From pioneering naval gameplay in Assassin’s Creed III to building the gritty world of Skull & Bones, Ubisoft Singapore has always been big on embracing bold new ideas. In celebration of our studio’s creative drive (and in sync with the Singapore Week of Innovation and Technology - SWITCH), we introduced Innovation Week – five days of innovation-themed events to empower new ideas and share tech-related knowledge. All our devs were invited to participate regardless of specialization.
We kicked off the week with a screening of the thought-provoking documentary film Data Science Pioneers: Conquering the Next Frontier over great food and drinks. Up next was a panel about reinforcement learning and AI, where our devs raised big topics like innovation within the game industry, the future of procedurally generated universes, cloud gaming and the ethics of AI.
The next day, Our Strategic Operations Director Nicolas Hunsinger was invited to SWITCH Singapore as a judge of SLINGSHOT, a startup pitching competition which awards funding and spaces to promising new tech ventures.
Day 3 was all about connecting with our Ubisoft Entrepreneurs Lab startups at the PIXEL building and learning about the experiences and breakthroughs of Mighty Jaxx, Story Puppet and Planetarium. Our Strategic Innovation Lab Program Director Catherine Seys was also there to speak about how Ubisoft is preparing for the future of gaming and entertainment. Curious to know what each of our startups are working on? Here’s a quick recap:
Mighty Jaxx designs and produces tech-enabled collectibles and toys in collaboration with artists and global brands.
Planetarium is a blockchain technology company and a game studio. They help developer teams and mod-creators create decentralized worlds for a large number of people.
Story Puppet is building an animation tool for virtual influencers. It will enable even non-technical people to build virtual spaces and performances for online and social platforms.
The next day saw us heading off to Blockshow Asia – a large blockchain conference for crypto enthusiasts. There was a special segment about the use of blockchain in AAA games, where our Blockchain Initiative Director Nicolas Pouard was invited to speak on a panel with several other experts. Watch this video to find out more!
See this awesome goodie? It’s both a mousepad and a screen cleaner - talk about innovation! We gave it to everyone in the studio on the last day of Innovation Week as a souvenir of the great fun and great learnings we’ve had all week.
But the real grand finale of Innovation Week was a studio-wide Blockchain Challenge, where our dev teams got together to work on a problem statement relating to Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). Our judges were so impressed with the challenge entries that they couldn’t help but nominate two winners! Check out some of our shots of the event:
And with that, we wrap up an energizing week of creativity, knowledge and geekiness. Check out #UbisoftInnovation on our social media to see more event highlights. Happy innovation, world creators!