Dr. Sook-Lei Liew is an assistant professor at the University of Southern California, and the director of the Neural Plasticity & Neurorehabilitation Labatory at USC. At IEEE VR 2017, she was showing off a DIY Brain Computer Interface called...
Neurable is building a brain-computer interface that integrates directly into the virtual reality headset. Neurable uses dry EEG sensors from Wearable Sensing, which means that it doesn't require gel in order to get a good signal from the EEG making...
UCSF professor Adam Gazzaley is a pioneer in the realm of experiential medicine as he's getting a video game approved by the FDA for ADHD treatment. He's a co-founder of Akili Interactive and the chief scientist at JAZZ Venture partners, where he's...
MindMaze is creating Brain-Computer Interface that's integrated with VR head-mounted displays, and they're also creating immersive technologies that neurorehabilitation. I had a chance to talk with MindMaze founder and CEO Tej Tadi at the XTech...
Noah Falstein started as a game design pioneer back in 1980, and lately he's been collaborating a lot with virtual reality companies like MindMaze, Akili Interactive Labs, StoryUp, and AppliedVR on different immersive medical applications and...
The Canadian Institute for Advanced Research invited me to moderate a panel discussion at GDC titled 'The Future of VR: Neuroscience and Biosensor Driven Development' featuring CIFAR scholars Craig Chapman and Alona Fyshe, as well as Jake Stauch...
Craig Chapman is a movement neuroscientist at the University of Alberta, and he's received an EEG in the Wild grant form the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research in order to study the combination of movement tracked by VR technologies, eye gaze...
Alex Coulombe's Agile Lens takes an interdisciplinary approach to immersive technologies at the intersection between theater and architecture. He was showing off a demo piece called That Kind of Guy at XR for Change, which explored a variety of...
I speak with three recent graduates of architecture school about how they're using virtual spaces for speculative design. Paula Strunden is working with the interface between physical objects and mixed reality environments. Nicholas Zembashi uses...
Richard Lemarchand directed a minimalist VR experience with the USC Game Innovation Lab
Andreea Ion Cojocaru is one of the few architects who is designing both virtual experiences as well as real buildings with Numena VR. I first met her in Germany during VR Now in November where I talked to her about her award-winning experiments in...
Architects Anna Mill & Luke Jones spent eight years creating a graphic novel called Square Eyes that explores the speculative design of augmented reality technologies and interfaces. They see this project as an in-depth paper architecture...
Yasmin Yesilipek is an architecture student at the Architectural Association who has been primarily focusing on virtual reality. She's been creating spaces for online gatherings, and trying to recreate a campfire digitally through experimenting with...
Space Popular is a multidisciplinary design and research practice led by Lara Lesmes & Fredrik Hellberg, and they've been architecture students for the last eight years about spatial design as well as the latest immersive technologies. They've been...
Robin Stethem & Colin Northway want to start a movement of virtual reality art. They've built the Museum of Other Realities (aka 'MOR'), which is a virtual gallery space that has VR pieces from some of the top virtual reality artists in the industry...
Kevin Mack is a VR artist who has created a series of surrealistic immersive experiences including Zen Parade, Blortasia, and Anandala. Mack starts with mathematically-inspired geometric forms that are generated by collapsing a 5-dimensional...
Chelley Sherman is an XR artist who has been working in VR for 4 years, creating audio-visual performances, and exploring how to created heightened, highly-perceptive experiences. Sherman says that her experience with scoliosis early in her life...
Omer Shapira is a developer for VR who does both art and software development, and he's interested in the reciprocal relationship between humans and technology. Shapira started working as a graduate student with Ken Perlin at NYU in 2012, and...
Amelia Winger-Bearskin is a VR director & performance artist who is building communities for artists, creators, and technologies working in emerging technology. She uses metaphor as her primary method for exploring emerging technologies like virtual...
Jakob Kudsk Steensen is a Danish artist who has been creating virtual landscapes for 15 years, and has recently been creating virtual reality environments. Steensen comes from the fine arts world, and he's been working as a VR artist with different...
Estella Tse discovered Tilt Brush at the Unity Vision AR/VR Summit in February 2016 where she met the developers, and became a beta tester where she provided feedback. She was invited to become an artist in residence with Google where she...
Buffalo Vision's Ben Vance is the artist, designer, & director behind Irrational Exuberance: Prologue. He started developing this experience on the Oculus Rift DK1 in 2013, and it wasn't until he saw the Valve Room demo that he was convinced that...
Wesley Allsbrook is an artist, art director, and writer who started as editorial illustrator and comic book creator before working at Oculus Story Studio as the lead artist on Dear Angelica. Allsbrook has been working with Quill since 2015, and she...
Goro Fujita is an artist in residence at Facebook, and he's been creating virtual reality art and animations since 2015 when he started working at Oculus Story Studio as an art director. I had a chance to talk to him at F8 in 2018 where he told me...
Brittan Heller is a technology & human rights fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard University where she is investigating the intersection of technology & policy when it comes to online harassment & hate speech within virtual worlds...
The RLab is a publicly-Funded XR center for research, entrepreneurship, and education located in Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York. It's being managed under NYU's Tandon School of Engineering in collaboration with Columbia, CUNY, & New School. The RLab...
Ethical design of technology is a hot topic right now, and Tristan Harris has been catalyzing a lot of broader discussion about the perils of persuasive technologies. He quit his job as a design ethicist at Google after feeling limited in his...
The XR Safety Initiative (XRSI) was co-founded by Kavya Pearlman and formally announced at the Open AR Cloud Symposium on Tuesday, May 28, 2019. XRSI is going to be looking at the safety and security issues within XR in collaboration with security...
Mozilla Hubs is an open source social VR platform built using open web technologies. You can create your own 3D scenes using their Spoke platform, or launch your own private Hubs server using the open sourced infrastructure code for Hubs. Mozilla...
Jessica Outlaw is a culture and behavioral researcher who released a qualitative study of the experiences of 13 women in social VR in October 17 2017, and then on April 4, 2018, she released a survey of 600 users in social VR getting some robust...
Nancy Baker Cahill is a multidisciplinary artist from Los Angeles, and she's created a public art application called The 4th Wall AR app that allows people to place augmented reality art onto contested sites. Cahill used her 4th Wall AR app to place...
The Valve Index officially launches today, and it provides a strong vision for the future of high-end PC VR with solid tracking, fidelity, and hand-tracked Index controllers that provide a deep sense of hand presence. Valve sent me hardware to...
The Multiplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies has been doing frontier research into the therapeutic uses of psychedelics for the past 33 years, and they're currently in Phase 3 FDA trials for MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for the treatment of...
Radix Motion is creating a trippy, asynchronous communication platform called MEU that starts to play with our experience of embodiment. CEO Sarah Hashkes is a cognitive neuroscientist who previously studied psychedelics through the lens of a...
Andromeda Entertainment is creating and distributing immersive entertainment experiences for healing and self actualization. I previously talked with CEO Robin Arnott about his Sound Self experience, as well as a previous incarnation of Andromeda...
Larry Minikes is a technological pioneer in the consciousness hacking space having started in the space back in 1989 after seeing LED glasses at CES that flickered light in order to invoke different brainwave frequencies. Minikes went on to star AV...
Dr. Cassandra Vieten is the president of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, who's current tagline is 'Informed by Science. Transformed by Experience.' Dr. Vieten gave an opening keynote at the Consciousness Hacking's Awakened Futures Summit where she...
East Forest has been crafting musical rituals for psilocybin journeys for the past decade, and he just released a five-hour album titled 'Music For Mushrooms: A Soundtrack For The Psychedelic Practitioner' coincidentally just a few days after Denver...
Dr. Jeff Tarrant founded the NeuroMeditation Institute in order to research the neuroscience principles of different meditation states. He came up with a taxonomy of four different types of NeuroMeditation that include Focus, Mindfulness, Quiet...
Muse is an immersive meditation device that provides real-time feedback on your mental activity, heart rate, breathing, and body movements. They've optimized the device for ease of use, and to assist in making the invisible and intangible process of...
Consciousness Hacking produced the The Awakened Futures Summit in San Francisco on May 18th & 19th, looking at the intersection between psychedelics, technology, and meditation. Consciousness Hacking previously hosted a sold-out event on October...
I recently attended Consciousness Hacking's Awakened Futures Summit that explored the cross-section of psychedelics, technology, and meditation. I ended up conducting 10 interviews totaling over 6 hours of conversations with neuroscientists...
Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun is an indigenous artist and painter who created his first VR experience called Inherent Rights, Vision Rights back in 1992. He collaborated with VR artist Paisley Smith in a piece called Unceded Territories that premiered...
Dr. Peter Simpson is a professor of ancient philosophy at The City University of New York, and I met him at the Philosophy of Time Society session on the first night of the American Philosophical Association Easter Meeting 2019 in New York City. I...
Beat Saber was launched on May 1, 2018, and has since sold over 1 million copies making it the most successful VR game ever. My first interview with the Beat Saber co-founders Jan Ilavsky and Jaroslav Beck was at GDC in March 2018, and I reached out...
Douglas Rushkoff is the host of the Team Human podcast and author of Team Human as well as a dozen other bestselling books on media, technology, and culture. He was invited to the VRTO conference in Toronto to record a live Team Human podcast about...
The Collider is an immersive experience that uses your memories and your body as a platform to explore asymmetrical power dynamics with another person. It's a profound experience that pushes the limits of what it means to have you as the protagonist...
The Open AR Cloud is a volunteer organization whose mission statement is to 'drive the development of open and interoperable spatial computing technology, data, and standards to connect the physical and digital worlds for the benefit of all.'...
Spatial XR creative collaboration platform has been featured in that past two Microsoft presentations at the Microsoft Build Keynote on Monday, May 6th as well as in the HoloLens 2 announcement at Mobile World Congress on Sunday, February 24, 2019...
The Venture Reality Fund general partner & co-founder Tipatat Chennavasin travels around the world tracking the progress of virtual and augmented reality, and I had a chance to catch up with him at Microsoft Build 2019 in order to get his...