Reimagined Vol II: Mahal is the second edition of the Reimagined VR series that premiered at Tribeca Immersive 2023 (see my interview about Volume I from Venice 2022). It’s a Quill animation piece that has lots of stylized cinematography...
This year, the seven games that were a part of the Tribeca Games selections were co-located with the 13 Tribeca Immersive experiences at Spring Studios. I had a chance to unpack each of the games with Casey Baltes who curated the selection and...
The Expanse: A Telltale Series is a 5-part, 2D narrative game series that’s a prequel to the Amazon TV and book series. I had a chance to play through the first 90-minute episode at Tribeca Games, and then unpack it with game director Stephan...
Emojiii is an immersive social experience for 20 – 200 people by the Smartphone Orchestra where people use their phone web browsers to be guided through a number of interactive games and quizzes exploring how we make meaning and communicate with...
The Pirate Queen: A Forgotten Legend is a narrative VR game with lots of exquisite environmental storytelling with embodied puzzles and escape room mechanics. You play as a 19th-century Chinese woman named Cheng Shih as she becomes one of the most...
#1244: “Maya: The Birth” Animation Uses Mythic Symbols & Magical Realism to Explore Menstrual Taboos
Maya: The Birth (Chapter 1) is an animated Quill piece that explores menstrual taboos by juxtaposing lots of mythic and archetypal symbols with more mundane scenes of shame and exile within the context of family, schools, and the broader culture...
Pixel Ripped 1978 is the third in a trilogy of game-within-a-game series from indie development shop ARVORE based in São Paulo, Brazil. It taps into some deep nostalgia by recreating the environmental and contextual aspects of computing through the...
In Search of Time is a 2D film that premiered at Tribeca Immersive, and it uses a lot of generative AI style transfer techniques on top of footage of Pierre Zandrowicz’s children. Atlas V co-founder Zandrowicz’s co-directed this piece...
MONSTRORAMA is a mixed reality narrative game from Atlas V that transforms your living room into a monster museum. There is a lot of environmental storytelling that’s used to modulate your home, and you end up using your hands to draw mixed...
Meneath: The Mirrors of Ethics uses the Pepper’s Ghost Technique from theme parks and theatre to represent hidden indigenous ancestors within her animation film. This technique uses two perpendicular monitors with a piece of glass at a 45...
Fortune is a series of 8 Snapchat and Instagram AR filters that explore the topic of money and our relationship to money. Each project is around 90-seconds in length and uses a variety of immersive storytelling techniques from tabletop-scale...
The Fury is a two-channel video installation in combination with a 360 video that “explores sexual exploitation of female political prisoners, referencing the Islamic Republic of Iran’s brutal treatment of political prisoners.” Director...
The VOID was a location-based entertainment company that shut down during the pandemic and maybe coming back at some point. The VOID Co-founder & Chief Creative Officer Curtis Hickman convinced his partners to allow him to reflect upon and share...
Sean Dougherty and Jeffrey Colon are Access Technology Experts who work for the LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired non-profit, and they were very active at the XR Access Symposium during a number of sessions focusing on the NSF-grant...
Yvonne Felix has been using augmented reality as an assistive technology since 2012. They tell me, “I actually wear an augmented reality device that allows me to see. I’m legally blind, so that means that I have about 2% of my vision...
Ohan Oda works at Google on an AR feature in Google Maps called Live View that he was showing off during the demo session at the XR Access Symposium. It adds some screenreader support for geospatial browsing where users can search for nearby...
Liv Erickson is the ecosystem development lead at Mozilla focusing on innovation in spatial computing and AI technologies, and they are the former director of the Mozilla Hubs team. They gave a presentation at the XR Access Symposium that they...
Owlchemy Labs has been on the leading edge of accessible VR game design since 2016. starting with Job Simulator, and then following up with key accessibility features for Vacation Simulator, and Cosmonious High. They were at XR Access Symposium...
Joel Ward is an Emerging Technology Manager at Booz Allen Hamilton who has been working within Web Accessibility since around the time Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act was enacted on August 7, 1998 and the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility...
Michael Cooper works for the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Accessibility Initiative, and he was attending the XR Access Symposium to learn more about the existing XR accessibility efforts but also to moderate a break-out session about...
Mark Steelman is a XR Access Working Group Member and Senior Unity Engineer at Transfr, which uses virtual reality to “train people for well-paying careers available now in high-demand fields.” Steelman was at XR Access showing off some...
Liz Hyman President and the CEO of the XR Association (XRA), which is a non-profit, industry trade association representing 47 XR companies including major players like Meta, Google, Microsoft, HTC, Sony Interactive Entertainment, Unity, and HTC...
Dylan Fox is the Director of Operations for the XR Access Initiative, where he focuses on outreach and advocacy for making virtual and augmented reality accessible for people who have disabilities. I previously interviewed Fox for the white paper on...
I had a chance to do six brief interviews during the poster session of XR Access Symposium 2023 that I’ve compiled into this single podcast episode. This gives a great overview of some of the emerging topics for XR accessibility including XR...
Christian Vogler leads the Technical Access Program at Gallaudet University, and has been looking into captions for VR and 3D spatial environments for folks who are deaf and hard of hearing. I had a chance to catch up with him at the XR Access...
Reginé Gilbert is the author of the book Inclusive Design for a Digital World: Designing with Accessibility in Mind, and teaches at the New York University in the Tandon School of Engineering. She has been teaching UX for nearly a decade now, and is...
Christine Hemphill started Open Inclusion in 2018 as a disability-inclusive research and design organization that is working at the intersection between accessibility and emerging technologies. She makes sense of the broad spectrum of disabilities...
This is the first of fifteen in a Voices of VR podcast series on XR Accessibility based upon my coverage from the XR Access Symposium 2023 that happened in New York City on June 15th and 16th. I’m kicking off my 8 hours of coverage with an...
Wagner James Au‘s latest book Making a Metaverse that Matters: From Snow Crash & Second Life to A Virtual World Worth Fighting For releases on June 27 after the 20th anniversary of Second Life is on June 23, 2023. Au started as an embedded...
I had a chance to speak with Tribeca Immersive curator Ana Brzezińska to break down each one of this year’s selection of 13 immersive stories. I’ll be in NYC from June 7-16th covering the festival, and so stay tuned for more coverage...
I speak to CNET editor at large Scott Stein about his hands-on impression of the Apple Vision Pro that he had on Tuesday, June 6, 2023. Check out his full article: “Apple Vision Pro Hands-On: Far Better Than I Was Ready For.” Also see my...
I speak with UploadVR Editor Ian Hamilton about his hands-on impression of the Apple Vision Pro that he had on Tuesday, June 6, 2023. Check out his full article: “Apple Vision Pro Hands-On: Way Ahead of Meta In Critical Ways.” Also see...
I speak with Road to VR Editor Ben Lang about his hands-on impression of the Apple Vision Pro that he had on Monday, June 5, 2023. Check out his full article: “Hands-on: Apple Vision Pro isn’t for Gaming, But it Does Everything Else Better...
Apple finally announced their mixed reality headset called the Apple Vision Pro at Apple’s WWDC keynote on June 5, 2023. It’s a $3500 device that by accounts is the most advanced XR headset produced up to this point that’s largely...
Engage XR produced a 45-minute “Eat Sleep VR Repeat” – Immersive Metaverse Concert in collaboration with Fatboy Slim’s Norman Cook that showed in a limited screening on March 30, 2023. It was an incredibly, mind-bending and groundbreaking VR concert...
The Engage XR platform holds a mix of different types of gatherings in VR ranging from educational meetings, corporate communications, and virtual events and conferences. With the onset of the pandemic in 2020, then HTC started holding a number of...
WebGPU shipped in Chrome 113, which brings high-performance 3D graphics & parallel compute capabilities to the web. I was able to chat with Google Chrome software Engineer Brandon Jones, who is a W3C specification editor for both WebGPU and WebXR...
The immersive documentary Reeducated won a Peabody Award as well as the Outstanding Interactive Media winner of the New Approaches category of the New & Documentary Emmy in 2022. I had a chance to record this interview with the co-directors Ben Mauk...
I did an interview with Jay Graber back in 2019 at the Decentralized Web (DWeb) Camp a few years before she officially became the Bluesky CEO, which is currently the new hot social media platform that’s a Twitter clone built on top a decentralized...
Immers Space implements the ActivityPub open standard in order to add a federated social graph to the open Metaverse. I had a chance to try a prototype back in December 2022 where I went from a modified Mozilla Hubs WebXR space (that had the Immers...
The Metaverse Standards Forum announced today that they are “incorporated as an independent non-profit industry consortium.” The Khronos Group has been financially bootstrapping the Metaverse Standards Forum’s efforts to see if there was enough...
In my final SXSW interview, I had a chance to catch up with SXSW Immersive Programmer Blake Kammerdiener to do a retrospective look at this year’s program, some of the challenges for VR exhibition, his design intentions for how to intermingle the...
Chloé Lee’s immersive art piece Temporal World: A Haptisonic Virtual Reality Memory World uses a custom-made haptic vest that is intimately integrated into the ambient sound design of this point-cloud, spatial exploration around memory. Lee wanted...
Another World VR developers Ioulia Isserlis and Max Sacker thought it was a prank when German Hip Hop legend Dennis Lisk (aka Denyo) reached out via email to collaborate on developing a social VR and a completely virtualized live DJ performance...
After I gave my Ultimate Potential of VR: Promises and Perils talk at SXSW, I met a third-year Ph.D. student in the field of Media Geography named Claire Fitch who wanted to follow up with me about the representation of virtual natures within...
The Ferryman Collective were back at SXSW presenting another immersive theatre piece in virtual reality, but this time they were translating an adapted a piece called Find WiiLii that was originally produced in South Korea by GiiÖii Immersive Studio...
Body of Mine VR won a special jury prize for the SXSW Immersive Competition for it’s potent use of virtual embodiment to explore gender dysphoria and testimonies from a number of different transgender folks. Director Cameron Kostopoulos leaned upon...
Roman Rappak’s Miro Shot band returned to SXSW again this year for an updated mixed reality, live concert performance with a much needed upgrade from the high-latency and outdated GearVR headsets to the much more cutting-edge HTC Elite mixed...
Jessie Cohen started representing immersive stories back at Sundance 2013 when she was working for the Sundance Film Festival for the New Frontier section. She eventually transitioned from trying to represent every New Frontier project through the...
Andreea Ion CojoCaru is a unique blend of VR developer and practicing architect in both virtual and physical spaces, but who is also driven by deep philosophical questions and her own embodied curiosities exploring the boundaries between the virtual...