days before our departure, but fortunately this time our flight was not cancelled, so we got to the event. Your reporter had suggested to the Display Daily office that “I’ll be finished this morning, as there’s not a lot to see”, but he was wrong! We spent almost the whole day on our tour of the booths at the show.
The event has been running for 18 years and until just a couple of years ago, was very small. However, that has changed, now and the event was lively as the world wakes up to the next attempt to establish VR as something other than an industrial niche. There was a real mix of very innovative university-led innovation, start ups (the start-up area was sponsored by Technicolor which has its main R & D base in Rennes, not far from Laval) and also established players and brands. If we could have stayed an extra day, we would have been able to attend Dr Jon Peddie’s special session and there were a couple of talks that looked very interesting.
Akoustik Arts directional speakerThere was lots to look at and, considering that we were really there to look at displays, one of the most surprising technology features was directional audio. The University of Kanagawa and French company, Akoustik Arts, were both showing very impressive and very directional audio systems. Get in line and clear audio could be heard, but get out of line and the audio disappeared. Very impressive!Anyway, we can recommend the event if you are interested in A/R or V/R. Although most of the exhibitors were comfortable in English, some were purely francophone, so French language skills can help. And book hotels early – there are only a few and they are fully booked before the event.
