Living Cities is a digital twin XR startup announced on May 26th, 2022 with an article titled 'Reality is Scarce...and The Metaverse is infinitely abundant.' that shares a list of '9 principles for connecting the real & virtual.' The founders of...
Matthew Ball's 'The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything' book (launching today) is the most comprehensive articulation of the Metaverse technology stack, as well as it's foundational principles catalyzing a paradigm shift from 2D...
I had a chance to drop by the Brooklyn office of Brain Control Interface start-up OpenBCI in order to get a hands-on demo of Project Galea, which includes a range of different biometric and physiological sensors such as EOC, EMG, EDA, PPG sensors in...
I moderated a Tribeca Talks Panel discussion on 'Making a Difference with Immersive Non-Fiction Stories' that on Sunday, June 12, 2022 where we focused on the structure and forms of immersive storytelling, and then reflected on the challenges and...
ReachYou is an AR story that receives transmissions from the future in order to connect to the tenderness of the now. It's a slow media project aimed to create a portal into a story world that allows the audience to access emotion states of deep...
Liam Young is a director and speculative architect who is designing regenerative futures via provocative thought experiments. Planet City VR is the provocation of centralizing all 10 billion humans on the planet to a city the size of Texas so that...
The LGBTQ+ VR Museum won the inaugural Tribeca Immersive New Voices Award as it curated a number of really touching virtual objects, art, and stories from LGBTQ+ people. Antonia Forester started the project after discovering that there was not a...
Exhibition A is 'A love letter to women of color written in virtual reality... showcases talent from the POC, immigrant, non-binary, LGBTQ, and Black communities in Portland, Maine.' I had a chance to speak with project creator and producer Janay...
Zanzibar: Trouble in Paradise is a volumetric documentary that premiered at Tribeca Immersive 2022 on the Looking Glass Factory 65-inch Holographic Display that was announced on June 7, 2022 just before the festival. I was able to catch up with...
First-time VR artists Miri Chekhanovich & Édith Jorisch in collaboration with Dpt. and '>The NFB created some unique embodiment experiments within Plastisapians as they explored speculative futures about plastic permeating and changing our bodies...
Marshmallow Laser Feast's latest piece Evolver premiered at the Tribeca Immersive festival, and it takes you inside the human body in a transcendent journey into how the blood flows through our heart and throughout our body. They collaborating with...
Missing Pictures is a five-part episodic series that translates unmade films from famous directors from around the world into a spatialized VR story pitch and treatment. French Director Clément Deneux created a episode short film version called...
Black Movement Library: Movement Portraits is a motion capture database project and series of experiences across different media by multi-media artist LaJuné McMillian. She wanted to see more black dancers represented in motion capture data, but...
Iago: The Green Eyed Monster is an Animated AR, Rock Operetta, exploring the villain origin story of the character of Iago from Shakespeare Othello. There are links to the iOS and Android AR app linked on their website, and I'd recommend checking...
Looking Glass Factory has been producing Holographic Displays for a number of years with their Kickstarted Dev Kit and then their $400 Looking Glass Portrait, and at the Tribeca Film Festival on June 9th they publicly premiered their 65-inch...
The Infinite is a location-based VR experience that allows you to freely roam around an architectural abstraction of the International Space Station with friends and family, and it has 360 video photospheres that transport you to nearly 60 excerpts...
The Metaverse Standards Forum was announced today on June 21, 2022 as it 'brings together leading standards organizations and companies for industry-wide cooperation on interoperability standards needed to build the open metaverse.' There's lots of...
The Metaverse and Its Governance is the final paper in the series of the IEEE Global Initiative on the Ethics of Extended Reality.
The Extended Reality (XR) Ethics in Education is the next paper in the series of the IEEE Global Initiative on the Ethics of Extended Reality.
I get a preview of Tribeca Immersive 2022 with curator Ana Brzezinska.
The Extended Reality (XR) Ethics in Medicine is the next paper in the series of the IEEE Global Initiative on the Ethics of Extended Reality. This paper explores the applications of medical XR, trends of telemedicine, AI assistant bots, and some...
The new business models of the Metaverse have yet to be fully forged? Will the existing structures of surveillance capitalism be extended into the new frontiers of biometric & physiological data? Or will there be new emergent & disruptive models for...
The next series in the IEEE XR Ethics series is deconstructing the paper title 'Who Owns Our Second Lives: Virtual Clones and the Right to Your Identity' featuring the lead author Thommy Eriksson - Researcher and Teacher Chalmers University in...
The ethical questions around privacy in virtual and augmented reality are some of the most pervasive, unanswered questions in XR with the top two questions being: What new types of intimate biometric & physiological data are available through XR...
Continuing on my series on XR Ethics in collaboration with the IEEE Global Initiative on the Ethics of Extended Reality, this episode dives into the White Paper on Diversity, Inclusion, & Accessibility featuring Isabel Guenette Thornton (Ph.D...
The IEEE Global Initiative on the Ethics of Extended Reality has published the first eight white papers investigating different ethical aspects of virtual and augmented reality. This has been a collaboration with dozens of XR industry professionals...
Croquet is an operating system within the context of a browser that serves as a virtual machine that enables bit-identical simulations across multiple computers synchronized via a dedicated network infrastructure of global reflectors. Croquet...
#1087: IndieWire Editor Eric Kohn on Deepening Critical Discourse within VR & Immersive Storytelling
Eric Kohn has been a professional film critic for 15 years, and he’s currently the Executive Editor at Indiewire, the Vice President of Editorial Strategy, as well as the co-host of IndieWire’s Screen Talk podcast. IndieWire first launched on July...
The Ristband music platform (formerly known as Overview Ark) launched an alpha version at SXSW during co-founder Roman Rappak's mixed reality show with his band Miro Shot that I previously covered in episode #1082. Ristband is described as 'your...
Radio Ghost is a 70-minute, interactive and immersive audio piece for three people that's site-specific to a mall. It's meant to unpack the unseen stories of unethical consumption and deconstruct the design patterns of shopping malls. It's has an...
Paradise is an immersive audio piece exploring themes of domestic violence that was an interdisciplinary collaboration between Darkfield, VR documentary filmmaker Gabo Arora of Lightshed.io and researcher and clinician Nancy Glass from the Johns...
Lustration is a 4-part episodic VR series illustrated within Quill that's in the fantasy, detective noir genre, and created by First Nation Creative Ryan Griffen. It allows you to change camera perspectives within Quill as it blends together aspects...
#1082 Roman Rappak’s Mixed Reality Live Music Performance & an Art History Perspective on XR + music
Roman Rappak's Miro Shot band had a unique mixed reality performance of a single song at SXSW to an audience of 50 people who were wearing GearVR headsets. The experience was live mixed by Rappak, who was switching between a monoscopic VR...
#1081: Using VR to Capture Memories of Home with Sunghwan Lee’s “Ihyangjeong: Carving with Memories”
Ihyangjeong: Carving with Memories is by Korean 2D animator Sunghwan Lee of Studio Shelter, who used Quill to tell a spatial story about the connections between home, objects, and memory. The piece tells a larger story of Lee's journey from a dingy...
Targo Stories has created a number of really well-produced and well-told immersive stories using the 360 VR video medium over the past three years. Their latest co-production with Meta is Surviving 9/11: 27 Hours Under the Rubble, which premiered in...
On January 10th, Ana Brzezińska was announced to be the new Immersive Curator of the Tribeca Film Festival, and I had a chance to speak to her before this announcement to do a retrospective of her time that she spent as Kaleidoscope VR's Head of...
FRAMERATE is a timelapse LIDAR art installation by ScanLAB Projects that showed at SXSW. It encourages the audience to 'think and feel in another time scale: geological time, seasonal time, tidal time.' I had a chance to talk with director & ScanLAB...
Black Ice VR is a sci-fi horror immersive narrative that experiments between switching between 3rd person and 1st person POV, and it was produced as a part of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts' The Media + Emerging Technology Lab...
Future Rights was a prototype at SXSW that aimed to bring bringing Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring into VR. They were showing a short demo at SXSW, but they have plans for a sort of dance autotune and collaborative performance that uses AI to...
The Choice is an interactive documentary that explores the issue of reproductive rights in Texas. The team uses a special stereoscopic compositing pipeline that combines depth sensor information with a stereo camera capture, but creates a shader to...
Céline Tricart is an award-winning VR director who gave one of the main SXSW Keynotes about immersive storytelling, live action role play, and emotional bleed. She started as a writer, went to film school, made a cinematic VR documentary Sun Ladies...
Liminal Lands is an environmental VR piece commissioned by Luma Arles to document and volumetrically capture different objects and organisms within 'overlooked wetlands at the edge of the Mediterranean.' It's a piece where the sound design adapts to...
AmazeVR is a VR Concert Platform that premiered part of an experience at SXSW that they will be taking on a 10-city concert tour called Megan Thee Stallion: Enter Thee Hottieverse. I had a chance to speak with AmazeVR's Head of Creative Eric J...
The Peabody Awards have expanded beyond the traditional categories of Entertainment, News, Podcast & Radio, Documentary, Arts, & Public Service, and into new formats of Digital and Interactive Storytelling that include Transmedia Storytelling...
On the Morning You Wake (To the End of the World) is now available for free on Oculus, and it's a must-watch immersive story that won the best XR Experience at SXSW. It's a three-part series that dives into the broader implications of a false...
Forensic Architecture is an innovative interdisciplinary, non-profit research group that uses the tools & techniques of architecture to tell spatial stories of state-sponsored violence and human rights. Their 79 investigations since 2010 have be...
The immersive story of Notes on Blindness: Into the Darkness (2016) VR experience (Quest, Rift) was awarded with a Legacy Peabody Award for Digital & Interactive Storytelling along with 15 other projects on Thursday, March 24th. This experience has...
Nonny de la Peña was one of the 16 Legacy Peabody Award recipients honoring historical work as a part of their new Digital & Interactive Storytelling Award. Specifically, de la Peña is receiving a Field Building honor for her body of work that has...
One of my favorite experiences from SXSW was Vincent Morisset's Composition, which is a physical installation of a table with blocks that serves as the interface of a interactive music piece that continually shifts the algorithm for how it generates...
Ioulia Isserlis' Komez Alef O translates the story of her father's refugee journey of escaping the Nazis during the Holocaust. Isserlis collaborated with her father in distilling his journey down to a dozen moments that were spatially reconstructed...