Don Bland with the Brave Heart Project, Marcelo Guimarães CIO with Sábia Experience, Jesses Maula CDO at IDEAN and Sandi Winter the Director of the Wellness Living Laboratory look at how they are using immersive worlds to tell a new type of story.

Don Bland has extensive experience creating cutting edge entertainment, using imaginative storytelling and the latest advances in technology to create award winning content. A creative Executive Producer in the entertainment industry and virtual environments with a proven track record in finding and creatively developing multiplatform content for global audiences. Specializing in building teams, business creation & development, designing workflows, and producing projects for specific technology platforms. Don is a co-founder and partner of Virtual Ventures, a company focused on advising, investment and MX content creation. Don is focused on the future of digital health and cognitive media.

Marcelo Guimarães is co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer of Sábia Experience, a Brazilian tech company dedicated to the Innovation in Immersive Education for workforce and professionals. He holds a Master of Science degree in Metrology and Instrumentation at UFSC-Brazil and he was a guest researcher at NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) in the USA . He participated in many executive courses at Sloan School of Management – MIT and at Stanford Business School – Stanford University. He is co-inventor of many patented technologies and products related to mechaoptoelectronic devices and systems used for training groups of workers in hostile industrial environments, typically found in Oil&Gas, Mining, Construction and Health Industries.

Jesse Maula is a hands-on design & business professional who has the best capabilities in transforming & digitizing businesses, creating elegant product & services, making profitable business, coaching the team to reach high performance level and inspiring people. Lately, he’s felt love with sales. He has over 15 years experience in international Customer Experience Design including Service Design, Research, SW development & Design + Product Management. He’s practiced Design consultancy globally receiving postings to Germany, China, Finland, Korea, US & UK. During the last 8 years I’ve been running international business units with great success.

Sandra J. Winter, PhD, MHA, is currently the Director of the Wellness Living Laboratory (WELL) and a Social Science Research Scholar at the Stanford Prevention Research Center. The goal of the WELL for Life initiative is to build the scientific evidence base about wellbeing by engaging thousands of participants from various parts of the world to help improve our understanding of the key determinants of wellbeing. In addition to measuring the factors that impact wellbeing over time, researchers on the WELL team will conduct interventions and experiments designed to improve wellbeing.