James McCrae wants to lower the barrier to entry for creating virtual worlds with janusVR. He has a PhD in computer science from University of Toronto, and he's created a sophisticated technology stack that allows front-end web developers to rapidly...
Presence Capital is a new early-stage venture capital firm that's focused on funding virtual reality and augmented reality startups. I had the chance to interview one of the co-founders Amitt Mahajan at the VRX Conference about this new fund and how...
Shauna Heller worked as a developer relations specialist focusing on non-gaming and non-entertainment experiences at Oculus for a year and a half before leaving to start her consultancy Clay Park VR. She's had a lot of exposure to the leading non...
Brian Blau is the research director in the personal technologies group at Gartner specializing in mobile apps and video game software in the consumer domain. He's also been analyzing the market for virtual and augmented reality for the past five...
The Night Café is an amazingly surreal immersive VR experience of walking through a space that's inspired by a painting by Vincent van Gogh. I speak with Mac Cauley about his inspiration and process to in creating The Night Café, which won both the...
Maureen Fan is the former vice president of gaming at Zynga, but she's always had a passion for animation. Maureen's mind was blown open the first time she experienced VR because she saw that the future of animation was going to be within Virtual...
Pete Moss is Unity's 'VR Dude' in that he's been a long-time believer and advocate in the cross section between VR and gaming and how the Unity game engine could play a significant part. He talks to me about his dual role of content creator and...
Sophia Dominguez is going all in with virtual reality, and she talks her journey of making virtual reality a career. She's the author of the weekly AllThingsVR newsletter, and she has been working as the entrepreneur in residence at the Rothenberg...
Sunny Dhillon is a principal and co-founder of Signia Venture Partners as well as a lifelong gamer. Signia has been an investor in mobile games, and so he knows what to look for in terms of a solid team and distinct art style that resonates with...
Joe Kraus is a general partner at Google Ventures, and he was on a panel at the Virtual Reality Intelligence conference in San Francisco talking about VC investment trends in virtual reality. Joe predicts that 2016 will be a 'perceptual year of...
Darrick Morrison is a the founder and CEO of Prizmiq, which is working as e-commerce tools to scan products with photogrammetry techniques, and then embed them within a shopping cart experience. Darrick comes from an ecommerce background, and he has...
Matthew Terndrup is a virtual reality journalist and content creator who's interested in exploring how the combination of psychedelics & virtual reality can help the process of self-discovery. Matt traces the influence that psychedelics have had in...
Domna Banakou is a Ph.D. student studying with Mel Slater at the Event Lab in Barcelona, Spain. She's been researching different aspects of the virtual body ownership illusion in order to investigate the short-term and long-term impacts of embodying...
Hilmar Veigar Pétursson has a bold vision for CCP with the mission statement 'To create virtual worlds more meaningful that real life.' He believes that after someone's basic needs on Maslow's hierarchy of needs are met, then humans will always be...
Ray Davis is the Studio Manager of Epic Games Seattle, and he talks about working on Bullet Train, which is Epic's latest VR tech demo that uses the Oculus Touch controllers and debuted at the Oculus Connect 2 gathering. I had a chance to catch up...
Ben Lang says that we've been at Year Zero of VR for three years now, and the official release of the Gear VR today marks the first official launch of a consumer-ready virtual ready head-mounted display. Ben joins me on the podcast to talk about...
Nick Ochoa is a co-founder of UploadVR, and he was recently at the VRX Virtual Reality Intelligence conference hosting a panel on social VR. Nick talks about of his open questions about social VR such as what does it mean to be a social VR app, and...
Matt McIlwain is a managing director at the Madrona Venture Group, which recently announced their first investment in the virtual reality space with a $4 million Series A round of funding for Envelop VR. Matt talks about why Seattle is one of the...
Tom Furness has been pioneering virtual and augmented reality for the past 50 years, which is longer than anyone else in the world. He has an amazing history that started back in 1966 while he was in the Air Force building some of the first helmet...
Layla Mah is the lead architect of virtual reality and advanced rendering at AMD. She talks about AMD's LiquidVR technology built to help bring comfort, compatibility and content to virtual reality. VR requires a lot of graphics processing...
Daniel 'SvenViking' Fearon is a developer behind the Scorched Battalion turn-based artillery game, which won the Silver prize for the Oculus Mobile Game Jam. Daniel talks about some of the design principles between alternating between first and...
Specular Theory CMO Ryan Pulliam and founder Morris May talk about some of the 360-degree video experiences that they've produced over the last year including an edgy Sundance film called Perspective: The Party, which tells the story of a sexual...
Jason Storey (aka apieceoffruit) is a VR developer, Left-Handed VR podcast co-host, and all-around VR enthusiast who has worked on number of different VR experiences. He talks about working on the gaze-control mechanism in the cinematic VR...
Tony Parisi has been working towards creating an open ecosystem of virtual reality helping to co-create the Virtual Reality Modeling Language in the early 90s. He recently took a position at WEVR, and while he's not revealing too much about the...
Dora Cheng is one of the co-founders of uForis VR, which is a VR company that is focused on creating pragmatic applications of virtual reality. One of their first big VR projects was to create virtual tours for the Domus Student Housing. They had to...
I had a chance to catch up with E McNeill at Oculus Connect about his design process for the Real-Time Strategy game called Tactera, which he developed for the Oculus Mobile Game Jam. He talks about some of the design constraints that he had by only...
Blair Renaud is the creator of Technolust, and he talks about his strategy for creating different experiences out of the Technolust universe for the Vive, Playstation VR, Oculus Rift, and Gear VR. Technolust has been one of the early VR adventure...
Envelop VR is a productivity tool that provides a virtual shell to allow users to use all of their existing 2D applications within the context of virtual reality. I had a chance to talk to the founder Bob Berry at the SEA-VR Expo, which he also...
I talk with Ikrima Elhassan of Kite & Lightning about their new tabletop VR game called Bebylon Battle Royale, which is a 'Vehicular Melee Party Brawler.' Kite & Lightning has a made a name of creating high-end cinematic VR experiences such as Senza...
Hao Li is an assistant professor at USC who has been collaborating with Oculus Research on facial tracking while wearing a virtual reality head-mounted display. They presented their initial prototype and research paper 'Facial Performance Sensing...
Mary Spio is the president and founder of Next Galaxy, and she's working on a number of different VR experiences including music videos, medical training, and enterprise applications. They're also developing the Ceekars 4D Headphones in order to...
There are a number of different 3D audio plug-ins available for game engines like Unity, but there have not been any solutions for mixing 3D audio for cinematic VR productions. Two Big Ears just released the 3DCeption Spatial Workstation, which is a...
Aashna Mago talks about the first Women in VR event in San Francisco that she helped organize on September 20th, 2015. There were over 200 people who attended the event that featured 13 women luminaries who are working in virtual reality, demos from...
Gunter S. Thompson has been hosting talk shows in virtual reality since April of 2014, and been participating in many of the early social VR experiences ranging from Minecrift, VRChat, and Riftmax Theater. He talks about some of the unique social...
Geoff Skow is a co-founder of Fish Bowl VR, which has over 200 early adopter, VR enthusiasts available to do user testing for VR experiences. VR developers can get a monthly subscription to get on-demand, user testing with let's play videos as well...
The Oculus Touch Toybox demo was shown to the most number of people in one day at Oculus Connect 2 on September 23rd. This was the first time that a lot of developers were able to get their hands on the Half Moon Prototype VR input controllers. But...
For the past three years, Will Smith and Norman Chan have been playing the latest virtual reality demos and tracking the evolution of VR with their Tested.com reviews. Will was able to see Oculus VR's Toybox demo at E3 this year, and the amount of...
Timoni West is a principle designer for Unity Labs, and she's working on creating professional tools for creating VR scenes in Unity while being in VR. These tools are still in the prototype phase of development, but it's something that Unity is...
Alex Tenyotkin is a senior design lead at Hulu, and he talks about how virtual reality went from being a passion project to being announced as part of the keynote at Oculus Connect 2. Alex talks about some of the design challenges for designing a VR...
Jon Brouchoud is an architect at Arch Virtual who has been putting architectural projects within Unity since before the Oculus Rift came out. He's been using virtual reality for architectural clients for over a year now, and says that VR has the...
Jesse Schell has been involved in virtual reality for over 20 years, and he's also the author of the popular The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses. He was able to combine his background in VR and game design at Schell Games to create the very...
Arthur van Hoff is the CTO of Jaunt, and I had a chance to catch up with him at Oculus Connect 2 to go over some of the most important specifications for their Jaunt ONE 360-degree camera,formerly known as 'Neo.' Arthur talks about how they're using...
Nicole Lazzaro is the founder and president of XEODesign, Inc., has twenty years expertise in Player Experience Design for mass-market entertainment products. She's recently started developing and consulting on a number of different virtual reality...
Nicolas Férey was presenting a number of papers at the first-ever workshop on Virtual and Augmented Reality for Molecular Science at the IEEE VR. Nicolas was presenting different navigational paradigms for molecular biology tasks that were designed...
Florian Frieß is from the Visualization Research Center at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. His presentation on using sonification to highlight events extracted from a molecular dynamics simulation. This talk on sonification was mentioned by a...
At the IEEE VR conference this year, there was the first-ever workshop on Virtual and Augmented Reality for Molecular Science (VARMS). Molecular science is one branch of science where virtual reality has a lot of applications, and Logan Herche from...
Himanshu Chaturvedi wanted to investigate the impact of the uncanny valley within training simulations that include interactions with virtual humans. The specific training scenario was a simulation for nurses to help them identify the signs of rapid...
Johanna Latt was at IEEE VR talking about the impact of avatar anthropomorphism on the Virtual Body Ownership Illusion effect. She found that there was some uncanny effects when the avatar looked more like a human than a more stylized robot or block...
Indira Thouvenin teaches Virtual Reality at the University of Technology Compiegne. Her research focuses on informed interaction in virtual environments, and how knowledge representation and sensory motor knowledge are linked within these...
The new JavaScript SDK from AltspaceVR is going to allow front-end web developers to quickly and easily create social VR applications. The AltspaceVR SDK is based upon three.js, which means that developers can create a WebVR-enabled application on...