Dr Johanna Pirker is an experienced speaker for digitalisation, gamification, digitalisation and the future. She loves to talk about her passion and has already been a guest speaker at TEDx or GDC, among others. She works as Ass. Prof. at TU Graz and heads the Game Lab Graz research group. She researches games with a focus on AI, HCI, data analysis and VR technologies. She is also an active and strong voice of the local indie developer community. Johanna Pirker has many years of experience in game development and brings a lot of knowledge to the field of VR in the entertainment sector and beyond.

Lecture topics by Johanna Pirker

• Do video games increase social awareness?
• How we use gaming to make the world comprehensible
• Social Online Gaming – The Real Meeting for Innovation & Learning
• Graphic Cards, Game Engines & Virtual Reality – Innovation through New Technologies

Johanna Pirker started in the industry as a QA tester at EA and still advises studios on game research. In 2011/12 she started researching VR experiences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Within the computer game industry, she is best known as the initiator and director of Game Dev Days Graz, Austria’s largest conference for game developers, and as a speaker at international conferences. She is also heavily involved in the indie game development scene and game jams.

Johanna Pirker was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in the field of science and was awarded the Futurezone Women in Tech Award (2019), the Käthe-Leichter Prize (2020) and the Hedy Lamarr Prize (2021).