Google announced at the W3C WebVR workshop in mid-October that they would be shipping a WebVR-enabled Chromium browser in Q1 of 2017. I had a chance to catch up with Josh Carpenter last week to talk about some of the work that Google is doing to...
Some of the earliest experiments of making VR a first-class citizen on the web originated at Mozilla in 2014. Then the WebVR spec was drafted in a collaboration between Mozilla and Google's implementations. There's been a lot of excitement and...
On October 28-31, there was a virtual & augmented reality art show in San Francisco called 'The Art of Dying.' It featured 15 VR experiences and another dozen artists exploring death and grieving using immersive technologies. The show was produced...
The concept of embodied cognition is a hot topic within immersive education circles, and was a featured topic at during the Embodied Learning educational workshop that happened at the IEEE VR academic conference. Embodied Learning could help...
On today's episode, I talk with Dr. Benjamin Lok from the University of Florida about how they're using Virtual Humans as patients to train medical students. He talks about the key components for creating a plausible training scenario which include...
Oculus Story Studio has been exploring VR storytelling through a series of short narrative experiences starting with Lost and Henry, but they wanted to push the envelope of immersive storytelling with their next short titled Dear Angelica. They...
Cognitive VR is an VR analytics platform that has an impressive system for visualizing a player's movements and gaze within a 3D representation of a VR experience. Their SceneExplorer tool translates the 3D geometry from a Unity or Unreal experience...
There's been a couple of key developments in the evolution of WebVR during the month of October. First, Nate Mitchell announced during his Oculus Connect 3 keynote that Oculus will be supporting the WebVR ecosystem with the React VR framework and a...
Stephanie Hurlburt is a low-level graphics engineer who has previously worked on the Unity Game Engine, Oculus Medium, and Intel's Project Alloy, and now she's creating on a texture compression product called Basis at her company Binomial. I had a...
Joel Breton is the Vice President VR Content at HTC, and I had a chance to catch up with him at the Casual Connect conference in July to talk about the different industry verticals that they've identified. These include commerce, games, healthcare...
Valve premiered a prototype of a new type of VR input controller at Steam Dev Days in order to get some preliminary feedback from developers. They've created a capacitive-touch controller that is attached to your hand so that you can open and close...
Oculus Medium may be the first professional 3D modeling creation tool for the Oculus Touch controllers. It was created with the goal to democratize the process of creating 3D art and prototyping 3D-printed objects. The Medium developers didn't set...
Epic Games has had a long history of releasing new demo content at big gaming and developer conferences to showcase the latest Oculus hardware, and this year was no different. Oculus Studios provided funding to further develop the Bullet Train demo...
In this episode of the Voices of VR podcast, I recap some of my highlights from Oculus Connect 3, but also dive into some of my biggest concerns and questions coming out of this year’s big developer conference. My two biggest concerns were the...
VR is a new communications medium, and as such it'll likely be applied to anywhere other existing communications mediums are already used -- such as in courtrooms for presenting evidence. Kineticorp VR has already been presenting 3D forensic...
Reverend Kyle and I recorded a recap of the first day of Oculus Connect 3 as a part of the Oculus Livestream sponsored by Intel. We went around Oculus Connect 3 trying out a number of multiplayer VR experiences with the Oculus Touch and the gamepad...
On October 4th, Google revealed Daydream View, which is their reference design for their mobile VR headset. Google CEO Sandar Pichai also announced the first Daydream-ready phone designed called Pixel, which also has native hardware support for...
At PAX West, Reload Studios made a strong push for cultivating World War Toons as a VR eSports title. They were livestreaming a couple of shoutcasters announcing a four-on-four player capture the flag game of World War Toons, which is a free-to...
Cohh Carnage is a professional Twitch streamer, and I had a chance to catch up with him at PAX West after he had a chance to scout out the expo floor for games that he's interested in streaming. As streamer, he has to cultivate a sense of presence...
Alexander Porter & James George want to democratize volumetric capture with Depthkit. Depthkit combines depth sensor devices like the Kinect or RealSense cameras with high-end digital SLR cameras. They're able to create a 3D mesh from the captured...
Andy Beall is the CEO of Worldviz, and has been doing VR since 1992. I had a chance to catch up with him at SIGGRAPH where he told me about the type of work that Worldviz has been doing in the VR space since 1992, including creating warehouse-scale...
Once a developer creates a VR experience, then the real difficult phase begins in trying to market their experience. VR is a new communication medium, and so traditional photos or videos don't always do the experience justice. At Casual Connect, I...
At VRLA, I had a chance to catch up with Sarah Hill, who is the CEO and Chief Storyteller for StoryUp VR. She's been doing some VR for Good projects including giving virtual Honor Flights for WWII veterans as a part of Honor Everywhere as well as...
The story of how DODOcase started the Google Cardboard VR ecosystem within 24 hours, and became responsible for producing 20% of all of the Cardboard headsets is really quite an incredible story. I had a chance to catch up with CEO and founder Craig...
uSens is working on gestural input and inside-out tracking for both AR and VR. I had a chance to catch up with uSens' vice president of product development, Yiwen Rong, at GDC in March to talk about some of their current tracking research and larger...
Anshel Sag is an analyst for Moore Insights and Strategies where he has focused on mobile computing platforms. I had a chance to catch up with him at VRLA where talked about his content highlights there as well as why he thinks that 2017 is going to...
Ken Perlin is a professor of computer science at NYU, and is researching how to use VR to enhance social interactions. I had a chance to talk with him about that as well as how he's combined his passions for math and art with his procedural textures.
I talk with Shauna Heller from Clay Park VR about here thoughts about non-entertainment and non-gaming VR content in education, medicine, and enterprise applications.
I had a chance to do a demo of Eyefluence, which has created a new model for eye interactions within virtual and augmented reality apps. Rather than using the normal eye interaction paradigm of dwelling focus or explicitly winking to select...
In 1968, Douglas Engelbart gave 'The Mother of All Demos' where he gave the first public demonstration of a mouse as a computer control device. For the last 48 years, the mouse and keyboard have remained the primary input devices for Human Computer...
When I was at SIGGRAPH this year, one of the hottest topics was figuring out the workflows for how to deal with the complexity of capturing, processing, and distributing volumetric digital light fields. Otoy's Jules Urbach had a lot of insights, and...
Dungeons & Dragons is a form of collaborative storytelling that isn't constrained by time or budget. Because it's all happening within the theater of the mind, then if you can imagine it, then it can be constructed instantaneously within everyone's...
HBO premiered a VR experience for their new Westworld series at TechCrunch Disrupt, and they used Spherica's camera stabilization technology in order to pull off an extended live-action tracking shot in VR. Common advice given to new VR filmmakers...
When Ted Schilowitz was looking for what to do after traveling the world as the first RED Camera employee, he happened upon an opportunity to serve as a futurist for 20th Century Fox for looking at how to use emerging technologies for storytelling...
One of the best VR experiences I did at PAX West this year was Funomena's Luna, which is a unique blend of tactile puzzles, creative world building, musical improvisation within the context of an emotionally-charged narrative. Luna is designed by...
It was on a San Jose sidewalk in 2015 that I first tried the SubPac, and it blew me away. I felt like I was immediately transported into a dance club standing in front of giant subwoofers with the soundwaves of bass rippling through my body, but yet...
OptiTrack premiered a new demo at GDC that shows the extent of their tracking technology precision. They put passive tracking markers on a basketball and football that allowed people to go toss a ball back and forth to each other in VR. I had a...
The IEEE VR held a new pre-conference workshop this year on Virtual Humans and Crowds for Immersive Environments. Movies like Lord of the Rings and video games like Assassin's Creed use this research in order to create convincing group behaviors...
I had a chance to try out the Manus VR hand-tracked controller on the expo floor of GDC this year, and saw that there a couple of really strong use cases for having your hands and fingers tracked in VR. You can be a lot more expressive within Social...
When Owlchemy Labs' Alex Schwartz saw that Rick and Morty creator Justin Roiland was a fan of their Job Simulator VR experience, then he reached out and met up with Justin in Los Angeles. They came up with the idea of creating an interactive Rick...
When Rand Miller was a kid, he played Dungeons & Dragons with his brother Robyn where they would go on adventures together exploring and creating imaginal worlds. They wanted to embed that same sense of wonder and awe of exploration and discovery...
Stephanie Harvey (aka 'missharvey') is a professional eSports gamer playing Counter-Strike: Global Offensive with the Counter Logic Gaming Red team. I had a chance to catch up with her at PAX West to talk about the future of eSports in VR, the...
Theresa Duringer has a fear of flying, and rather than treating her aviophobia with VR exposure therapy she's been experimenting with using VR to just completely opt out of the real-life signals of the flying experience altogether. She's found some...
When Derek Belch was a kicker on Stanford's football team in 2004, he took a class with the Virtual Human Interaction Lab's Jeremy Bailenson where he was exposed to virtual reality technologies for the first time. Belch asked Bailenson if it was...
Sensomotoric Instruments (SMI) is a German-based eye tracking company who has released an eye tracking kit for the Oculus DK2 & Gear VR, and most recently for the HTC Vive. At SIGGRAPH this year, Nvidia was showing a foveated rendering demo where it...
TheWave VR coordinated two days worth of DJs playing musical sets in the world's first VR Rave at VRLA. It was TheWave's first event since announcing that they raised a round of $2.5 million to build out an interactive, VR music concert platform. I...
Originally launched in 2012, Sketchfab has grown to be the largest social media website for sharing 3D objects and scenes with over 500,000 members and close to 1 million experiences. At SIGGRAPH, Sketchfab launched their VR browser to be able to...
There was a VR Village again this year at the SIGGRAPH conference where a lot of experimental interactive technologies were on display. Virtual Reality was the common thread, but there were other immersive technologies like different prototype...
Back in February, Amazon announced that they had purchased and forked Crytek's Cryengine and made the full source code available in a free AAA game engine offering called Lumberyard. The only catch is that if you want to use any public cloud...
At Google I/O this year, Google announced the Daydream VR platform and mobile headset that will be coming to the latest Android phones later this year. There's a DIY dev kit that you can start using today to start developing Daydream-ready apps, and...