Ideas

387 episodes

#498: Keys of Owlchemy Labs’ Success: Agency & Plausibility + What is Real?

by kentbyeJanuary 25, 2017

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...

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#496: Quantifying Touch on 15 Dimensions with SynTouch

by kentbyeJanuary 20, 2017

SynTouch has created a system that can quantify the sense of touch on fifteen different dimensions called the SynTouch Standard, and they're one of the most impressive haptic start-ups that I've seen so far. SynTouch isn't creating haptic displays...

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#495: Tricking the Brain is the Only Way to Solve the Infinite Degree of Freedom Haptics Problem

by kentbyeJanuary 19, 2017

Deep in the basement of the Sands Expo Hall at CES was an area of emerging technologies called Eureka Park, which had a number of VR start-ups hoping to connect with suppliers, manufacturers, investors, or media in order to launch a product or idea...

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#493: Is Virtual Reality the Most Powerful Surveillance Technology or Last Bastion of Privacy?

by kentbyeJanuary 13, 2017

Virtual Reality has the potential to enable so many amazing utopian futures, but it also has the potential to become one of the most intimate surveillance technologies that could create a Big Brother dystopia of political and economic control. But...

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#491: Brain-Controlled VR Experiences: Challenges & Potentials

by kentbyeJanuary 4, 2017

When I attended the Experiential Technology Conference in May 2016, I heard from a number of commercial off-the-shelf brain-control interface manufacturers that their systems would not natively work with VR headsets because there are some critical...

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#490: Making VR Experiences Wheelchair Accessible

by kentbyeJanuary 3, 2017

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...

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#486: “Everything We Do is Experiential:” The Many Innovations of Felix & Paul Studios

by kentbyeDecember 23, 2016

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...

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#485: Mary Whitton on Fundamental Research on VR Locomotion and Presence

by kentbyeDecember 20, 2016

Dr. Mary Whitton has been working with interactive computer graphics since 1978 and virtual reality since 1994 in collaboration with Dr. Fred Brooks at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I had a chance to talk with Mary back in 2015 at...

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#484: Creating a Synthetic Peak Experience in VR with SoundSelf

by kentbyeDecember 17, 2016

Robin Arnott had a peak experience from a LSD trip at Burning Man, and wanted to see if he could replicate this type of peak psychedelic experience within virtual reality. The result of four years of work is a transcendent experience called...

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#482: Designing an Escape Room Puzzle Game with “I Expect You to Die”

by kentbyeDecember 12, 2016

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...

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#480: Op-Ed Comparing Oculus Touch vs HTC Vive Technology & Ecosystems

by kentbyeDecember 6, 2016

The Oculus Touch motion-tracked controllers are launching on December 6th after eight months of the Rift solely supporting gamepad experiences. I wanted to take a moment to dig into some of the more subtle technical nuances when comparing the Oculus...

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#479: VR & Memory, and Fate vs Free Will in Simulation Theory

by kentbyeDecember 3, 2016

Hassan Karaouni is one of the 11 winners of an Oculus Launch Pad scholarship for his project My: home, which allows people to share 360 videos of locations that are meaningful to them. In my Voices of VR episode about Google Earth VR, I talked about...

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#478: VR Fidelity Contract: Cultivating Plausibility & Presence in VR

by kentbyeDecember 1, 2016

Cultivating presence is one of the main goals for a lot of VR experiences, but our brains are like a black box of perceptual soup that makes it hard to know all of the right ingredients to achieve this. Kimberly Voll is a cognitive scientist...

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#476: Two Words for “Experience” in German: What VR Can Learn from “Erfahrung” vs “Erlebnis”

by kentbyeNovember 23, 2016

The language and terminology around virtual reality is still evolving, but the VR community has been settling into using the phrase 'VR Experience' in order to describe the process of a going through a piece of virtual reality content. I had a...

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#475: Designing Google Earth VR: The Overview Effect & Finding Common Ground

by kentbyeNovember 16, 2016

Google Earth VR has been one of the most mind-blowing experiences that I've had so far in VR, for so many different reasons. It's felt like it's been rewiring my brain to accommodate the new perspectives of the earth in a way similar to what...

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#474: Android Jones on Using VR for Spiritual Transformation & Unlocking Creative Flow

by kentbyeNovember 14, 2016

There was an immersive dome experience at VRLA called Samskara that was based upon the Hindu Vedas produced by 360art. It featured different Hindu mythological characters reimagined by visionary artist Android Jones. I had a chance to talk to...

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#466: VR Analytics for Playtesting & Optimization with Cognitive VR

by kentbyeOctober 25, 2016

Cognitive VR is an VR analytics platform that has an impressive system for visualizing a player's movements and gaze within a 3D representation of a VR experience. Their SceneExplorer tool translates the 3D geometry from a Unity or Unreal experience...

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#463: HTC’s VP of Content on VR Industry Verticals & Game Genres

by kentbyeOctober 17, 2016

Joel Breton is the Vice President VR Content at HTC, and I had a chance to catch up with him at the Casual Connect conference in July to talk about the different industry verticals that they've identified. These include commerce, games, healthcare...

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#458: Bringing VR into the Courtroom with Kineticorp VR

by kentbyeOctober 7, 2016

VR is a new communications medium, and as such it'll likely be applied to anywhere other existing communications mediums are already used -- such as in courtrooms for presenting evidence. Kineticorp VR has already been presenting 3D forensic...

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#454: Cohh Carnage: A Twitch Streamer’s Perspective on VR

by kentbyeOctober 2, 2016

Cohh Carnage is a professional Twitch streamer, and I had a chance to catch up with him at PAX West after he had a chance to scout out the expo floor for games that he's interested in streaming. As streamer, he has to cultivate a sense of presence...

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#445: Shauna Heller on VR in Education, Medicine, & Enterprise

by kentbyeSeptember 23, 2016

I talk with Shauna Heller from Clay Park VR about here thoughts about non-entertainment and non-gaming VR content in education, medicine, and enterprise applications.

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#443: Five Universal Tasks of 3D User Interfaces with Doug Bowman

by kentbyeSeptember 22, 2016

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...

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#439: Ted Schilowitz on Bringing VR & Interactive Storytelling to Hollywood

by kentbyeSeptember 17, 2016

When Ted Schilowitz was looking for what to do after traveling the world as the first RED Camera employee, he happened upon an opportunity to serve as a futurist for 20th Century Fox for looking at how to use emerging technologies for storytelling...

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#438: “Luna”: A Deep Game, Narrative Puzzler about Recovering From Grief & Trauma

by kentbyeSeptember 15, 2016

One of the best VR experiences I did at PAX West this year was Funomena's Luna, which is a unique blend of tactile puzzles, creative world building, musical improvisation within the context of an emotionally-charged narrative. Luna is designed by...

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#435: Simulating Crowds of Virtual Humans in Immersive Environments

by kentbyeSeptember 11, 2016

The IEEE VR held a new pre-conference workshop this year on Virtual Humans and Crowds for Immersive Environments. Movies like Lord of the Rings and video games like Assassin's Creed use this research in order to create convincing group behaviors...

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#416: Research on VR Presence & Plausibility with Anthony Steed

by kentbyeAugust 10, 2016

One of the gold standards of a VR experience is being able to achieve presence, but presence is an elusive concept to precisely define. Mel Slater is one of the leading researchers into presence and Mel says that it's a combination of the Place...

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#379: VR Time Perception Insights from Filmmaking & Cognitive Science

by kentbyeJune 10, 2016

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...

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#363: Time Perception Research & Manipulating Time Dilation Effects in VR

by kentbyeMay 16, 2016

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...

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#362: Future of VR on the Open Web: WebVR, WebGL 2, & WebAssembly

by kentbyeMay 13, 2016

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...

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#338: Katie Goode on VR Accessibility & Designing for Users with Disabilities

by kentbyeApril 8, 2016

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...

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#315: Job Simulator and the Magic of Hand Presence

by kentbyeMarch 9, 2016

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...

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#311: Karl Krantz on VR Startups, SVVRCon, & Time Dilation

by kentbyeMarch 2, 2016

Karl Krantz made a strategic move to California in order to start the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality meetup in May of 2013. One year later, he organized the first consumer VR conference with SVVRCon that had 400 people and 35 companies. SVVRCon 2015...

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#207: Underwater VR locomotion in the Time Machine VR adventure game

by kentbyeSeptember 8, 2015

Patrick Harris is the lead game designer at Minority Media where they're developing a sci-fi adventure game called Time Machine VR. The premise of Time Machine VR is that humanity is facing a deadly plague from ancient times, and that best way to...

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#183: Mel Slater on VR Presence, Virtual Body Ownership, & the Time Travel Illusion

by kentbyeAugust 6, 2015

Mel Slater is an ICREA Research Professor at the University of Barcelona, Spain, where he leads the Event Lab. Mel and his fellow Event Lab researchers have been doing some pioneering work in defining the key components of presence as well as the...

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#106: Josh Carpenter on The Future of WebVR and Enabling the Metaverse

by kentbyeMarch 16, 2015

Josh Carpenter is a researcher and interaction and user interaction designer for figuring out how to use virtual reality on the web with WebVR. Mozilla has been increasing the size of the team working on WebVR because they're betting that immersive...

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#88: Tom Kaczmarczyk on the VR implementation of SUPERHOT, an FPS where time moves only when you move

by kentbyeNovember 3, 2014

Tom Kaczmarczyk is a developer of SUPERHOT, which is an FPS where time moves only you move, which recently raised $250k on Kickstarter. It was a popular 2D game that was developed as a part of the 2013 7-Day First Person Shooter game challenge.Tom...

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