Morgan Mercer's Vantage Point is creating virtual reality training experiences in order to cultivate the skills to break the stigma around sexual assault and and to overcome the bystander effect. They're using the affordances of VR & 360 video in...
On April 4th, Jessica Outlaw released a survey of 600 regular virtual reality users about harassment experiences in VR, which was funded by Pluto VR.
Marlon Fuentes is a ethnomusicologist who looks at the culture of how people relate to music through an anthropological lens. He's an emerging technologist who is tracking how virtual reality provides new opportunities for new culture to develop...
Gabo Arora's ZIKR: A Sufi Revival premiered at Sundance this year. It's a 360-degree video capture of a number of different Sufi rituals, songs, and dances, but it had a real-time, social VR experience overlaid on top of the live action footage...
Lawnmower Man director Brett Leonard is working on a project called Hollywood Rooftop, which is going to be shot both as an immersive 360 video as well as a 2D film. It's an experiment to discover some of the unique cinematic storytelling...
I facilitated a panel discussion at the Decentralized Web Summit that brought together some of the leading virtual reality creators who have been integrating blockchain technologies and creating the foundations of the decentralized metaverse.We...
Jules Urbach wants to create a photorealistic metaverse. He's been working on rending technologies to render digital lightfields, and Otoy's Octane renderer is used everywhere from baking scenes in Unity's real-time game engine to rendering the...
Samantha Matthews Chase calls GDPR - General Data Portability Regulations rather than data protection. GDPR has forced many companies to make over a decade's worth of our data available to use, and Chase sees this as a goldmine that can be mined for...
Janus VR has been implementing an IPFS distributed file system option for creators for the past couple of years. I talk to 'Taco Dog' who was the catalyst behind helping to architect the protocol foundations of the decentralized metaverse.He has...
The decentralized metaverse will require the transferring of A LOT of data. Distributed, peer-to-peer file systems like IPFS could provide the backbone of the decentralized metaverse.I talk with David Dias who is one of the developers of IPFS about...
Decentraland is a grand experiment of bringing together decentralized blockchain technologies and virtual worlds. Decentraland ICO raised over 26 million dollars, but it wasn't without controversy where 5-9 whales came in to buy up all of the tokens...
ICOs are disrupting late stage venture capital. Shawn Cheng was working at the Vayner/RSE VC, but now he's working with Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin's Consensys where he's helping to manage a portfolio of over 40 blockchain companies. Cheng talks...
The threat of forking a blockchain project is a catalyst for cooperation, which means that there are many parallels between the blockchain and open source development dynamics. It also means that the value of a blockchain project comes more from a...
High Fidelity and Janus VR announced in March that they were creating a Virtual Reality Blockchain Alliance in order to determine the protocols for the global interoperability of VR.I had a chance to talk to the co-founders of Janus VR and High...
Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, a co-editor for Boing Boing, and consultant to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He’s been closely tracking the relationship between Tech, Law, Culture, & Markets, and he is seeing a concerning pattern...
There’s a tension on the web today between creating a safe space to be online versions the costs to censorship and free speech. Spam, bots, trolls, harassment, hate speech, and terrorism are on the frontlines of making the web an unpleasant place to...
Brewster Kahle told me that the average of a web page on the Internet is 100 days before it either changes or disappears completely. Kahle realized that you can’t run a culture when you have no institutional memory, and so he started the Internet...
In “Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace,” Lawrence Lessig wrote about four socioeconomic regulators of society as being the law, cultural norms, economic markets, and architecture/code (i.e. technology). All of these four factors combine in order to...
Pixel Ripped 1989 is one of the most ambitious and innovative VR experiences I've seen. It's a multi-dimensional experience with 2D game within a VR game within an immersive story. You're in a VR world set in 1989 while also playing a Game Boy-like...
Each of the founders of TribeXR wanted to learn how to become a DJ, but they never got around to it. So they all went to DJ school, and they've been building virtual reality technologies to alleviate many of the pain points that slowed down their...
Electronauts is a cross between a simplified DJ simulator and improvisational music tool from Survios that is launching today. It's releasing with over 40 electronic songs that allows you to step into the DJ booth and control the flow of the music...
Kaliya Young (aka Identity Woman) has been working on digital identities for the past 15 years including helping facilitate the twice-a-year Internet Identity Workshop. These workshops lead to the Rebooting the Web of Trust workshops and the...
Vint Cerf is a co-inventor of the Internet, and he's currently working as a Vice President at Google at their Chief Internet Evangelist. With all of the ethical discussions about the dangers of centralization of power and influence for censorship...