2022 Games for Change Festival

When Aaron Huey set out to do a cover story for NatGeo on public lands in 2017, he had a suspicion it would fail. The story was just too big, with too many important voices and ideas to fit into a traditional format. When he turned to photogrammetry as a solution, he had no idea that this would become a crucial turning point in his career as a storyteller, activist, and founder. The NatGeo piece went on to become a Webby-award winning experience, producing the world’s largest photogrammetry collection of Ancestral Pueblo structures in the process. Since then, he’s shifted from flat to spatial technologies, from the “We the People” campaign he built with Shepard Fairey through Amplifier.org to his latest efforts at Art Machine. This keynote explores his insights learned throughout the past half-decade, taking a look at the unique affordances of Metaverse-driven storytelling formats to deepen cultural heritage efforts, foster inclusion, and provoke new forms of activism.