Paisley Smith's Homestay is a deeply powerful spatial story that explores her family's journey of grief from the death by suicide of an international student that they were hosting. She shares her journey of how to best tell this story in VR with...
Monika Bielskyte is a futurist, science fiction worldbuilder, and a digital nomad who has been traveling around the world to over 80 different countries searching for where the future is headed. She's in conversation with the bleeding edge of...
Rust LTD is composed of four avant-garde artists who are experimenting with political philosophy as game design through surrealist narratives and open world sandboxes of resolving paradox through play. I spoke with Rust's CTO Anton Hand about Hot...
VRLA co-founder Cosmo Scharf talks about some of the deepest levels of our current socio-political and economic context, and how VR & AR can teach us that our beliefs and perception of reality is malleable. Cosmo says that we're suffering form a...
Qualcomm believes that the future of XR is mobile. TechCrunch published rumors published that the Oculus Rift 2 headset was being cancelled, which catalyzed a larger discussion about the degree to which Facebook/Oculus is committed to VR on the...
Indiecade is the International Festival of Play, and Festival Director Sam Roberts curates innovations in game play and interaction paradigms that explore the questions of: What do I do? What happens when I do it? And how do I do it? Roberts sees an...
The Spatial Reality: Artists Explore the Future of XR show is running from October 12 to 28 at the Ayzenberg spce gallery in Pasenda, CA. I had a chance to see all of the pieces in the show, and then talk with the curator Jesse Damiani about my...
Immersive advertising campaigns on phone-based AR platforms like AR Kit and AR Core are currently subsidizing a lot of development within the larger XR ecosystem of developers. I heard of many AR developers at Magic Leap who were doing phone-based...
In this podcast episode, I share some of my take aways from Magic Leap's LEAPcon as well as talk with the creators behind the Sigur Ros interactive music experience called Tónandi, which is the best interactive AR experience that I've had so far. I...
Robin Hunicke is the co-founder of Funomena, which recently released Luna. I had a chance to catch up with Hunicke at Oculus Connect 5 where she shared her insights into embodied game design, game design theory, experiential design, and some of the...
Oculus employees Yelena Rachitsky and Isabel Tewes gave a great talk at Oculus Connect 5 titled 'The Hierarchy of Being.' It's a great melding of theory and practice of the impacts of embodiment on the phenomenological experience of a VR experience...
Aaron Stanton says that VR is the most effective piece of exercise equipment he's ever purchased. He's spent over 100 hours playing an exercise mod of Audioshield, which is more than he's used his exercise bike, treadmill, or elliptical machine...
Brands are looking to cause-based marketing & creating interactive experiences in order to provide customers an opportunity to participate in the story of brand that has a deeper purpose and mission that they're trying to achieve. Immersive...
I had an opportunity to moderate a panel featuring six psychonauts who are exploring the intersection between Psychedelics, VR, and consciousness transformation at the VRTO conference in Toronto, Canada on June 16th, 2018. The participants from left...
I talk with StoryUp XR CEO Sarah Hill about an experience that they collaborated on called Healium XR in order to use biofeedback with VR to train positive thinking. They're using a commercial, off-the-shelf EEG Muse headband to detect the...
Is consciousness emergent from our bodies? Or is it a fundamental field of the universe? It's possible that various quantum entanglement anomalies from Quantum Mechanics experiments could eventually provide some answers, but there isn't yet a...
Nicolas Goyer is a writer and philosopher who takes a tour through phenomenology & post-modern philosophy, and how the can provide insights into immersion, embodiment, imagination, mythology, and the human experience experience for experiential...
Metaphors of Presence & Experiential Design keynote talk that I gave at the Symposium iX conference in Montreal covers provides some concrete metaphors for presence, explores the connections between the Yin and Yang concepts of Chinese Philosophy...
Clorama Dorvilias' Debias VR is using virtual reality to make diversity training more immersive, interactive, and fun. There are various controversies around the Implicit Association Tests (IAT) that are related towards how far the abstractions of...
Ken Wilber is a philosopher known for his 'Integral Theory' framework that mapping of all dimensions of reality, consciousness, and stages of human development. He's synthesized maps and models from various Buddhist wisdom traditions, psychology...
Howard Rose is a pioneer in creating medical applications for Virtual Reality, and I had a chance to catch up with him about his company Firsthand Technology which is creating pain management applications for VR. He's also creating medical VR...
Dinner Party is a short VR story that premiered at Sundance, and it uses the story of the alien abduction of Barney and Betty Hill to metaphorically explore the racial tension of interracial marriage in the early 1960s. I spoke to writers Laura...
Morgan Mercer's Vantage Point is creating virtual reality training experiences in order to cultivate the skills to break the stigma around sexual assault and and to overcome the bystander effect. They're using the affordances of VR & 360 video in...
On April 4th, Jessica Outlaw released a survey of 600 regular virtual reality users about harassment experiences in VR, which was funded by Pluto VR.
Marlon Fuentes is a ethnomusicologist who looks at the culture of how people relate to music through an anthropological lens. He's an emerging technologist who is tracking how virtual reality provides new opportunities for new culture to develop...
Gabo Arora's ZIKR: A Sufi Revival premiered at Sundance this year. It's a 360-degree video capture of a number of different Sufi rituals, songs, and dances, but it had a real-time, social VR experience overlaid on top of the live action footage...
Lawnmower Man director Brett Leonard is working on a project called Hollywood Rooftop, which is going to be shot both as an immersive 360 video as well as a 2D film. It's an experiment to discover some of the unique cinematic storytelling...
I facilitated a panel discussion at the Decentralized Web Summit that brought together some of the leading virtual reality creators who have been integrating blockchain technologies and creating the foundations of the decentralized metaverse.We...
Jules Urbach wants to create a photorealistic metaverse. He's been working on rending technologies to render digital lightfields, and Otoy's Octane renderer is used everywhere from baking scenes in Unity's real-time game engine to rendering the...
Samantha Matthews Chase calls GDPR - General Data Portability Regulations rather than data protection. GDPR has forced many companies to make over a decade's worth of our data available to use, and Chase sees this as a goldmine that can be mined for...
Janus VR has been implementing an IPFS distributed file system option for creators for the past couple of years. I talk to 'Taco Dog' who was the catalyst behind helping to architect the protocol foundations of the decentralized metaverse.He has...
The decentralized metaverse will require the transferring of A LOT of data. Distributed, peer-to-peer file systems like IPFS could provide the backbone of the decentralized metaverse.I talk with David Dias who is one of the developers of IPFS about...
Decentraland is a grand experiment of bringing together decentralized blockchain technologies and virtual worlds. Decentraland ICO raised over 26 million dollars, but it wasn't without controversy where 5-9 whales came in to buy up all of the tokens...
ICOs are disrupting late stage venture capital. Shawn Cheng was working at the Vayner/RSE VC, but now he's working with Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin's Consensys where he's helping to manage a portfolio of over 40 blockchain companies. Cheng talks...
The threat of forking a blockchain project is a catalyst for cooperation, which means that there are many parallels between the blockchain and open source development dynamics. It also means that the value of a blockchain project comes more from a...
High Fidelity and Janus VR announced in March that they were creating a Virtual Reality Blockchain Alliance in order to determine the protocols for the global interoperability of VR.I had a chance to talk to the co-founders of Janus VR and High...
Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, a co-editor for Boing Boing, and consultant to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He’s been closely tracking the relationship between Tech, Law, Culture, & Markets, and he is seeing a concerning pattern...
There’s a tension on the web today between creating a safe space to be online versions the costs to censorship and free speech. Spam, bots, trolls, harassment, hate speech, and terrorism are on the frontlines of making the web an unpleasant place to...
Brewster Kahle told me that the average of a web page on the Internet is 100 days before it either changes or disappears completely. Kahle realized that you can’t run a culture when you have no institutional memory, and so he started the Internet...
In “Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace,” Lawrence Lessig wrote about four socioeconomic regulators of society as being the law, cultural norms, economic markets, and architecture/code (i.e. technology). All of these four factors combine in order to...
Pixel Ripped 1989 is one of the most ambitious and innovative VR experiences I've seen. It's a multi-dimensional experience with 2D game within a VR game within an immersive story. You're in a VR world set in 1989 while also playing a Game Boy-like...
Each of the founders of TribeXR wanted to learn how to become a DJ, but they never got around to it. So they all went to DJ school, and they've been building virtual reality technologies to alleviate many of the pain points that slowed down their...
Electronauts is a cross between a simplified DJ simulator and improvisational music tool from Survios that is launching today. It's releasing with over 40 electronic songs that allows you to step into the DJ booth and control the flow of the music...
Kaliya Young (aka Identity Woman) has been working on digital identities for the past 15 years including helping facilitate the twice-a-year Internet Identity Workshop. These workshops lead to the Rebooting the Web of Trust workshops and the...
Vint Cerf is a co-inventor of the Internet, and he's currently working as a Vice President at Google at their Chief Internet Evangelist. With all of the ethical discussions about the dangers of centralization of power and influence for censorship...
Hotdogs, Horseshoes, and Hand Grenades (aka H3) is an open-ended sandbox VR experience where you can play with a variety of exotic firearms. It's a puzzle game where you have to figure out how to activate, load, and fire a huge range of different...
There is a lot of promise of a decentralized metaverse built on top of the open web, but the idealism of that promise isn't yet matching the quality & stability of experiences from centralized, native applications built on top of Unity or Unreal...
The YouTube VR application just released some social viewing features as well as finally released a version for Gear VR, although there isn't any specific updates on if or when there will be an Oculus Go or Oculus Rift version released. When I asked...
One of the recurring themes that was coming up at the IEEE VR academic conference was how VR is starting to catalyze interdisciplinary collaborations between different academic fields including computer science, social science, neuroscience, and...
I gave a talk about Metaphors of Presence at the Sandbox Immersive Festival in Qingdao, China where I talked about how Chinese Philosophy insights about the balance between Yang and Yin could help describe the fundamental tensions in immersive and...