Richard Lemarchand directed a minimalist VR experience with the USC Game Innovation Lab
Andreea Ion Cojocaru is one of the few architects who is designing both virtual experiences as well as real buildings with Numena VR. I first met her in Germany during VR Now in November where I talked to her about her award-winning experiments in...
Architects Anna Mill & Luke Jones spent eight years creating a graphic novel called Square Eyes that explores the speculative design of augmented reality technologies and interfaces. They see this project as an in-depth paper architecture...
Yasmin Yesilipek is an architecture student at the Architectural Association who has been primarily focusing on virtual reality. She's been creating spaces for online gatherings, and trying to recreate a campfire digitally through experimenting with...
Space Popular is a multidisciplinary design and research practice led by Lara Lesmes & Fredrik Hellberg, and they've been architecture students for the last eight years about spatial design as well as the latest immersive technologies. They've been...
Amelia Winger-Bearskin is a VR director & performance artist who is building communities for artists, creators, and technologies working in emerging technology. She uses metaphor as her primary method for exploring emerging technologies like virtual...
Buffalo Vision's Ben Vance is the artist, designer, & director behind Irrational Exuberance: Prologue. He started developing this experience on the Oculus Rift DK1 in 2013, and it wasn't until he saw the Valve Room demo that he was convinced that...
Wesley Allsbrook is an artist, art director, and writer who started as editorial illustrator and comic book creator before working at Oculus Story Studio as the lead artist on Dear Angelica. Allsbrook has been working with Quill since 2015, and she...
Brittan Heller is a technology & human rights fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard University where she is investigating the intersection of technology & policy when it comes to online harassment & hate speech within virtual worlds...
The RLab is a publicly-Funded XR center for research, entrepreneurship, and education located in Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York. It's being managed under NYU's Tandon School of Engineering in collaboration with Columbia, CUNY, & New School. The RLab...
Ethical design of technology is a hot topic right now, and Tristan Harris has been catalyzing a lot of broader discussion about the perils of persuasive technologies. He quit his job as a design ethicist at Google after feeling limited in his...
The XR Safety Initiative (XRSI) was co-founded by Kavya Pearlman and formally announced at the Open AR Cloud Symposium on Tuesday, May 28, 2019. XRSI is going to be looking at the safety and security issues within XR in collaboration with security...
Mozilla Hubs is an open source social VR platform built using open web technologies. You can create your own 3D scenes using their Spoke platform, or launch your own private Hubs server using the open sourced infrastructure code for Hubs. Mozilla...
Nancy Baker Cahill is a multidisciplinary artist from Los Angeles, and she's created a public art application called The 4th Wall AR app that allows people to place augmented reality art onto contested sites. Cahill used her 4th Wall AR app to place...
The Valve Index officially launches today, and it provides a strong vision for the future of high-end PC VR with solid tracking, fidelity, and hand-tracked Index controllers that provide a deep sense of hand presence. Valve sent me hardware to...
The Multiplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies has been doing frontier research into the therapeutic uses of psychedelics for the past 33 years, and they're currently in Phase 3 FDA trials for MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for the treatment of...
Dr. Cassandra Vieten is the president of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, who's current tagline is 'Informed by Science. Transformed by Experience.' Dr. Vieten gave an opening keynote at the Consciousness Hacking's Awakened Futures Summit where she...
Dr. Jeff Tarrant founded the NeuroMeditation Institute in order to research the neuroscience principles of different meditation states. He came up with a taxonomy of four different types of NeuroMeditation that include Focus, Mindfulness, Quiet...
Consciousness Hacking produced the The Awakened Futures Summit in San Francisco on May 18th & 19th, looking at the intersection between psychedelics, technology, and meditation. Consciousness Hacking previously hosted a sold-out event on October...
Dr. Peter Simpson is a professor of ancient philosophy at The City University of New York, and I met him at the Philosophy of Time Society session on the first night of the American Philosophical Association Easter Meeting 2019 in New York City. I...
Douglas Rushkoff is the host of the Team Human podcast and author of Team Human as well as a dozen other bestselling books on media, technology, and culture. He was invited to the VRTO conference in Toronto to record a live Team Human podcast about...
The Open AR Cloud is a volunteer organization whose mission statement is to 'drive the development of open and interoperable spatial computing technology, data, and standards to connect the physical and digital worlds for the benefit of all.'...
The Venture Reality Fund general partner & co-founder Tipatat Chennavasin travels around the world tracking the progress of virtual and augmented reality, and I had a chance to catch up with him at Microsoft Build 2019 in order to get his...
French journalist Julien Bergounhoux has been covering the business applications for spatial computing for L'Usine Digitale over the past 6-7 years, and I had a chance to catch up with him following the Microsoft Build opening keynote. We talked...
Ida Benedetto gave the opening keynote of the Immersive Design Summit where she shared some of the work that she's doing as an experiential designer as a corporate consultant at SYPartners working with companies on organizational transformation and...
Graham Sack says that dream analysis and the language have film have co-evolved together as visual forms of symbolic communication, and he wanted to further that exploration in an experimental narrative series funded by Samsung VR. Sack and...
Owlchemy Labs have been pioneering VR experiences exploring hand presence and embodied gameplay in VR since the release of Job Simulator and Rick & Morty VR, and they're releasing their next experience in this sequence called Vacation Simulator...
Lucid Dreaming is ability to become aware that you’re dreaming, and to potentially even start to interact and direct what happens within your dream. Arthur Gillard is a VR enthusiast who has been tracking the intersection between immersive...
Torkom Ji tells the story of how he used Resident Evil 7 VR as a form of fear resistance training, and transformational shadow work to overcome his fears. He’s also a co-founder of Visual Reality, which is bringing psychedelic culture and visionary...
Helixaeon's Time Helix has a unique way of visualizing time-based data as a fractal-nested helix. Helixaeon was recently awarded US Patent #10,185,933 for their interactive, multi-dimensional data visualization that's able to 'generate a...
There's a lot of intensity in the world right now, and it reminded me of a short excerpt about VR shooters from a longer conversation that I had with Danny Bittman back at Oculus Connect 4 in 2017. I think it speaks to some of what's happening in...
I moderated this 90-minute Sundance New Frontier panel discussion about immersive storytelling in AR and the role of virtual characters and conversational interfaces. It included Alice Wroe, who is the creative director of Magic Leaps digital human...
One of the most visceral experiences I had at Sundance New Frontier this year was Marshmallow Laser Feast's Sweet Dreams, which incorporated taste as part of the narrative in a surrealist virtual reality story world called Luscious Delicious Land...
Immersive theater is on a collision course with virtual reality. There are so many best practices for interactive storytelling that are easily translatable into VR. Immersive Theater troupe Third Rail Projects produced the acclaimed Then She Fell...
Human Interact's Starship Commander uses AI-enabled, voice-activated commands in order to participate within an interactive story. It was recently was released as a location-based entertainment arcade game, and I first talked to Alexander Mejia...
I interviewed the co-founders of Innerspace VR Hadrien Lanvin and Balthazar Auxietre about Firebird - La Peri at the inaugural VR on the Lot in 2016. This is where I first got a sneak peak at their A Fisherman's Tale puzzle game, which just released...
Filip Kostic is an artist and educator at the ArtCenter College of Design, and he had a piece called Landgrab: The Musical that was featured in the Sptial Realities Art Show curated by Jesse Damiani. Landgrab is a post-modern musical that is trying...
Ali Eslami is an award-winning Iranian virtual reality developer who has recently taken an artist residency in Amsterdam in order to continue his speculative design of a virtual city. Eslami's premiered False Mirror at the International Documentary...
The DocLab at the International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam (IDFA) was started in 2007 by Caspar Sonnen, and it's very similar to the New Frontier programming at Sundance as it's looking at how what new forms of storytelling is emerging from...
I moderated a discussion with VR pioneers Fred Brooks & Henry Fuchs at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts' Future of Reality Summit (original video is here). We talk about the evolution of immersive technologies since the mid 1960s...
Designing impossible architecture in VR is changing how Andreea Ion Cojocaru designs real buildings, and she's reveling in the fact that she finally has a tool with VR to be able to explore some of the deeper philosophical questions about the nature...
Quiddale O'Sullivan is an architect who is using his spatial design skills to design environments within virtual reality. We cover a wide variety of worldbuilding insights from an architectural perspective, and how the process of architecture is an...
The VR Privacy Summit happened on November 8th, and brought together representatives from the top XR companies, start-up companies, VR experts, medical academics, and legal experts to talk about the potential risks and benefits of having access to...
The medical professionals at the VR Privacy summit has a lot of interesting insights into how they navigate issues around informed consent in medical research through Institutional Review Boards, and perhaps how privacy policies for companies need a...
Monika Bielskyte is a futurist, science fiction worldbuilder, and a digital nomad who has been traveling around the world to over 80 different countries searching for where the future is headed. She's in conversation with the bleeding edge of...
Rust LTD is composed of four avant-garde artists who are experimenting with political philosophy as game design through surrealist narratives and open world sandboxes of resolving paradox through play. I spoke with Rust's CTO Anton Hand about Hot...
VRLA co-founder Cosmo Scharf talks about some of the deepest levels of our current socio-political and economic context, and how VR & AR can teach us that our beliefs and perception of reality is malleable. Cosmo says that we're suffering form a...
Qualcomm believes that the future of XR is mobile. TechCrunch published rumors published that the Oculus Rift 2 headset was being cancelled, which catalyzed a larger discussion about the degree to which Facebook/Oculus is committed to VR on the...
Indiecade is the International Festival of Play, and Festival Director Sam Roberts curates innovations in game play and interaction paradigms that explore the questions of: What do I do? What happens when I do it? And how do I do it? Roberts sees an...
The Spatial Reality: Artists Explore the Future of XR show is running from October 12 to 28 at the Ayzenberg spce gallery in Pasenda, CA. I had a chance to see all of the pieces in the show, and then talk with the curator Jesse Damiani about my...