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...
At Oculus Connect 2, SVVR's Karl Krantz told me that he accidentally spent 12 straight hours in VR and only thought that 3 hours had passed. I then started hearing a lot more time dilation stories from Owlchemy Labs' Alex Schwartz and Devin Reimer...
Brandon Jones has been one of the lead developers on the WebVR API over the past couple of years as part of his 20% project at Google. He announced this week that he's now going to be working on WebVR full-time, which is a great indicator that...
Walter Greenleaf has been researching medical applications of virtual reality since 1984, and he believes that healthcare is going to be transformed by consumer VR & AR technologies. Walter says that VR is fitting into a number of different...
Linden Lab's Second Life has been one of the largest and most successful virtual world ecosystems with nearly 13 years of existence. But Linden Lab recognized that the infrastructure and foundations of Second Life was not going to be able to drive...
Fred Brooks was in the process of looking for his next research agenda when he heard Ivan Sutherland give a speech in 1965 at a computer conference that laid out his vision for future of virtual reality. Sutherland said that you shouldn't think of a...
Otherworld Interactive recently announced that their horror experience Sisters just surpassed one million downloads for Google Cardboard. To celebrate, they released a compilation of reaction videos of people screaming and slamming VR headsets into...
On April 26, 1986, there was a catastrophic nuclear accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine rated as the highest severity of level 7. Thirty years after the disaster, there are still ongoing construction projects to confine the...
I didn't expect that a VR rock-climbing game that used neck thrusts as one of the primary locomotion mechanics would be as immersive or fun as it was, but I was really impressed with the level of immersion and presence that I felt while playing...
I gave a talk at Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference where I attempted to summarize highlights from over 400 Voices of VR podcast interviews. This was a daunting task which forced me to synthesize the emergent patterns that I've been seeing...
The third annual Silicon Virtual Reality Conference happened from April 27 to 29, and I had a chance catch up with Road to VR co-founder and executive editor Ben Lang to cover some of the big highlights and takeaways this year. Ben talks about...
Minecraft VR was released on the Gear VR this week, and it completes the long journey of making one of John Carmack's dreams come true. If you haven't watched John's Oculus Connect 2 keynote yet, then now is a good time to go back and check it out...
One of the most immersive and memorable experiences that I tried at the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference yesterday was TheWave. Just as TiltBrush is able to unlock your creative expression through 3D drawing, TheWave has the potential to...
Redirected walking is a concept within VR that tricks a user into walking into circles, but gives them visual feedback that they're walking in a straight line. We tend to trust our visual input over our other senses, and so redirected touch using...
Is VR on the open web going to provide a good enough experience as to be a viable distribution platform for certain VR content? That's the big question that people have been asking for the past couple of years, and there's been a lot of big steps...
Kevin Cornish is a LA-based VR filmmaker who teamed up with AMD to do some interactive narrative experiments using gazed-based content in Believe VR. Depending on which character you look at different moments will triggered up to 32 different...
Liv Erikson was able to to live out one of her dreams when she stepped into the Star Wars universe to battle against a lightsaber training Remote within Sixense's VR demo. This helped her discover that she has a passion for immersive technologies...
Tom Furness has been working in virtual reality longer than anyone else on the planet, and he's starting a new phase of his legendary career. He's starting to build a coalition of content creators and financial backers through the Virtual World...
It's not every day that someone gains an entirely new sense, but James Blaha did just that. He created a virtual reality vision therapy experience that essentially cured his lazy eye and enabled him to see in 3D for the first time in his life. When...
At GDC this year, Epic Games had a VR Lounge where they were showing off 10 different VR experiences that used the Unreal Engine. One of those experiences was Create VR's The Walk VR Experience, where you can walk across a tightrope between the two...
Nine different New Revolution Virtual Reality Coasters open to the general public at Six Flags theme parks around the country this Thursday, April 21st. A couple of roller coaster veterans Six Flags who had seen every roller coaster imaginable and...
I was invited to cover the VR Intelligence Conference that debuted in San Francisco on November 9-10, 2015. It was a smaller but very focused gathering of decision-makers from a wide range of different industries, and they're holding a European VR...
Milica Zec grew up in war-torn Serbia, but this was a part of her life that she preferred to just forget about and leave behind. After telling screenwriter Lizzie Donahue her story, she was encouraged to tell her story in a short film. Milica...
One of my favorite VR games is the Kokoromi Collective's SUPERHYPERCUBE, which is a very stylized 3D Tetris game with amazing sound design. It's a VR experience that really gives your brain a stimulating spatial memory workout. I first had a chance...
At GDC this year, I had a chance to talk with Valve developer Jeremy Selan and tracking engineer Ben Jackson about the evolution of room-scale tracking technologies, as well as some of the oral history stories that include some of their favorite...
Rob Morgan is the writer of The Assembly, and he spoke last year at GDC about narrative design in VR and the importance of accurate body language in NPCs to maintain a sense of presence. He returned to GDC this year to talk about some of his lessons...
Katie Goode is the Creative Director of Triangular Pixels, which has developed Smash Hit Plunder for the Gear VR and Unseen Diplomacy for the Vive. Unseen Diplomacy is a room-scale experience that has people crawling through tunnels as a spy, but...
VR Unicorns is a Copenhagen-based development collective that developed #SelfieTennis. They were working on Julie Heyde's RagnarökVR until they stated experimenting with room-scale sports experiences.Playing tennis against yourself in VR was the...
VR has the capability to take us into completely new realms, and experimental artist Isaac 'Cabbibo' Cohen has been creating some of the most surreal and transportive experiences that I've seen. I had a chance to try out a number of Cabbibo's Vive...
Valve's Chet Faliszek has been a key virtual reality evangelist & developer relations liaison over the past couple of years for the HTC Vive, and I had a chance to sit down with him at GDC as they were showing off many of their launch titles. Chet...
HoloLens development kits started shipping last week following Microsoft's Build conference and there were also a number of NDAs that were lifted, which allowed some companies to start talking about their HoloLens projects for the first time. One of...
Virtual Reality has the power to transport you to anywhere in the world, and NextVR has been one of the leaders of giving you a front row seat to live sporting events including hockey, boxing, NASCAR, basketball, soccer, and golf. NextVR recently...
Timoni West is a principle designer at Unity Labs, and she's been working on creating tools within Unity to be able to create VR within VR. I first talked with Timoni in October about these content creation tools, and these were revealed to the VR...
I got the first glimpse of what advertising within a VR experience might look like when I saw a demo of some ads playing on the Immersv platform. I was within an movie theater similar to Oculus Cinema watching a 2D video screen where there was a 30...
Part of the challenge of creating a first-person perspective game in VR is that there are limited locomotion options for moving around in VR in a way that's comfortable for most people. Damaged Core is a Oculus Rift launch title that uses a unique...
When most people think about the types of things that want to do in virtual reality, then they almost always think of experiences that are from the first-person perspective. But Lucky's Tale proved to me that there are going to be a whole range of...
Slightly Mad Studios been making racing games for the past 10 years, and they raised over $3 million dollars in crowd-funding to produce their own racing game called Project CARS. It's a AAA racing simulation game that was first released in May...
James Green is the creative director at Carbon Games, and he was inspired to create AirMech: Command from playing a 1989 game called Herzog Zwei, which was one of the first real-time strategy games that also used a gamepad as the primary control...
Jeep Barnett is a programmer at Valve Corporation who has been on the VR team for the last couple year. He was at GDC showing off The Lab, which is a series of mini-games demonstrating different design principles within VR. I had a chance to catch...
Gunfire Games' Chronos is an atmospheric RPG with over 10 hours of action and adventure, and it uses a satisfying combat game mechanic that's very similar to their Herobound: Spirit Journey on the Gear VR. Chronos had a lot of buzz from GDC as being...
Jeff Pobst admits that it's probably not a new Rift owner's first thought to go out and buy a tower defense game, but Defense Grid 2: Enhanced VR Edition proved to me how compelling a tower defense game can be in VR. It's a tabletop scale strategy &...
Road to VR co-founder Ben Lang and writer Scott Hayden join me in our third and final GDC round table discussion talking about our demo highlights including Valve's The Lab and a series of different shooters. There is a theme that's emerging in VR...