VR/AR Association

VR/AR Association
Information
Type	Trade association
Industry	Virtual reality, Augmented reality
Founded	2015
Founder	Nathan Pettyjohn
Notable Personnel	Nathan Pettyjohn (Founder and President), Pradeep Khanna (Executive Director, Asia Pacific)
Products	Local chapters, industry committees, Immerse Global Summit (with the Applied AI Association), best-practice white papers
Website	https://www.thevrara.com

Not to be confused with the XR Association.

The VR/AR Association (VRARA) is an international membership association for companies and professionals working with virtual reality and augmented reality. Its founder, Nathan Pettyjohn, announced it in a founder's letter dated 1 December 2015 as "a global trade association for the virtual reality and augmented reality marketplace". The association is organized around city and country chapters and around industry committees, which publish best-practice papers and hold online sessions. With the Applied AI Association, it produces the Immerse Global Summit event series.

According to the VRARA, its members range from startups to large companies such as Meta, Microsoft, Lenovo and Epic Games.

Reviewed 6 October 2026. Founding letter, launch and chapter events, Kolo appointment, 2016 committees, summit history (2018 to 2026), leadership, chapter/committee pages, white papers and size figures checked against the cited archived and live sources. About review dates.

History

Founding

Pettyjohn was the founder and chief executive of Aisle411, an indoor location and mobile software company that began building 3D augmented reality indoor navigation with Google's Project Tango technology in 2014. In his founding letter he wrote that, after retail clients asked Aisle411 for more VR and AR work, he found the market "fragmented across the globe", and he set out the association's mission as fostering collaboration, accelerating growth, supporting research and education, helping to develop industry standards, and promoting member companies. The letter said that chapters would open in more than eight cities during 2016.

Entrepreneur Quarterly, a St. Louis publication, reported in February 2016 that the association had launched the previous month. Its first chapter event took place on 11 February 2016 at Venture Cafe in St. Louis, where nearly 100 people attended demonstrations and talks that included John Chicoli of Boeing. Pettyjohn told the publication that he had started the association in St. Louis partly because he was based there, and that the next chapter launch was planned for San Francisco. The New York City chapter held its launch event at New York University in March 2016, with demonstrations, an expert panel and a startup pitch session. Georgia Tech, describing the organization in 2025, gave its founding year as 2015.

Growth and committees

In October 2016 the association named Kris Kolo, who had been running the New York chapter, as its Global Executive Director. The announcement listed USA Today Network, NYU, GoPro and Samsung among its members and said Kolo would oversee member growth, a sponsorship program, a YouTube news channel and support for chapter presidents. According to the release, Kolo had earlier been an advisor and board member of FlyBy Media and an executive at Toys R Us and Verizon, where his work involved AR projects with Metaio and Wikitude.

A December 2016 press release said the association had passed 100 members and had 17 chapters as it entered its second year. It sought participants for industry committees covering digital health, VR experiences, storytelling and audiences, VR content licensing, advertising (with the American Association of Advertising Agencies), co-located VR, and retail and e-commerce, plus public safety, education and mobile VR. The release listed Cathy Hackl as the association's director of PR and social media.

Summits

At the end of 2017 the owners of CVR, a VR and AR show that had run for two years in Vancouver, decided not to continue it. The VRARA created the VR/AR Global Summit as its successor, kept the same executive producer, and held the first edition in Vancouver on 21 and 22 September 2018. The Vancouver Economic Commission said it was honored that the association had chosen Vancouver to host its "inaugural Global Summit". A full-day VRARA Enterprise Summit was scheduled for 10 June 2019 as part of the LiveWorx conference at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. The 2019 summit returned to Vancouver on 1 and 2 November. In a guest article for Daily Hive, a media sponsor of the event, Vancouver chapter president Dan Burgar wrote that it would feature more than 1,000 executives, speakers and exhibitors and that the speaker lineup was split evenly between men and women.

After an online edition held from 29 September to 1 October 2021, the VRARA renamed its next event the immerse Global Summit (iGS, later styled Immerse Global Summit or IGS) so that it could cover technologies beyond VR and AR alone, such as 5G and cryptocurrency; gaming was listed as one of its content tracks. IGS Europe 2022 ran from 28 to 30 September 2022 at the Savoy Palace in Funchal, Madeira, Portugal; XR Today reported it as the association's return to in-person events in the European Union. The 2023 edition took place in Orlando, Florida, from 17 to 19 October, co-hosted with the MetaCenter and Synapse as part of MetaCenter Global Week.

In 2026 the summit was reorganized as a series of focused, industry-specific editions produced jointly by the VRARA and the Applied AI Association. The first, an Enterprise Edition on 14 and 15 April 2026 at the Verizon Innovation Lab in San Francisco, had about 200 attendees and 45 speakers, according to the organizers. Healthcare, media and entertainment, and education editions were listed to follow. As of October 2026 the organizer's site gave two different dates for the Healthcare Edition at the Verizon Innovation Lab: 27 and 28 October 2026 on its home page, and 8 and 9 December 2026 on the edition's own page.

Recent activity

In December 2024 the association announced a VRARA National Roadshow for 2025 and 2026, a series of free one-day events on XR, digital twins and AI for government and public-sector organizations in United States cities. Booz Allen Hamilton, HTC VIVE, Hadean and Virtualware USA were named as sponsors. In April 2025 Georgia Tech joined the association and became a strategic sponsor of its Atlanta chapter. Chapters also run their own regional events; on 18 April 2024 Amy Peck, chief executive of Endeavor XR, gave the first keynote of the VRARA Central Florida Immersive Technology Summit 2024.

Organization

Leadership

As of October 2026 the association's team page lists Nathan Pettyjohn as founder and president and Pradeep Khanna as executive director for Asia Pacific. The page describes Pettyjohn as a former strategic technology executive at Lenovo who managed the go-to-market strategy for Lenovo's AR and VR division; his 2021 Augmented World Expo speaker biography gave his Lenovo title as Commercial AR/VR Lead. Kris Kolo was still the association's Global Executive Director at IGS Europe in September 2022. The association's global board of advisors includes Amy Peck (Endeavor XR), Daniel O'Brien (HTC Vive), Jonathan Martin (Magic Leap), Munjeet Singh (Booz Allen) and Dan Nieves (Meta); the team page also lists an advisor from Qualcomm.

Chapters

Each chapter is led by a chapter president. The association describes the role as typically taking two to five hours a week for communications, event coordination, onboarding new chapter members and overseeing research and case-study work. In October 2026 its chapter directory listed chapters across the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, the Middle East and Australia, although the team page showed many of them, including London, Singapore and San Francisco, with the president position open.

Committees and publications

Industry committees hold weekly online sessions for members, with presentations and discussions. As of October 2026 the committees page listed groups for enterprise, storytelling, education, the metaverse, generative AI, digital twins and the industrial metaverse, training, aerospace, healthcare, universities and colleges, retail and e-commerce, safety and security, sports, "VR for Good", policy development, QA and testing, optics, WebXR, real estate, hospitality, mapping, travel and tourism, automotive and 3D. Several committees have produced best-practice white papers, which the association distributes to members.

Publication	Date	Committee	Notes
VR/AR Top 10 VR Best Practices	August 2017	VR Stories & Audiences Committee	Covers VR hardware, software, development and content production; the committee said it intended to update it every six months
VR & AR in Training Best Practices	May 2018	Training Committee	More than 20 pages, aimed at training professionals new to VR and AR
Best Practices for VR & AR in Education	November 2018	Education Committee	Lead author Carlos J. Ochoa; includes case studies such as learning resource centers in United Arab Emirates schools

Reported size

The association's membership and reach figures are self-reported, and its pages have used different measures over time (paying members, registered companies, or a wider "ecosystem").

Date	Reported figure	Source
December 2016	More than 100 members, 17 chapters	Association press release
2019	An "ecosystem" of over 4,100 companies, schools and organizations and 25,000 professionals	Association white paper pages, as archived in 2019
September 2022	About 60,000 professionals and 4,000 companies	Kris Kolo, quoted by XR Today
April 2025	More than 60,000 professionals, 4,000 organizations, more than 50 chapters	Georgia Tech
October 2026	70+ chapters, 60,000+ professionals, 4,000 organizations	Association chapters page

See also

• XR Association
• Augmented World Expo
• Khronos Group