TPCast is a Chinese company that was one of the first in the world to provide a wireless VR peripheral solution that could viably eliminate the cable tether of a VR HMD. I talk with co-founder David Jiang at CES 2017 about some of the early...
Visbit is a B2B, 360-video streaming distribution company based out of Silicon Valley, and co-founder and CEO CY Zhou is originally from China. I caught up with CY at CES 2017 to talk about some of the basic streaming services and application SDK...
The VR hardware ecosystem in China is fairly self-contained, and Nolo VR ran a successful Kickstarter campaign to bring 6DoF hand tracking to mobile VR headsets, but also giving access to your SteamVR library through your mobile phone.
The Nordic Trolls is a VR development company based in Beijing, China. I had a chance to catch up with the CEO Thorbjørn Olsen (originally from Norway) and co-founder Lin Chen at CES 2017 to talk about the VR ecosystem in China, the different ways...
LumièreVR's Jenny Guo is building bridges between the East and West through virtual reality. She's producing 360 content for the Netflix of China, & she's a consultant building cross-cultural collaborations & helping companies navigate the VR...
Eddie Lou is the founder of Sandman Studios in Beijing, and he is also the founder of the Sandbox Immersive Festival that took place in Qingdao China on June 23-27, 2018. I was able to travel to Qingdao for the festival, and the next seven podcasts...
Danielle Perszyk is a cognitive scientist, and co-founder and lead scientist at Oscillations who is using neuroscience theory of synchrony in order to make predictions for how to direct attention and tell stories using body and gestures without any...
Our stores of the past shape our future. There is a growing movement to use augmented reality technologies to reclaim suppressed histories by creating site-specific AR art installations that challenge institutionally-backed narratives. Glenn...
Sound Self developer Robin Arnott is starting a publishing label named Orpheus Technodelics to curate and distribute consciousness hacking VR experiences. 'Technodelics' are digital psychedelics that provide peak experiences, and Arnott hopes till...
I talk with Jason Edward Lewis about the Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace initiative, as well as the two 2167 Indigenous Storytelling in VR that he helped to produce. How do we reckon the past, present, and the future, and what types of...
I speak with Mike Sapiro about the Indian Philosophy concept of the five koshas and insights that might provide into VR presence.
I speak to Cris Beasley about her design principles for embodiment.
Here's a bit more information on the game mechanics of Light Strike Array:
I talk with flow artist Swan about the story of behind the Beat Saber viral videos, and what it means to add style to VR with embodiment and VR.
I talked with Cix Liv, the CEO of Liv, about their mixed reality hardware and software solutions. Mixed reality shows what it feels like to be in VR better than any other depiction, and Cix is really interested to see how mixed reality is going to...
Google announced some new features for ARCore at Google I/O last week including Sceneform to help Java developers integrated 3D content into apps, augmented images to trigger immersive AR experiences off of trained images, and cloud anchors to...
May 16th is the five-year anniversary for Silicon Valley Virtual Reality meetup, and founder Karl Krantz is announcing a couple of new initiatives as SVVR reorganizes itself as a public-benefit corporation. They're going to be formally announcing...
Google's mission statement is to 'organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful,' and so it's a natural fit that they'd be a leader in creating educational experiences for AR & VR. Google Expeditions continues to...
The Oculus Go was released on Tuesday, May 1st at the Facebook F8 developer conference, and it is a self-contained, 3-DoF mobile VR HMD with a price of $199 that is optimized for media consumption and social VR interactions. Facebook showed off four...
Beat Saber is a rhythm game that is like an embodied puzzle game that creates a visceral connection to 10 custom music tracks. It's similar to Soundboxing and Audio Shield, but you use extended light sabers rather than your fists, which makes you...
Matt Miesnieks is creating an AR cloud with 6D.AI, which aims to 'synchronize 3D computer vision data across devices, time and space' in order to enable 'persistent content, occlusion, and real-time shared experiences.' Miesnieks has founded a...
One of the things that inspires me to do the Voices of VR podcast is being able to talk with hundreds of people listening for the underlying patterns of experiential design. VR & AR are reflections of the human experience, and so any experiential...
Oculus will be releasing a new Privacy Policy and Terms of Service tomorrow that will go into effect on May 20th, just five days before the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) privacy law enforcement deadline of May 25th. I had a chance...
John Root co-founded VRLA with Cosmo Scharf in 2014, and it has organically grown into a thriving VR event with over 10,000 attendees in the Los Angeles Convention Center. VRLA is a non-profit where funding from sponsors helps to support about half...
Keiichi Matsuda went from being a dystopian filmmaker to becoming the vice president of design at hand-tracking company Leap Motion. Matsuda is probably the most famous for his HYPER-REALITY dystopian filmthat imagined an commodified & gamified AR...
The open metaverse is going to be built on web standards like the WebXR Device API (formly WebVR), but the larger community of web developers has been waiting to fully commit to building immersive WebVR experiences until there's universal support in...
The future of VR storytelling will be immersive and interactive. Yelena Rachitsky is an executive producer of experiences at Oculus, and she's been inspired by how interactive narratives have allowed her to feel like a participant who is more...
Ready Player One was released on March 29th, and the current VR experience that comes the closest to realizing the vision of the OASIS depicted in the movie is the social VR experience of VRChat. By 2045, I predict that we'll have a decentralized...
What is happening with the VR industry? Is the adoption and growth still on target to support a vibrant and diverse ecosystem of independent VR developers? Leading headset manufacturers have not been transparent in sharing any specific information...
Ela Darling calls herself the 'Queen of VR porn' as she co-founded CAM4 and became the first virtual reality cam girl from VR tech integrations that her company developed. She shared her founding story with me in a previous interview in 2015, and I...
The VR Unicorns use a rapid iteration, game jamming approach to VR development, and co-founder Julie Heyde does daily playtesting and quality assurance gathering feedback and guidance for the development team. Heyde has also been experiencing a...
Darryll Starr is a former game developer who now teaching underprivileged youth how to create VR experiences with Unity at the David E Glover Education and Technology Center in Oakland, CA. Starr is the lead instructor and curriculum developer who...
The Columbia Digital Storytelling Lab had a design research project at Sundance that is exploring new models of cooperative storytelling and collaborative sensemaking, but it was also on the bleeding edge of integrating technologies ranging from...
Each year, the Sundance New Frontier features VR experiences, films, and live performances that push the boundaries of storytelling. Cory McAbee did live performance of a piece called Deep Astronomy and the Romantic Sciences, which combines elements...
The Sundance Film Festival's New Frontier Program featured over 20 different VR, AR, and AI experiences that were pushing the boundaries of immersive storytelling. After seeing all of the experiences, I had a chance to unpack and analyze the larger...
Tony Parisi is the Head of AR & VR strategy at Unity so he has an insider's perspective of not only where the VR and AR industry is today, but some hints as to what xR is going to look like by 2025. Parisi had a fireside chat with HTC Viveport...
The full release of CloudGate Studios' VR survival game Island 359 is now available, and there's some special embodiment features for anyone who has 1-3 of HTC's Vive Trackers. They've developed an adaptive system that uses 1 tracking puck on your...
Felix & Paul Studios had two experiences at Sundance this year. One featured the training of NASA astronauts in Space Explorers, and the other was a time-lapse VR story featuring characters from Wes Anderson's Ilse of Dogs film in front half with a...
Holonet is an open source project that implements the Decentralized Identity Specifications for open web VR platforms like WebXR. A self-sovereign identity system could enable the seamless portability of your avatar identity across multiple sites...
Rose Colored by INVAR Studios & Adam Cosco won the award for best live-acton VR experience at the Advanced Imaging Society's Lumiere Awards on February 12th. I previously interviewed Cosco at VRLA last year, and I had a chance to talk with INVAR's...
At SIGGRAPH 2017, NVIDIA was showing off their Isaac Robot that had been trained to play dominos within a virtual world environment of NVIDIA's Project Holodeck. They're using Unreal Engine to simulate interactions with people in VR to train a robot...
The Sun Ladies VR is an amazing story about a group of Yazidi women from the Northern Iraq community of Sinjar, who escaped as sex slaves and started an all-female unit to fight ISIS. ISIS raided the Sinjar District in August 2014 and massacred over...
Tender Claws' Virtual Virtual Reality is a Daydream-exclusive interactive story that won the best VR experience at the 2017 Google Play Awards VR, and it's one of my personal favorite interactive narratives within VR. Virtual Virtual Reality (aka...
Tender Claws, the creators of the award-winning interactive VR narrative Virtual Virtual Reality, premiered a new, site-specific, interactive AR narrative experience at the Sundance New Frontier called TendAR. It was a social augmented reality...
The HaptX Glove that was showed at Sundance was one of the most convincing haptics experiences that I've had in VR. While it was still primitive, I was able to grab a virtual object in VR, and for the first time have enough haptic feedback to...
Dinner Party is an immersive exploration of Betty and Barney Hill's alien abduction story that premiered at the Sundance New Frontier. Rather than using normal alien abduction tropes, writers Laura Wexler & Charlotte Stoudt chose to use the spatial...
Sundance New Frontier had a solid line-up of VR experiences this year with a number of immersive storytelling innovations including SPHERES: Songs of Spacetime, which takes you on a journey into the center of a black hole. It's a hero's journey that...
Jeremy Bailenson founding director of Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, and his latest book Experience on Demand traces his academic journey through virtual reality. It's an intellectual memoir that focuses on his personal work in...
Live Action Role Playing (LARPing) is something that emerged out of table top games like Dungeons & Dragons in the 1970s driven by a desire to be more immersed in living out fantasy scenarios. Boffer LARPs use foam weapons to simulate D&D-style...
Tommy Honton is an experiential designer in the immersive theater space, and he's helped to design interactive narratives that can handle a range of different disruptive responses that can ruin the experience for other people. One question for all...