Bernard 'Bernie' Yee is the CEO and co-founder of Windup Minds, a Seattle-based independent VR/MR studio building 'Stay: Forever Home,' a mixed-reality virtual pet named Ember. A games-industry lifer who started as a journalist and trained as a lawyer, Yee has produced or shaped some of the most influential titles in gaming - Plants vs. Zombies 2 and Peggle 2 at PopCap, Destiny at Bungie, Rock Band at Harmonix, EverQuest at Sony Online - before spending nearly a decade at Oculus/Meta Reality Labs producing landmark VR experiences like Dreamdeck, Toybox, First Contact and First Steps. His thesis: XR is uniquely capable of making a digital creature feel real, and a game can make you feel loved.

Sir Demis Hassabis CBE FRS is a British AI researcher, neuroscientist, chess prodigy, and game designer who co-founded DeepMind in 2011 and serves as CEO of Google DeepMind. He won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold's protein structure prediction, was knighted for services to AI, and is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in the development of artificial general intelligence.