Digital lightfields are a cutting-edge technology that can render photorealistic VR scenes, and Otoy has been a pioneer of the rendering and compression techniques to deal with the massive amounts of data required to create them. Their OctaneRender...
During the Enlightenment, René Descartes declared that the mind and body were split and that we should think about them as separate dualistic entities. But more and more evidence is pointing to the fact that our bodies are much more involved in...
When the recession hit in 2008, book publisher Charlie Melcher looked to reinvent how Melcher Media told stories using the latest smart phone technologies. They developed an iOS app for Al Gore's Our Choice, and started having a lot of conversations...
Adventure Time creator Pendleton Ward has been fascinated by the idea of virtual reality since he first read Snow Crash as a teenager. He backed the Oculus Kickstarter, and has been exploring many of the early VR prototypes over the last three years...
Wizard of Oz' VR experiences use improv actors to drive either a single or multiple virtual characters. This technique is commonly used within VR training applications where it's cheaper to have a single actor puppeting multiple virtual characters...
Catherine Rehwinkel is working on creating a conceptual framework that enables storytellers to storyboard linear stories in VR. She's a filmmaker who recently finished a master's degree computational & systems thinking at NYU. She's been inspired by...
Back in 2014, the CLOUDS interactive documentary premiered at Sundance New Frontier where it debuted a VR interface to navigate over 40 oral history interviews with creative coding pioneers. Movies have typically been pretty linear, but how could a...
Brett Leonard's journey into VR all started when he moved to Santa Cruz and started partying and smoking pot with some of the elite visionaries from the Silicon Valley technology scene. He was an aspiring writer and film director who got inspired by...
Roy Sherrill is enabling the time travelers from the future to get a sense of presence at a number of different tech and cultural events around the San Francisco Bay Area. Roy's been shooting a lot of 360 videos from his wheelchair at a number of...
Pokémon Go has quickly become the #1 mobile game of all time, and while there's been some debate as to whether it should be considered Augmented Reality or not, it's clear that location-based gaming has taken to the next level. I had a chance to...
What are the game design considerations for creating a VR experience that will be compelling for not only the primary player, but also the spectators who may be watching it on a livestream with VREAL? This was the big question that I discussed with...
When people dream about what they want to do in VR, it inevitably involves actually moving around within a virtual environment. But VR locomotion triggers simulator sickness in a lot of people, and solving it is one of the biggest open problems in...
Dr. Ming Lin has been working on realtime physics simulations before physics engines were cool. Ming is now actively researching how to simulate audio in real-time. Rather than recording or generating sounds that are then simulated within a virtual...
Pete Moss is known as the 'VR Dude' within Unity, and has long seen the potential of virtual reality. He's really been on the frontlines of this virtual reality revolution over the past 3-4 years creating a bridge between the hardware manufacturers...
Two years ago, not very many people were thinking about how important audio was going to be for consumer VR. Jason Riggs was pitching what would eventually become OSSIC by claiming that it was going to be the Oculus for audio headphones. Two years...
Sound is probably the second most important part of creating a compelling immersive VR experience, but it's also usually put off to the end as an afterthought. The visual system is so dominant that this is not a huge surprise, but I thought that...
Josh Farkas has given over 6000 VR demos over the last couple of years, and he's been in the position of having had to try to explain the potential of VR to many skeptical businesses. That's in part because his Cubicle Ninjas was primarily a web...
The first time that I experienced Sequenced, I had no idea that my gaze directions might have been triggering different branches or small events within the story. Experiencing an interactive drama, but not knowing it was one of the design challenges...
VR on exercise bikes like VirZOOM is going to be AMAZING... for some people, and I may not be one of those people. Movement within virtual environments is a hard problem, and while VirZOOM addresses some of the challenges of VR locomotion, people...
Academic VR researchers have shown that 'people typically underestimate egocentric distances in immersive virtual environments,' sometimes up to 20%. This could have huge implications for architectural visualizations, but also for anyone making...
Eva Hoerth is a VR design researcher & community organizer, and she enjoys recording videos of people as they're immersed within a VR experience. She shot a video of of her co-worker in VR trying out the latest Leap Motion Orion update, and tweeted...
Sony's The London Heist is one of the best fusions of narrative VR storytelling with interactive game components. It's structured as a flashback sequence starting with you being confronted within an interrogation room, and there are branching...
At GDC this year, Sony revealed some of their first experiments into social VR with a four-person demo that was showing at their press event. The avatars looked like South Park characters, and the thumbs up or down gestures using the move...
Machine Learning is going to revolutionize so many different aspects of our lives, and it's starting to enter into game development with IBM's Watson. Developers can integrate cloud-based AI services into their game to dynamically change the game...
Astronaut Edgar Mitchell was the sixth man to walk on the moon, and upon his return to earth he had a profound mystical experience. Being able to see the earth from space expanded his worldview about human's role on the planet and the nature of...
Jenn Duong is the Director of VR at 1215creative as well as the co-founder of 'SH//FT,' which stands for 'Shaping Holistic Inclusion in Future Technology.' SH//FT has been partnering with VR companies who plan on supporting diversity and inclusion...
Tipatat Chennavasin is a general partner at The VR Fund, which is an early stage VC fund focusing exclusively on virtual reality and augmented reality start-ups. One of the services that Tipatat does for the community is maintain a VR Industry...
Azad Balabanian is the co-host of the ResearchVR podcast where he discusses the latest cognitive science research that applies to virtual reality with fellow cognitive scientists Petr Legkov and Krzysztof Izdebski. The premise of their work in VR is...
For the past three years, Cris Miranda has been taking VR pioneers down the rabbit hole of thinking about the deepest philosophical implications of virtual reality on his Enter VR podcast. He has been seeking out the boundaries of our understanding...
Christine Heller is the co-founder and CEO of VR Playhouse, and she gave a talk with her co-founder Ian Forester at SVVR 2016 titled 'How Fantasy Becomes Form' about the process of starting up a 360-degree video production studio. I had a chance to...
One of the PlayStation VR titles at Sony's E3 booth this week is RIGS: Mechanized Combat League, which is a competitive, 3 player vs 3 player game that is like a mixture between a FPS and basketball. The overall goal is for you team to run up a ramp...
There were a lot of VR games announced over the past two days at E3 by AAA game publishers. I watched all of the press conferences from Sony, Ubisoft, Bethesda, Microsoft, EA, and Oculus' appearance at the PC Gaming Show in order to capture audio...
When Ben Throop went to the Boston VR hackathon in June 2014, he didn't know that Valve was going to be showing off some prototype VR hardware that had positional tracking. At this point the Oculus DK2 had not shipped yet, and so he was able to...
KonceptVR has produced a couple of 360 videos for Broadway Theater productions that includes a promo with the cast of Hamilton as well as a music video with the cast of School of Rock. I had a chance to catch up with KonceptVR's Max Bolotov at SVVR...
Xárene Eskandar is an artist who has been exploring representations of time through the mediums of film and photography for many years, and she's has been starting to design VR experiences that alter the user's perception of time based upon insights...
I had a chance to try out VREAL's VR streaming technology a few weeks ago, and I think they've made some key technological breakthoughs that makes it possible to livestream an entire virtual reality experience. Rather than render out a 2D, first...
Darshan Shankar started BigScreen VR with a deceptively simple premise of wanting to have Virtual LAN parties with other gamers in VR, but using your computer screen as a center point of conversation has catalyzed a wide range of different use cases...
Philip Rosedale has been working with virtual worlds for a long time, having founded Second Life back nearly 13 years ago in 2003. He co-founded High Fidelity in 2013, and he previously told me that he wanted to fix a lot of the things that were...
At the IEEE VR conference this year, there was a pre-conference workshop about Immersive Analytics, which talked about how to use VR & multi-sensory interfaces to support analytical reasoning, decision making, and real-world analytics tasks by...
Brad Herman & Shiraz Akmal recently left DreamWorks Animation to raise $3 million to start SPACES Inc., which is a virtual reality and mixed reality company focusing on storytelling for different brands including Microsoft, NBCUniversal, and The...
Rob Jagnow is a senior software engineer who was a part of Google's Daydream Lab team that produced over 60 VR prototypes in 30 weeks. This team was originally revealed in a WIRED magazine profile of VP of VR Clay Bavor, and this Daydream Labs...
Betty Mohler is a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, and she had some keen insights the nature of the uncanny valley being connected to expectations in my previous interview with her. I caught up with her again at the...
During Google's Daydream Labs presentation at Google I/O, they discussed how to deal with different types of trolling behaviors. Suzanne Leibrick is a VR user interface and user experience designer, who has experienced different types of online...
Techcrunch reports that Snapchat just raised another $1.8 billion in a Series F round, and Snapchat could end up being a major player within augmented reality hardware market. Snapchat is probably considered a bit of a dark horse by most people when...
Artificial Intelligence has the potential to disrupt so many different dimensions of our society that the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy recently announced a series of four public workshops to look at some of the possible impacts...
Google's Nathan Martz is a product manager for the Daydream SDK, and I had a chance to catch up with him to talk about what developers need to know in order to get started in developing for Daydream, which will be released in the Fall. Road to VR...
Google's mission is 'to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,' but what happens if there's a shift from the Information Age to the Experience Age? Google's Daydream mobile VR headset is part of that answer...
Candy Crush creator Tommy Palm has moved into making casual virtual reality games with Resolution Games. They've already released Bait! on the Gear VR, and it's the first VR app to feature in-app purchases, and they just announced at Google I/O that...
OpenBCI is an open source, brain control interface that gathers EEG data. It was designed for makers and DIY neuroengineers, and has the potential to democratize neuroscience with a $100 price point. At the moment, neither OpenBCI nor other...
AltSpaceVR is the first cross-platform social VR application that supports both the Gear VR, Oculus Rift, and HTC Vive. Now that all of these VR headsets have had their consumer launch, then AltSpace VR has been one of the top places in VR to have...