French journalist Julien Bergounhoux has been covering the business applications for spatial computing for L'Usine Digitale over the past 6-7 years, and I had a chance to catch up with him following the Microsoft Build opening keynote. We talked...
I got to do a hands-on demo with the HoloLens 2 at Microsoft Build, and then talk about my impressions with Microsoft Developer Relations Program Manager Jesse McCulloch. We talked about where HoloLens is at, more details on the 4th generation Azure...
Facebook announced new information about Oculus for Business at their F8 Developer conference last week, and I had a chance to sit down with Facebook's Head of AR/VR Maria Fernandez Guajardo to go over some of the the details that have been released...
Back at Microsoft Build 2018, I had a chance to talk to two of the lead programmers of Babylon.js, which is a JavaScript framework for building 3D immersive environments with HTML5 and WebGL. It's a framework that's similar to three.js or React 360...
The Oculus Quest is a gamechanger for the VR industry as the inside-out tracking is an engineering marvel, & the untethered experience lowers the friction for being to easy jump into VR. My biggest hesitations with the Quest have more to do with my...
Ida Benedetto gave the opening keynote of the Immersive Design Summit where she shared some of the work that she's doing as an experiential designer as a corporate consultant at SYPartners working with companies on organizational transformation and...
Graham Sack says that dream analysis and the language have film have co-evolved together as visual forms of symbolic communication, and he wanted to further that exploration in an experimental narrative series funded by Samsung VR. Sack and...
On April 15, 2019, the Notre-Dame Cathedral suffered a devastating fire. I recently had a chance to see a 360-degree VR documentary by Targo called The Man Behind Notre-Dame, which follows the Rector-Archpriest of Notre-Dame Patrick Chauvet and his...
Jessica Brillhart's Vrai Pictures & Superbright launched a spatial audio platform at SXSW called Traverse, and they premiered a spatialized audio experience that turned your body into a mixer. As you walked around a space, then your movements...
Owlchemy Labs have been pioneering VR experiences exploring hand presence and embodied gameplay in VR since the release of Job Simulator and Rick & Morty VR, and they're releasing their next experience in this sequence called Vacation Simulator...
The Bose AR platform with the Bose AR Frames and the QuietComfort 35 headphones was one of the most exciting announcements that happened at SXSW. These Bose AR Frames wearables feature spatialized audio and serve as a bluetooth headset that has an...
The Bose AR House at SXSW 2019 featured the first round of interactive audio experiences that are integrated with the Bose AR Frames and Quick Connect 35 noise-cancelling headphones. Devices on the Bose AR platform have an accelerometer, gyroscope...
BehaviorMe is using virtual reality to enhance behavior therapy for children and young adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). It's started by four people including two therapy practioners with fifteen years of experience working with clients...
Lucid Dreaming is ability to become aware that you’re dreaming, and to potentially even start to interact and direct what happens within your dream. Arthur Gillard is a VR enthusiast who has been tracking the intersection between immersive...
Torkom Ji tells the story of how he used Resident Evil 7 VR as a form of fear resistance training, and transformational shadow work to overcome his fears. He’s also a co-founder of Visual Reality, which is bringing psychedelic culture and visionary...
Helixaeon's Time Helix has a unique way of visualizing time-based data as a fractal-nested helix. Helixaeon was recently awarded US Patent #10,185,933 for their interactive, multi-dimensional data visualization that's able to 'generate a...
Restorative Justice practices are an alternative form of justice that's a victim-centered that creates a space for offenders to own the harm done, and for victims to tell the story of their experiences of that harm directly to the offender. It's a...
There's a lot of intensity in the world right now, and it reminded me of a short excerpt about VR shooters from a longer conversation that I had with Danny Bittman back at Oculus Connect 4 in 2017. I think it speaks to some of what's happening in...
The History of the Future' book was published on February 19th, and it's a storified non-fiction account of the modern resurgence of virtual reality through the eyes of the founders of Oculus. Author Blake Harris was able to cultivate some...
Disclosure: Mozilla is financially sponsoring the Voices of VR podcast to collaborate on four different events in 2019, and our first collaboration was this conversation featuring the work of seven women within the XR space. Mozilla curated these...
I moderated this 90-minute Sundance New Frontier panel discussion about immersive storytelling in AR and the role of virtual characters and conversational interfaces. It included Alice Wroe, who is the creative director of Magic Leaps digital human...
Traveling While Black is the most powerful piece of virtual reality that I've ever seen. Director Roger Ross Williams in collaboration with Felix & Paul Studios and co-director Ayesha Nadarajah were able to capture a powerful story of the Green Book...
Disney Animation was showing Cycles, which is their first narrative VR short film that they produced during private screenings in Park City during Sundance. It's a beautifully-produced piece that explores the connection to place, memories and...
Colum Slevin is Facebook/Oculus' Head of Experiences, and I had a chance to talk about how they're supporting independent storytellers in a quest of trying to discover some of the fundamental components of an immersive story. Slevin says that the...
Tenderclaws debuted The Under experience at Sundance that features live immersive actors from the Piehole theater troupe. Actors embody different characters within a storyworld that has free roaming, non-verbal participants, who need to use their...
The Swiss-based company Imverse built a Voxel rendering engine that can do real-time volumetric capture. It powered the Elastic Time experience at New Frontier last year, and this year they collaborated with artist Maria Guta on Interlooper that...
Interlooped allows you to record real-time, volumetric capture segments of yourself where you layer these loops while interacting with recorded and real-time interactions of other people. It's a trippy experience that shows the power of real-time...
#736: Integrating Taste into Narrative & Navigating an Unconscious Matrix of Memories & Associations
One of the most visceral experiences I had at Sundance New Frontier this year was Marshmallow Laser Feast's Sweet Dreams, which incorporated taste as part of the narrative in a surrealist virtual reality story world called Luscious Delicious Land...
Embody was an experience at the Sundance New Frontier that started to blend Yoga movement practices into virtual reality. VR artist and MAP Design Lab founder Melissa Painter collaborated with Lululemon's Whitespace Innovation team in order to...
Your brain can fuse together so many different layers of reality so seamlessly that it's quite flexible and capable of blending the digital and the real in a way that will soon be completely indistinguishable. The Dial at Sundance New Frontier...
Kathy Bisbee started the first publicly funded VR lab called PublicVR Lab, and she's leading an initiative for the 1500 community media centers in the United States to start offering kits and programs to help create community media immersive...
Zero Latency just announced a free-roaming, player vs. player experience called Sol Raiders that will be available to play starting February 9th at one of there 20+ locations around the world. Most location-based VR experiences are co-op where you...
Wolves in the Walls is a narrative VR piece based upon a Neil Gaiman novel that explores object interactions and cultivating a connection to a virtual character. It's a project that originally started as a project within Oculus Story Studio, but was...
Immersive theater is on a collision course with virtual reality. There are so many best practices for interactive storytelling that are easily translatable into VR. Immersive Theater troupe Third Rail Projects produced the acclaimed Then She Fell...
Human Interact's Starship Commander uses AI-enabled, voice-activated commands in order to participate within an interactive story. It was recently was released as a location-based entertainment arcade game, and I first talked to Alexander Mejia...
Frankenstein AI from the Columbia Digital Storytelling Lab debuted at Sundance 2018. It was a cross-displinary collaboration that used machine learning, immersive theater, dance, and prompts for social interactions. I talk with choreographer Brandon...
I interviewed the co-founders of Innerspace VR Hadrien Lanvin and Balthazar Auxietre about Firebird - La Peri at the inaugural VR on the Lot in 2016. This is where I first got a sneak peak at their A Fisherman's Tale puzzle game, which just released...
Filip Kostic is an artist and educator at the ArtCenter College of Design, and he had a piece called Landgrab: The Musical that was featured in the Sptial Realities Art Show curated by Jesse Damiani. Landgrab is a post-modern musical that is trying...
Robert Hernandez is a Digital Journalism Professor at USC, and he serves a sort of innovation lab to see how journalists can use emerging technologies to tell stories. I talk with him about some of his projects including 'The Deported: Life Beyond...
Ali Eslami is an award-winning Iranian virtual reality developer who has recently taken an artist residency in Amsterdam in order to continue his speculative design of a virtual city. Eslami's premiered False Mirror at the International Documentary...
Pilgrim is an AR audio documentary that I experienced at the IDFA DocLab premiere as I was walking through the streets of Amsterdam. Co-director Lauren Hutchinson captured audio stories of people as they were walking the Camino de Santiago trail in...
The DocLab at the International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam (IDFA) was started in 2007 by Caspar Sonnen, and it's very similar to the New Frontier programming at Sundance as it's looking at how what new forms of storytelling is emerging from...
#721: Introspective Hero’s Journey of Self-Reflection & Emotional Education with “Where Thoughts Go”
Where Thoughts Go: Prologue is one of my favorite VR storytelling experiences of the year, as I think that creator Lucas Rizzotto has discovered a number of different design innovations that push forward the storytelling potential of the VR medium...
I moderated a discussion with VR pioneers Fred Brooks & Henry Fuchs at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts' Future of Reality Summit (original video is here). We talk about the evolution of immersive technologies since the mid 1960s...
Designing impossible architecture in VR is changing how Andreea Ion Cojocaru designs real buildings, and she's reveling in the fact that she finally has a tool with VR to be able to explore some of the deeper philosophical questions about the nature...
Quiddale O'Sullivan is an architect who is using his spatial design skills to design environments within virtual reality. We cover a wide variety of worldbuilding insights from an architectural perspective, and how the process of architecture is an...
The VR Privacy Summit happened on November 8th, and brought together representatives from the top XR companies, start-up companies, VR experts, medical academics, and legal experts to talk about the potential risks and benefits of having access to...
The medical professionals at the VR Privacy summit has a lot of interesting insights into how they navigate issues around informed consent in medical research through Institutional Review Boards, and perhaps how privacy policies for companies need a...
Mozilla Mixed Reality's Diane Hosfelt says, 'The immersive web has all of the problems of the 2D web, they're just magnified and they're harder.' She says the the privacy challeges around biometric data privacy are even more dire because you can't...
The VR Privacy Summit happened at Standord University on November 8th to explore pressing issues around biometric data privacy in virtual reality. There were around 50 representatives from around the VR industry with representatives from nearly all...