The La Jolla Playhouse last week held its annual thank you dinner that follows its annual Innovation Night fundraiser which was held in early October. The Playhouse had much to be thankful for as this year’s event raised $360,000 – “a new record for us,” said Playhouse Director of Development Julia Foster.
La Jolla Playhouse started Innovation Night in 2012 as an event to showcase its innovative performances alongside innovations by San Diego’s tech and biotech industries and honor an influential leader from the business community.
This year’s Honorary Chair was Qualcomm founder Irwin Jacobs and in honor of his innovations, the Playhouse presented a performance created with the San Diego Symphony that involved turning cell phones into an instrument.
“Because we’re honoring Irwin Jacobs and basically his technology is powering all the phones that are part of this artistic piece, it was the perfect piece to bring it all together,” Foster said.
Innovation Night was supported by presenting sponsor PNC Bank, founding sponsor Cooley; lead sponsors BioMed Realty and UC San Diego; host sponsors Lodge at Torrey Pines, Maravai Life Sciences, Qualcomm and Show Imaging; and many more co-host sponsors.
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In other Qualcomm news, the company just revved its engines in the race to lead virtual reality technologies.
This weekend at the Formula 1 Las Vegas Grand Prix, the company, in partnership with the Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 Team, offered racing fans a VR experience that took them into a virtual garage where virtual avatars of driver Lewis Hamilton and Team Principal and CEO Toto Wolff acted as guides in a 3D space that allowed them to walk around the race car and see within its schematics and more.
The VR experience was created and powered using Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Spaces XR platform for a Lenovo VRX headset device, which Qualcomm describes as “the most complete, highest quality Spaces-powered experience” it has ever done.
The high-profile VR experience at the Vegas Grand Prix is Qualcomm’s latest move emphasizing its focus on emerging extended reality (XR) technologies. In May, the company announced a $100 million Snapdragon Metaverse Fund to invest in leading XR companies and create a developer ecosystem across gaming, health and wellness, media, entertainment, education and enterprise.
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UC San Diego’s $220 million mixed-use Nuevo East Graduate Student Housing complex this month won a Design-Build Institute of America National Award of Merit in the Educational Facilities category. UC San Diego and designer Latitude 33 Planning & Engineering accepted the award at the Design-Build Conference & Expo in National Harbor, MD.
To be eligible for DBIA awards, projects must be completed on time, on budget, and without litigation. In addition, the six mid- and high-rise building Nuevo East project achieved the university’s sustainability goals, met the University of California Policy on Sustainable Practice, and secured USGBC LEED Gold certification.
The DBIA award for Nuevo East is Latitude 33’s fourth. Prior awards include two other UCSD buildings and the county’s Youth Transition Campus.
