On October 21, there was a five-hour AR/VR Policy Conference organized by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation as well as XR Association covering some other public policy issues relevant to XR technologies, but also really focused on...
Tony Parisi published really great Metaverse manifesto on October 22nd titled The Seven Rules for the Metaverse, which attempts to rein in some of the more hyperbolic musings about what the Metaverse is or could be.
Adam Draper is the founder of Boost VC, which a technology accelerator that has funded over 70 VR companies and over 100 crypto companies since 2012. He's been in a really unique position to understand how blockchain technologies and the more...
I talk with Joey J. Lee & Elliot Hu-Au about a paper they published in Frontiers of Virtual Reality called 'E3XR: An Analytical Framework for Ethical, Educational and Eudaimonic XR Design,' which looks at the intersection of XR ethics, best practice...
The WebXR Design Summit was a 9-hour series of talks about immersive design & experiential design that was organized by Ben Erwin and his WebXR Polys Awards team on October 12th. I was the host and moderator for the day, but also helped to curate a...
The Festival of International Virtual and Augmented Reality Stories (FIVARS) is holding a hybrid event where the IRL component in LA starts today October 15th, and the virtual festival starts on October 22nd. FIVARS has been curating independent and...
HTC is launching the Vive Flow today available for pre-order $499 and launching in early November. They're 6-DoF 'immersive glasses' weighing 189 grams that are meant to be the tablet of VR. You have to bring your own power supply, and so you'll...
HP's G2 Reverb Omnicept edition is a special version of their VR headset targeted for enterprises that includes Tobii eye tracking that can track real-time pupil dilation, eye saccades, visual attention with eye gaze vectors, a camera for facial...
The London Film Festival Expanded runs from October 6-17 with a total of 18 pieces of immersive stories and art, with 9 of those pieces available remotely via their LFF Expanse art gallery that is available for free on Viveport (with nine...
Container is a hyperreal 180-degree spatial art installation that explores modern day slavery. Visual artist/visual anthropologist Meghna Singh and documentary filmmaker Simon Wood utilize the shipping container as consistent piece of architecture...
Kevin Mack's Anandala is an awe-inspiring piece of VR-native, generative, abstract art with some really compelling experiments in interactive, embodied NPC entities he calls 'blorts.' There are 130 of these blorts spread out throughout a massive...
GOLIATH: PLAYING WITH REALITY is an interactive VR story that explores the experience of schizophrenia & psychosis through the story of a Twitch Streamer named GoliathGames. It's a really strong piece of immersive storytelling balancing...
Kusunda is a spatial documentary about a indigenous language in Nepal that is on the brink of going dormant and falling asleep. It's an incredibly powerful story that uses photogrammetry, Tilt Brush interpretations of oral history, and interactive...
The Venice VR Expanded portion of the Venice Film Festival opens today, and runs from September 1-19, 2021. I had a chance to talk to the co-creators Liz Rosenthal and Michel Reilhac to get a sneak peak of the 37 immersive storytelling projects with...
Episode #1000 of the Voices of VR podcast is a special, three-hour retrospective featuring over 100 of the best answers I've received about the ultimate potential of VR over the past 7 years. I hope that it serves as a primer on the scope and...
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is a non-profit that has been defending civil liberties & digital rights for over 30 years since it was first announced on July 10, 1990. My first conversation with the EFF was with Dave Maass at the VR Privacy...
In her Contextual Integrity theory of privacy, Helen Nissembaum defines privacy as 'appropriate flows of information' where the appropriateness is defined by the context and its contextual informational norms. Contextual Integrity is a paradigm...
Ellysse Dick is a policy analyst who has written 10 technology policy publications over the last year about VR & AR for the The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation. The ITIF is a non-partisan, non-profit tech policy think tank, who says...
OpenBCI's Project Galea was originally announced on November 19, 2020 as a 'hardware and software platform that merges next-generation biometrics with mixed reality.' OpenBCI has been collaborating with MIT Ph.D. student Guillermo Bernal in...
Breonna's Garden is an augmented reality experience that premiered at the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival that was created by Lady PheOnix in collaboration with Ju'Niyah Palmer to honor the life of her sister, Breonna Taylor. I found it to be a...
Neuroscientist researcher Rafael Yuste started the Columbia University's Neuro-Rights Initiative to promote an ethical framework to preserve a set of human rights within neuro-technologies. He co-authored a Nature paper titled 'Four ethical...
HTC announced two new, enterprise-focused VR headsets at their Vivecon on Tuesday May 11th. The Vive Focus 3 is a standalone VR HMD with an impressive 2,448 x 2,448 per-eye resolution, 90Hz, 120° FoV, new controllers, swappable battery, and priced...
The second volume of the Immersive Arcade Showcase featuring four immersive stories from the United Kingdom launches today as DLC within the Museum of Other Realities. The theme of the second volume is Memories & Dreams and features Vestige, Limbo...
Facebook's Project Aria announcement in September at Facebook Connect raised a number of different ethical questions with anthropologists and technological ethicists. Journalist Lawrence Dodds described it on Twitter by saying, 'Facebook will send...
The 29 immersive experiences that are a part of the Tribeca Immersive 2021 line-up were announced on Tuesday, April 29. There will be 11 Virtual Arcade experiences available starting on June 9 within the Museum of Other Realities, 5 Storyscape...
On April 22, 2020, Magic Leap announced layoffs of somewhere between 600 to 1000 employees, which amounted to around 1/3 to 1/2 of their total staff. On December 2019, The Information reported that Magic Leap had only sold 6,000 AR headsets against...
Brittan Heller is a human rights lawyer who recently published a paper pointing out that there are some significant gaps in privacy laws that do not cover the types of physiological and biometric data that will be available from virtual and...
On March 18th, Facebook Reality Labs Research announced some of their research into next-generation neuromotor input devices for mixed reality applications. I paraphrased the most interesting insights from their press conferences announcement, but I...
Dream was a series of 10 live performances over 8 days that used motion captured actors who had virtual embodiments set within an immersive storyworld of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream powered by the Unreal Engine. This project was a research...
I participated in a Facebook press event on Tuesday, March 16th that featuring some Facebook Human-Computer Interaction Research on AR Neural Inputs, Haptics, Contextually-Aware-AI, & Intelligent Clicks. It was an on-the-record event for print...
Kiira Benzing's Loveseat was an ambitious fusion of live theater performance with VR technologies that premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2019. They performed live for the audience in Venice while wearing VR headets as their performances were...
SXSW Online is happening March 16-20, and I had a chance to get a sneak peak of the SXSW Online XR world in VRChat and talk with the chief curator of the SXSW Virtual Cinema program Blake Kammerdiener about the program and special events that he's...
The Polys WebXR Awards was an awards show on February 20th, 2021 founded by Ben Irwin in collaboration with Sophia Moshasha and Julie Smithson. Irwin wanted to feature a lot of the work that's been happening on the immersive web in the year 2020...
One of my favorite pieces at Sundance New Frontier 2021 this year was a series of four open web experiences created as a part of the piece Traveling the Interstitium with Octavia Butler. Born out of The Guild of Future Architects' Futurist Writer...
Worldbuilding and speculative design was a big theme at Sundance New Frontier 2021, and I had a chance to participate in an experience that facilitated a collaborative & deliberative process of worldbuilding that was called Beyond the Breakdown...
Nightss is an sensual experience that's structured around an erotic Polish-language poem by Weronika Lewandowska that uses dance and spatial metaphors in VR to create an immersive poem. She collaborated with co-director and co-screenwriter Sandra...
Depthkit's volumetric capture solution is democratizing access to the tools of volumetric filmmaking. I had a chance to do a deep dive with two of the co-founders of Scatter, James George (CEO) & Alexander Porter, who have been pioneers in the...
The Changing Same is one of the most ambitious pieces of volumetric filmmaking yet since it combines all sorts of volumetric capture techniques with Scatter's new Depthkit Studio multi-depth sensor set up, photogrammetry, and a fusion of rigged...
I've been an executive committee member of the IEEE Global Initiative of the Ethics of Extended Reality for the past six months, and we had our official kickoff meeting on Friday, February 5th. The goal of this effort is to produce a white paper...
After watching the 14 immersive experiences at Sundance New Frontier 2021, I invited three other immersive critics for a roundtable discussion unpacking each of the experiences inlucing CNET's Joan Solsman, Forbes contributor Jesse Damiani, and...
On January 14, 2021, VR developer Fox Buchele announced on Twitter that he was fired by Owlchemy Labs in 2020, and 'I'm sharing this now because I'm done with this industry. And I don't see myself coming back.' He described being a VR developer as...
Sundance New Frontier 2021 features 14 immersive experiences that will be accessible via the $25 Sundance Explorer pass starting on Friday, January 29th until Wednesday, February 3, 2021. The New Frontier site will also be hosting virtual premiere...
Aardvark is an AR platform within the context of virtual reality applications. Here's how Aardvark is described on it's Steam page:Aardvark is a new kind of web browser that allows users to bring multiple interactive, 3D 'gadgets' into any SteamVR...
Mark Pesce's new book Augmented Reality: Unboxing Tech's Next Big Thing was released on Friday, January 8th, 2021. It's a lucidly-written look at the past, present, and future of augmented reality. He contextualizes AR within the history of...
Note: This is a sponsored content post from the University University of North Carolina School of the ArtsI was a mentor for the UNCSA's Media + Emerging Technology Lab's Immersive Storytelling Residency program in 2020, which was a 6-month program...
The Devouring is an epic, 5-6 hour horror adventure game within VRChat that launched on August 14, 2020. It quickly went viral in the VRChat community because it was a unique, shared experience that had a vast world to explore, an evocative...
Virtual Market 5 opens today December 18th, 2020 at 6p PST (Dec 19th at 11a JST), and will run until January 10th at 6a PST (11p JST). It will feature over 1500 VR artists and creators in 30+ worlds in VRChat that features avatars, meshes, clothes...
Note: This is a sponsored content post from the University University of North Carolina School of the Arts
Pluto VR is a general-purpose VR, telepresence application that hopes to provide the social presence glue for a standards-driven, multiple-application ecosystem using SteamVR on the PC. I had some new conceptual breakthroughs about the potential...
Virtual reality has the potential catalyze a paradigm shift around our concepts about the nature of reality, and one of the most influential philosophers on my thinking has been Alfred North Whitehead. His Process Philosophy emphases unfolding...