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...
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:
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
John Bucher wrote a book titled 'Storytelling for Virtual Reality: Methods and Principles for Crafting Immersive Narratives' where he includes interviews with dozens of VR experience designers and the major insights into immersive storytelling...
Punchdrunk's immersive theater piece of Sleep No More opened in March 2011, and it's inspired countless experiential designers of immersive theater, and virtual and augmented reality experiences. It was a paradigm shift that broke the fourth wall...
The Immersive Design Summit brought together over 150 of the top experiential designers from around the world, mostly from the performance community of immersive theater productions and escape rooms, but also with a small number of people focusing...
The Columbia University School of the Arts' Digital Storytelling Lab has been conducting interactive storytelling experiments to create guidelines, rules, and structures for facilitating emergent and interactive stories through an open-ended...
OSSIC's Jason Riggs told me at CES last year that the future of music is going to be immersive and interactive. Interactive sound design where user agency is considered a part of the experience is a key ingredient to creating fully immersive audio...
I recently gave the keynote at the Immersive Technology Conference in Houston, TX where I talked about the many different maps that I use to understand reality & virtual reality. Because virtual reality is simulating reality, then a lot of these...
Ravé Mehta talks about how he was able to deal with recovering from a health condition through achieving progressively deeper, longer, and more consistent levels of flow states. He talks about his holistic philosophy of flow, what he learned from...
VR represents a shift from telling stories to building story worlds that people experience and interact with. There is a process of world building and experiential design that first creates the conditions of the environment, and then the full...
Ida Benedetto is an experiential designer who has developed a framework she calls 'Patterns of Transformation: Designing Sex, Death, and Survival in the 21st Century. She started curating Trespass Adventures, which were private & exclusive one-off...
Dustin Chertoff has pulled experiential design insights from the advertising world to come up with a more holistic theory of presence in virtual reality. In 2008, he was in graduate school and was dissatisfied with the major theories of VR presence...
The Microsoft Build conference starts this week, and I expect that we'll be learning more about the HoloLens as well as Microsoft's Windows Mixed Reality operating system. Microsoft has been evangelizing about virtual reality the past couple of...
Using language to translate an experience into words is one of the highest levels of abstraction that you can have. Using the power of visual metaphor through poetry is able to get to deeper levels of emotion, and virtual reality is able to remove...
Last year, Baobab Studios' Eric Darnell was skeptical about adding interactivity to virtual reality stories because he felt like there was a tradeoff between empathy and interactivity. But after watching people experience their first VR short...
Owlchemy Labs recently announced that Job Simulator has grossed over $3 million, and so it's worth reflecting on some of the design principles of agency and plausibility that have proven to be some of the key affordances of the virtual reality...
Brian Van Buren is a narrative designer at Tomorrow Today Labs, and he's also a wheelchair user who has been evangelizing how to make virtual reality experiences more accessible. I had a chance to catch up with him at the Intel Buzz Workshop in June...
Felix & Paul Studios have been innovating on their own immersive VR camera technology since they pioneered the first-ever stereoscopic VR video with Strangers with Patrick Watson. They went on to sign a deal with Oculus Studios to produce a number...
VR escape room games are one of the emerging genres that are particularly well-suited for the affordances of VR, and Schell games' I Expect You to Die sets the standard for creating this type of puzzle game. I had a chance to catch up with game...
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...
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...
Owlchemy Labs' Job Simulator was recently announced to be one of the bundled games to be included with the HTC Vive, and it's also going to be a launch title for the Sony PlayStation VR as well as for Oculus Touch. I had a chance to catch up with...