There were not a lot of AR or VR announcements that happened during the main keynotes of Microsoft Build 2020, but there were a number of announcements that I was covering as comprehensively as I could in real-time in this Twitter thread. But Azure...
On March 6th, 2020, the IEEE VR announced a venue change on their website from Atlanta, Georgia to online in virtual reality for the academic conference set to happen between 22-26 March, 2020. The organizers of the IEEE VR conference had two weeks...
Akihiko Shirai has been doing research and development in VR live entertainment since 1995, and he's been a key liaison between the XR communities in Japan and France going back to 2004. Since June 2018 he's been researching vTuber (Virtual...
David Nahon is a pioneer of the French XR industry who is currently working at Dassault Systèmes' 3D Experience Lab. I had a chance to talk with Nahon at Laval Virtual 2019 where we talk about how he's using VR for Open Innovation to include more...
Laval Virtual has a AR/VR Business Intelligence division that tracks the use cases and evolution of XR applications, and produces a number of VR/AR newsfeed email lists and reports (like this free magazine on Health Applications of XR). I had a...
The first Laval Virtual Conference happened on 3-4 June, 1999 in Laval France, and had a chance to talk with the founder Simon Richir about the 20+ year history of Laval Virtual when I attended in 2019. It's an amazing history of the evolution of...
The Tribeca Film Festival is releasing fifteen 360 videos that were programmed within their Cinema360 program for free via the Oculus TV platform, and they'll be available to watch until April 26th. This is a great opportunity to see a portion of...
SoundSelf is a technologically-mediated, psychedlic experience (aka 'technodelic') that is being released by Andromeda Media on Wednesday, April 22nd. Developer Robin Arnott has been working on it on 8 years now, and he just released a The...
VRChat is one of the most popular social VR applications out there, and Chief Creator Officer Ron Millar recently told me that they had over 18,000 concurrent users this past weekend. I had a chance to catch up with the co-founders Jesse Joudrey &...
In my final episode of my coverage from Sundance New Frontier 2020, I speak with chief curator Shari Frilot about some of the themes of the line-up of XR experiences that were programmed this year. There were a number of themes the embodiment...
Milo Talwani (pronouns they/them) is a curator, and creative technologist who oversees the selection process for New Frontier at the Sundance Film Festival. They're also the technical coordinator for Tribeca Immersive, and they also help curate...
One of the most powerful explorations of embodiment at Sundance New Frontier 2020 was Metamorphic. The creators describe it as exploring the 'ephemeral nature of the self by allowing participants to redefine their relationships to their own bodies...
ANIMALIA SUM is an animated short VR 360 video / application hybrid with some light, embodied, 3 degree-of-freedom interactions on the Oculus Go. It's a mockumentary exploring the potential of whether or not humans should consider moving from...
Anti-Gone is a mixed reality play that features two actors performing in front of a wall that has an open, virtual world projected on it. One of the actors spends the majority of the time in VR navigating this world and interacting with the other...
A Machine for Viewing was a series of three film essays that were shown to someone in virtual reality, whose first-person perspective was then projected onto the Egyptian movie theater screen at Sundance with a crowd who was watching the film essays...
Chomsky vs Chomsky: First Encounter is a virtual reality experience where you get to interact with a virtual representation of Noam Chomsky, and essentially ask him any question that you want to. Trained on a corpus of 60 years worth of Chomsky...
Solastalgia is a site-specific augmented reality experience on the HoloLens 2 where you explore the surface of a depopulated planet in ruin, and colonized by a number of human ghost holograms. 'Solastalgia' is a neologism coined by philosopher Glenn...
All Kinds of Limbo featured the ability to show a volumetric-captured, virtual reality performance to 20 users within the Oculus Quest. Nubiya Brandon narrates her experience of being a mixed-race woman in the United Kingdom, and takes a tour...
The Book of Distance is one of the best VR narratives or immersive stories I've ever seen. Director Randall Okita tells the story of his grandfather Yonezo Okita's journey from Hiroshima, Japan to Canada in 1935 to begin a new life. It has some...
Living Distance is a contemporary piece of immersive art from China that casts the audience in the role of a tooth that takes a celestial journey into space. Director Xin Liu 刘昕 is an artist and mechanical engineer, who built a physical, crystalline...
Hypha is a VR experience that premiered at Sundance New Frontier 2020 that allos you to embody the full life cycle of a mushroom. You start as a spore in space that comes to Earth, you find enough water, and the go underground to grow into a hypha...
There have been a number of documentaries at Sundance over the past three years that have taken a critical lens the social impacts of technology including The Cleaners (2018), The Great Hack (2019), The Social Dilemma (2020), and Coded Bias (2020)...
Al Jazeera Contrast is an immersive storytelling and media innovation studio that is interested in telling the stories of the Global South and communities of color. They premiered a multi-media experience at Sundance New Frontier called Still Here...
Disney premiered the VR short Myth: A Frozen Tale at the November 7th, 2019 world premiere of Frozen II at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, and the creative team came to Park City during Sundance 2020 to privately screen it to industry professionals...
Google discontinued their Daydream VR headset and support for Pixel 4 in October 2019, but they still have a number of different initiatives within virtual reality including Tilt Brush, Google Earth VR, games from Owlchemy Labs, WebXR integrations...
Breathe is a Magic Leap, mixed reality experience with four people in shared environment that uses a biometric sensor measuring chest movements in order to explore how our breathing connects us to each other and to the atmosphere. It's a powerful...
Spaced Out is an aquatic virtual reality piece that premiered at the swimming pool at Sundance's Festival Headquarters at the Sheraton Park City Hotel. It uses Ballast VR's DIVR system that includes a waterproof VR headset, a snorkel,as well as a...
Atomu is a social VR experience that premiered at the Sundance New Frontier Biodigital Theater on Friday, January 24, 2020 by co-creators Shariffa Ali (half-Kenyan, half-Ethiopian) and Yetunde Dada (half-Zambian, half-Nigerian) who met growing up in...
Scarecrow is an one-on-one immersive theater piece where you engage with an actor in virtual reality. Every person gets the same structure of a story, but the interactions are customized based upon your actions within the piece. There are a number...
In the final interview of this VR for Good series, I'm featuring the WebXR Device API and how this represents a new open standard that allows for the easy creation and distribution of immersive content.
Rec Room is one of the most successful social VR platforms, and they're also on the most platforms including PC VR, Quest, PSVR, PC 2D, PS4 2D, and most recently iOS phones and tablets. There aren't a lot of other casual social mobile app...
Kai Frazier is a history teacher who decided to make a complete pivot into creating accessible and diverse educational content and kits for education. She curates 360 videos and produces content aimed for underrepresented minorities to be able to...
Queerskins VR is an embodied story that explores the range of experiences from love to loss, and the shame, regret, and fears around sexual identity. It's got a magical realism aesthetic that transports you back to the 80s AIDS crisis as two devout...
One of the most intense interactive storytelling experiences I've ever had was the Accenture AVEnueS training application for child welfare caseworkers.
StoryFile is an interactive storytelling platform that allows you to interact with someone as they tell their story. A comprehensive oral history could be as many as 1000 questions and 20 hours of content, and StoryFile's combination of a...
Home After War is an Oculus VR for Good piece that focuses on the civilian causalities of mines and improvised explosive devices. It uses photogrammetry to recreate an Iraqi home, and features haptics and immerskve sound design to provide an...
On 14 April 2014, the terrorist group Boko Haram kidnapped 276 girls from a sleepy, northeastern Nigerian town called Chibok. While it made news around the world, some of the incumbant Nigerian politicians declared it fake news by the opposition...
Tripp is a VR toolkit to gamify meditation in order to help you self-regulate and perform better. They had a really interesting strategy of bootstrapping the company by targeting corporate wellness clients, which allowed them to create a production...
The Ørsted 360° VR Space Safari by Khora VR is one of the best 360 video pieces I've seen.
Nancy Baker Cahill is an artist who is creating the 4th Wall App AR platform that distributes inclusive, augmented reality art at site-specific, locations that are contested in some way. She launched Battlegrounds: New Orleans in December 2019, and...
I talk with Winslow Porter at Tribeca 2017 about Tree VR, which is an experience catalyzed by the Rainforest Alliance where you embody a tree and experience an accelerated life cycle that comes to a premature end as human activity is catalyzing the...
At the Games for Change 2019 conference, Sharang Biswas gave a presentation on 'Promoting Sex-Positivity Through Analog Games.' He won a grant from The Effing Foundation for Sex Positivity to curate an Erotic Art Games Anthology to be published by...
On November 26, 2016, Rosario Perazolo gave a TEDxCórdoba talk about a wide range of cultural taboos she experiences as someone in a wheelchair. She talks about the transition of ooking at the world from the perspective of someone who was 5'7', but...
I got an update from Traveling While Black director Roger Ross Williams after he's been traveling around the world at different outreach & engagement screenings. I did a deep dive discussion with Williams in my interview with him at the debut at...
Asad J. Malik is an augmented reality artist and director who created Terminal 3, which premiered at Tribeca 2018, and Jester's Tale, which premiered at Sundance 2019.
Amy Zimmerman is a senior producer on the innovation group for media & entertainment at Unity Technologies, and she helped to start the Unity for Humanity contest there. We talk about her inspiration for the project, and what type of projects that...
Vulcan Productions has been producing social impact films and XR experiences since 1997, when it was founded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who passed away in October 2018. Their four main topics they're focused on are climate change, ocean...
Vince Kadlubek is one of the co-founders of Meow Wolf, and at the time of this interview on March 24, 2019 he was the CEO (but he recently resigned in October 2019.)
Marshmallow Laser Feast is one of my favorite studios with projects like Into the Eyes of an Animal, Treehugger, Sweet Dreams, & We Live in An Ocean of Air. Most of their work has only shown at Film Festivals like Sundance or Tribeca, but last year...
René Pinnell originally created Kaleidoscope VR in order to show immersive art and stories around the world. After talking with creators, he realized that the biggest blocker for creating immersive art was securing funding and resources to make the...