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Heads up, game makers: There's a new UX Summit debuting at the Game Developers Conference, and GDC organizers are now accepting UX Summit talk submissions through Friday, September 23rd!

Led by Celia Hodent, director of user experience at Epic Games, the new UX Summit is devoted to all facets of the user experience discipline in the video game industry.

Hodent is a passionate advocate for UX in games, and since this will be the inaugural UX Summit at GDC, we briefly corresponded with her to get her thoughts on why the Summit is important, what value it offers to GDC 2017 attendees -- and most importantly, what the UX Summit is looking for in terms of talk submissions.

As virtual- and augmented-reality technologies become more powerful and more commonplace, the question arises: how can you use them to enhance your workplace?

At the Virtual Reality Developers Conference this November IBM engineer Rosstin Murphy will help answer that question with a talk on "Immersive Data Visualization: AR in the Workplace."

It should be an intriguing talk, as Rosstin will present his research on using AR to visualize, analyze, and manipulate big data in the workplace. His goal is to use AR to augment the data scientist's toolbox, and improve the speed and depth of their analyses.

Even if you aren't a data analyst, his talk is worth checking out because (in addition to his insight on AR uses) his work exploring VR interaction in a business context reveals objective challenges with using VR to improve work productivity.

Interested in potentially serving as a judge for the 2017 Independent Games Festival Awards? Now's your chance!

Got a great idea for a talk that would fit in well at the 2017 Game Developers Conference Community Management Summit?

Great news! GDC organizers are now accepting Community Management Summit talk submissions through Friday, September 23rd.

Next year is a great time to be speaking at the event. This will be the 31st edition of GDC, which continues to be the world's largest and longest-running event serving professionals dedicated to the art and science of making games.

The week-long conference takes place Monday, February 27 to Friday, March 3, 2017 at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, California, and will once again host thousands of game developers from all around the world for a week of learning, networking and inspiration.

The one-day Community Management Summit will cover every corner of a quickly-evolving, crucial facet of video game development. Summit content will focus on how to inspire, build and maintain user loyalty and enthusiasm through the ups and downs of community opinion and adoption.

This November San Francisco will host the inaugural standalone Virtual Reality Developers Conference, and as part of the event's broad coverage of the virtual- and augmented-reaility industries a panel of experts will explore how VR/AR can be used to improve healthcare.

During the panel on "The Future of Healthcare: Creating VR/AR for Patients & Doctors" experts Tracey John (Vice President, Associate Creative Director, Havas Health), Bart Kok (Studio Manager, The Virtual Dutch Men), Dr. Mark Lightowler, PhD (Founder and CEO, Phorix Limited, formerly head of digital innovation at Novartis) and Gerald Flannory (Vice President, Associate Creative Director, Havas Life New York) will discuss the needs, the challenges, the opportunities, and the process for creating VR/AR in healthcare by sharing their own work and experiences.

Not only is there emerging research and innovation in providing diagnostic and therapeutic applications for patients using VR and AR, there is a storytelling aspect, often aimed at physicians and non-patients, that can help inspire empathy and understanding of various disease states.

If you've got a great idea for a session that should take place as part of the Game Career Seminar at Game Developers Conference 2017, now is the time to submit it! We at GDC are now accepting Game Career Seminar submissions through Friday, September 23rd.

This will be the 31st edition of GDC, which continues to be the world's largest and longest-running event serving professionals dedicated to the art and science of making games.

The big event will take place Monday, February 27 to Friday, March 3, 2017 at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, California, and will once again host thousands of game developers from all around the world for a week of learning, networking and inspiration.

The Career Seminar is all about bringing new faces into the game industry, and encouraging the new folks who have recently joined us. It's for people who have either just made their first game, or are thinking about it. These aren't complete neophytes, but they certainly aren't veterans.

Last week the producers of the Virtual Reality Developers Conference released the first-ever VRDC VR/AR Innovation Report, a compilation of responses from professionals involved in the development of virtual and augmented reality.

Notably, this new report offers an exclusive glimpse into the rapidly-expanding, diverse and hard-to-measure VR/AR industry - from sustainability of the market, to market challenges, platform availability, funding and more.

For more information and to download the report, download it for free here!

This inaugural VR/AR Innovation Report comes in advance of the highly anticipated standalone VRDC event, which will take place November 2nd and 3rd in San Francisco. Reported findings are based on responses from more than 500 professionals currently working to develop VR/AR experiences.

To give you a better sense of the data available within the report, today we'd like to highlight a particularly notable finding regarding how many developers are working on platform-exclusive VR or AR projects.