Women’s Immersive Tech NGO receives Meta funding
Women in Immersive Tech Europe (WIIT) has announced that it is the first European NGO to receive funding from Meta ‘for building the metaverse responsibly’.
The WIIT Meta Grant includes both a new fund to support key European festivals in developing XR projects by women, non-binary and diverse gender creators, as well as the launch of several in-house creative labs to better define and represent the digital self in the metaverse.
The first part of the WIIT Meta Grant, funded by Meta’s 2-year $50 million initiative, will be distributed to key European XR festival labs under the form of a special fund dedicated to European based women, non-binary and diverse gender XR creators who submit their projects to these festivals. The goal of this fund is to help in the development of their projects/prototypes and to offer more visibility in the industry. Three festivals have been selected so far: the Biennale College Cinema VR, the European Creators’ Lab and the Booster Lab.
The second part of the WIIT Meta grant will fund different workshops organized by WIIT and dedicated to its members. It includes the launch of WIIT’s Metaverse Creation Lab, a month-long lab that enables ten women, non-binary and diverse gender individuals to create their unique, virtual identity. This new lab headed by Sara Lisa Vogl, Co-Founder of WIIT together with other metaverse experts, will offer a series of workshops around the definition and representation of “self” in a digital context as well as around aspects of responsible creation for online, social XR spaces. It is centered around building a virtual avatar that might express a female or diverse identifying individual better in comparison with existing models whilst above all ensuring safety in the metaverse.
The WIIT community is a group of like-minded women and underrepresented groups from across Europe and beyond, and find the resources to learn and grow, launched in May 2016 in Brussels and was turned into an NGO in March 2018.
At the moment the funding by Meta was announced, the WIIT have a strong Facebook group of more than 2,500 members.
The level of the grant was not included in the announcement.
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