Field of Vision: An Immersive 2032

2032 is fast approaching, and with it comes the opportunity to broaden our perspectives and take a bold, future-focused approach to how the Olympic and Paralympic Games are planned, delivered and experienced.

Field of Vision: An Immersive 2032 is a half-day event that brings this future into focus, showcasing the breadth of roles extended reality (XR) technologies can play across the Games ecosystem – from infrastructure and venue planning to workforce development, visitor experience and city activation.

Extending beyond individual events and venues, XR can connect the wider Games experience through immersive fan engagement and tourism activations that transform the local landscape into a cohesive digital experience. Behind the scenes, the same technologies can support logistics and operations through interactive digital twins, scenario and process simulations, and scalable, experiential training for staff and volunteers.

Looking across these themes, the program will explore how immersive technology can make a meaningful contribution, and create an important connection between the people, priorities and opportunities shaping the Games and Queensland XR capability.

Join us to discover what’s possible when these technologies are built into the foundations of planning and delivery, helping to create a 2032 Games that’s ambitious, innovative and inclusive.

Field of Vision artwork: Original photo by Grant Phillips

Agenda

9:00AM – ARRIVAL & REGISTRATION

9:30AM – Opening & Welcome

RHIANNON PHILLIPS, CEO, Queensland XR Hub

KEY SPEECH: From Spectator to Co-Creator: What if Brisbane 2032 could respond to us?

What if Brisbane 2032 were experienced less as a series of events to watch, and more as a city people could play with, contribute to and help shape?

This talk explores a more participatory role for immersive technology. Mixed reality, responsive environments and interactive public works can turn audiences into active participants, using movement, voice, gesture and collective behaviour to influence what unfolds around them. An individual interaction can become a shared spectacle; a crowd can become part of the work itself.

The opportunity stretches well beyond the stadium. Streets, riverfronts, cultural precincts, tourism destinations and night-time spaces could become places of play, storytelling and unexpected connection, giving visitors and locals new ways to encounter one another and the city.

It also raises a question of legacy. NUMINA is INTERACTOR’s developing vision for a large-scale, participatory cultural experience on the Brisbane River. Images projected onto floating water mist would create a public spectacle, while audience participation could become part of the visual storytelling. Conceived to evolve through new artistic and community contributions, it offers a way to imagine an immersive experience that could become part of Brisbane’s cultural life beyond 2032.

Could 2032 leave Brisbane with a new kind of cultural infrastructure: programmable, evolving and distinctly of this place, continuing to invite artists, communities and visitors to participate for years to come?

GEORGIE PINN, Founder & Director, INTERACTOR

PROVOCATION: Nobody Needs Glasses to Get Lost

Brisbane 2032 will be a decentralised Games, spread across South East Queensland and navigated by millions of unfamiliar visitors. This provocation makes the case for building a shared spatial layer now, connecting navigation, live information and engagement rather than leaving them to a collection of venue-by-venue activations.

The real challenge is discovery. How does a visitor navigate thousands of experiences, places and pieces of information without another menu to learn? One answer to this is a conversational spatial guide. This talk will introduce you to Skye: an AI holographic concierge that offers a simple, voice-first way into the city.

Phones provide the starting point; mixed-reality glasses may extend the experience by 2032. The larger opportunity reaches beyond spectators into workforce training, athlete orientation, Games delivery and cultural legacy.

The provocation: who gets to build on Brisbane’s spatial layer, who owns it, and when does that conversation begin?

PAUL MARTIN, CEO & Founder, tagSpace

PANEL: The City in Play

A modern Olympics concentrates the world’s attention in one place. For a few weeks, millions of people learn a city at once: its landmarks, neighbourhoods, streets and peculiarities.

Paris showed how thoroughly the Games can inhabit a host city. By 2032, spatial computing will be more mature and connectivity will have moved further from 5G Advanced towards 6G. The experience of the Games may become more distributed, more immediate and more entwined with the city itself.

This session explores what that could mean for fans and visitors. Advanced broadcasting could carry live sport into public spaces and create new forms of remote viewing. AR could help people find their way, uncover stories held in particular places, or lead them towards neighbourhoods, cultural experiences and destinations they might otherwise miss.

There is a legacy question here as well. Digital commissions, spatial storytelling and immersive representations of place could foster greater environmental awareness and endure beyond the event, adding new layers to Brisbane’s cultural and environmental record. For Queensland’s XR creators, artists and technology companies, 2032 also offers something rare: the chance to make ambitious work at scale, test it in public and place it before an international audience.

The larger question is how far the Games experience might travel by 2032, and what Brisbane and Queensland choose to do with the world’s attention while it is here.

JAMES HIGHAM, Distinguished Professor, Sustainable Tourism and Co-Director, Climate Change Action Cluster, Griffith University

JOE CARTER, Senior Lecturer, Film Production, Faculty of Creative Industries, Education & Social Justice, School of Creative Arts, Film, Screen & Animation, QUT

KAREN SANDERS, XR Strategist, Queensland XR Hub

RALF MUHLBERGER, CEO, Ardacious

BEN PARSONS, Founder, Ministry of Sport and Playa Power (Moderator)

10:50AM – MORNING TEA & TECHNOLOGY SHOWCASE

11:20AM – KEY SPEECH: Olympics 2032: The Story of Place

2032 is an opportunity to share Queensland with the world as more than a stage for the Games, but a story shaped by our unique culture, history and landscape.

This talk explores how an accessible digital twin could allow people anywhere in the world to explore the places hosting the Brisbane 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games, while understanding why those places matter.

Through spatial storytelling, the experience connects Country, history, culture, community and future legacy. Users could move through Brisbane and the wider Games region and travel through layers of time: what came before, what exists there now, how the place will change for 2032, what happens there during the Games, and what remains afterwards.

Designed for the phones, tablets and computers people already use today, the platform also grows with the emerging spatial technology of tomorrow. As wearables and smart glasses become more capable and widely adopted, the same digital twin could move beyond the screen and into the physical city, accompanying visitors throughout their Games experience.

The proposition is simple: use the Games not only as an invitation to explore Queensland, but as an opportunity to understand its places, people and stories more deeply.

MATTHEW AISTHORPE, Chief Technology Officer, Intelligence Layer

KEY SPEECH: Training for 2032 Before it Happens

A Games is rehearsed long before it is performed.

By 2032, thousands of volunteers, venue staff and operational teams will need to understand places they may never have worked in, respond to situations they may rarely encounter, and coordinate across an event spread over an entire region.

This talk explores how immersive VR could become part of that preparation. Virtual environments can let people learn a venue before they enter it, practise a role before they perform it, and experience complex scenarios without the cost or disruption of staging them physically.

The value is less in making training feel futuristic than in making it repeatable, consistent and easier to scale. For Brisbane 2032, immersive simulation could offer a way to rehearse the human side of the Games before the city is asked to perform it for real.

HAYDEN MORISON, CEO, Next World

PANEL: Who Gets to Build on the Digital City?

There is the Brisbane you can see — concrete, steel, streets, river. And then there is its other life in data: mapped, modelled, simulated and increasingly connected in real time.

As the city prepares for 2032, geospatial data and digital twins should form part of the infrastructure used to plan, operate and experience the Games, supporting transport, venues, crowd movement, emergency response, workforce coordination and visitor experience.

This session explores what becomes possible when that spatial foundation connects with game engines, real-time 3D environments and immersive technology.

The discussion will look at how authoritative city and infrastructure data can move beyond traditional GIS applications and into simulation, AR, VR and other spatial experiences.

It will also ask how this investment can create opportunity for Queensland talent, giving local XR creators and technology companies the chance to experiment, build and deliver new products and experiences, while using the global stage of 2032 to showcase that capability to the world.

From open standards and interoperable data to immersive interfaces and real-time environments, the session will explore what it takes to build digital infrastructure that serves Games-time operations while supporting a wider ecosystem of innovation long after 2032.

BETTY MOINET, Senior Manager, Strategic Engagement, Esri Australia

RICHARD SIMPSON, Founding Director & CEO, Meta Moto

FREDERICO FIALHO TEIXEIRA, Director, UQ VisLab and Associate Professor, School of Architecture, Design and Planning, The University of Queensland

KATE RAYMOND, CEO, Master Electricians Australia (Moderator)

12:30-1:00PM – TECHNOLOGY SHOWCASE & CLOSING

Presenters

Technology Showcase