Brendan Bradley is an actor and storyteller who got into real-time animation systems and social VR during the pandemic, and then starting putting on live theatre shows in Virtual Reality both onsite, hybrid, and in-venue, and fully virtual. He co...
Matt Kim is the technical creative director at inworld.ai creating demos to show off their NPC platform, which was featured in my previous episode #1263 in the MeetWol demo by Liquid City and Niantic. I was really impressed with how my interactions...
Keiichi Matsuda is one of the deepest thinkers in the field of XR. He is trained as an architect, and he’s currently the director of Liquid City, a small design studio based in London that is engaged developing cutting-edge AR applications and...
Don Allen Stevenson III aspires by become the Bob Ross of the Metaverse by creating AR filters and creative technology XR projects, and XR developer that he promotes on this social media channels (@donalleniii on Instagram, X (Twitter), and TikTok)...
I had a chance to catch up with Jeri Ellsworth, co-founder and CEO of Tilt Five again at Augmented World Expo 2023. Be sure to catch my previous conversation in episode #1021 where she gives her full epic backstory in inventing Tilt Five at Valve...
Javier Fadul is Director of Innovation at HTX Labs, and I ran into him on the expo floor of the Augmented World Expo 2023. We talked about how he’s been using ChatGPT via AR Glasses as a impromptu research assistant, curriculum planner, and...
I had a chance to participate in a panel discussion exploring “The Intersection of AI and the Metaverse: What’s Next?” on the main stage of Augmented World Expo on the opening day on May 31, 2023. The discussion was moderated by...
Michael Running Wolf is a Northern Cheyenne/Lakota/Blackfeet indigenous man who grew up in Montana. He’s worked for Amazon, but eventually left in order to pursue his lifelong goal of building XR experiences that integrate with AI for language...
I was invited to give an opening keynote talk about AI at a half-day seminar titled “Tech Talks: AI Tools, Tips, & Traps” on April 20, 2023 that was put on by San Jose State University’s King Library Experiential Virtual...
The Unclaimed Masterpiece won the best student VR project at Laval Virtual as it has a novel integration of a conversational interface with a virtual assistant / character who is assisting you as you try to find the correct virtual painting to steal...
Christina Kinne (aka XaosPrincess) wanted to seed social VR worlds with AI chatbots in order to help catalyze larger social VR gatherings, and so she created the The Quantum Bar in Neos VR, which features a robot bartender that does speech to text...
Violeta Ayala is a filmmaker, film futurist, and creative technologist who using semantics to create immersive art with ChatGPT and generative AI programs. I had a chance to catch up with her at NewImages France where she talked about how AI has...
The intersection of XR and Artificial Intelligence is a hot topic, and this is the start of a 17-part Voices of VR podcast series where I’ve interviewed different immersive artists and XR developers over the past four months about how...
In Search of Time is a 2D film that premiered at Tribeca Immersive, and it uses a lot of generative AI style transfer techniques on top of footage of Pierre Zandrowicz’s children. Atlas V co-founder Zandrowicz’s co-directed this piece...
The VOID was a location-based entertainment company that shut down during the pandemic and maybe coming back at some point. The VOID Co-founder & Chief Creative Officer Curtis Hickman convinced his partners to allow him to reflect upon and share...
Sean Dougherty and Jeffrey Colon are Access Technology Experts who work for the LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired non-profit, and they were very active at the XR Access Symposium during a number of sessions focusing on the NSF-grant...
Liv Erickson is the ecosystem development lead at Mozilla focusing on innovation in spatial computing and AI technologies, and they are the former director of the Mozilla Hubs team. They gave a presentation at the XR Access Symposium that they...
Consensus Gentium is took him the Grand Jury prize for SXSW Immersive 2023, and it’s the most immersive phone-based experience that I’ve ever had. The Latin title translated means that “If everyone believes it, it must be true,” and it’s a near-term...
I speak with HTC’s Alvin Wang Graylin, who is the President of HTC China & Global VP of Corporate Development at HTC about HTC’s investment strategy and what’s happening in the enterprise XR space. We talk about how hardware subsidies have distorted...
There’s an upcoming Virtual World Initiative (aka the Metaverse Initiative) at the European Commission on May 31st, and I had a chance to get Florence G’sell’s thoughts on it. She’s a law professor in France teaching at the University of Lorraine...
The European Union’s AI Act is pending legislation that is classifying different AI applications across different tiers of risk, and there are a number of ways that this legislation could shape the future of how the Metaverse unfolds, especially as...
Future Rights was a prototype at SXSW that aimed to bring bringing Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring into VR. They were showing a short demo at SXSW, but they have plans for a sort of dance autotune and collaborative performance that uses AI to...
The third annual Virtual Beings & Virtual Societies Summit happened on October 29-30, and I had a chance to attend and unpack it with the co-founder of Fable Studio and instigator of a new Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) called the The...
#1004: ANANDALA is an Awe-Inspiring, Generative Art of Embodied AI that Cultivates Perpetual Novelty
Kevin Mack's Anandala is an awe-inspiring piece of VR-native, generative, abstract art with some really compelling experiments in interactive, embodied NPC entities he calls 'blorts.' There are 130 of these blorts spread out throughout a massive...
I participated in a Facebook press event on Tuesday, March 16th that featuring some Facebook Human-Computer Interaction Research on AR Neural Inputs, Haptics, Contextually-Aware-AI, & Intelligent Clicks. It was an on-the-record event for print...
John Robb has a concept of Networked Tribalism, which is a result of the combination of filter bubbles, AI algorithms, and political polarization. Robb is a military analyst who looks at the impact of technology on culture, and he started his Global...
Human Interact's Alexander Mejia has a hard time describing what exactly Starship Commander: Arcade is. For movie lovers, he says it's a choose-your-adventure narrative where your the main character of your own movie. For gamers, he calls it a...
The creators of Agence call it a 'dynamic film,' but it's part immersive story with game-like interactions and puzzles where you engage with either traditional heuristic game AI bots or bots trained through reinforcement learning processes. There's...
SoundSelf is a technologically-mediated, psychedlic experience (aka 'technodelic') that is being released by Andromeda Media on Wednesday, April 22nd. Developer Robin Arnott has been working on it on 8 years now, and he just released a The...
Chomsky vs Chomsky: First Encounter is a virtual reality experience where you get to interact with a virtual representation of Noam Chomsky, and essentially ask him any question that you want to. Trained on a corpus of 60 years worth of Chomsky...
One of the most intense interactive storytelling experiences I've ever had was the Accenture AVEnueS training application for child welfare caseworkers.
StoryFile is an interactive storytelling platform that allows you to interact with someone as they tell their story. A comprehensive oral history could be as many as 1000 questions and 20 hours of content, and StoryFile's combination of a...
Caspar Sonnen founded the DocLab as a part of the International Documentary Festival in Amsterdam (IDFA) in 2007 after a period of being really skeptical about some of the early overstated and inflated claims of the transformative power of...
Alexander Devriendt is an immersive theater creator with the company Ontroerend Goed, and he was presenting an interactive piece about artificial intelligence called Artificial: Room One. It was an early-iteration prototype that is starting to...
In the Event of a Moon Disaster uses AI deep fake and speech synthesis technology to produce a Nixon speech that never happened. Bill Safire wrote a contingency speech on July 18, 1969 for President Richard Nixon to read in the event that something...
Joel Zylberberg has a background in physics and cosmology, but then he got interested in theoretical neuroscience and he's been researching the nature of perception in humans and in machines through the lens of computational neuroscience. He's the...
Craig Chapman is a movement neuroscientist at the University of Alberta, and he's received an EEG in the Wild grant form the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research in order to study the combination of movement tracked by VR technologies, eye gaze...
Kevin Mack is a VR artist who has created a series of surrealistic immersive experiences including Zen Parade, Blortasia, and Anandala. Mack starts with mathematically-inspired geometric forms that are generated by collapsing a 5-dimensional...
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...
Wolves in the Walls is a narrative VR piece based upon a Neil Gaiman novel that explores object interactions and cultivating a connection to a virtual character. It's a project that originally started as a project within Oculus Story Studio, but was...
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...
Frankenstein AI from the Columbia Digital Storytelling Lab debuted at Sundance 2018. It was a cross-displinary collaboration that used machine learning, immersive theater, dance, and prompts for social interactions. I talk with choreographer Brandon...
Jules Urbach wants to create a photorealistic metaverse. He's been working on rending technologies to render digital lightfields, and Otoy's Octane renderer is used everywhere from baking scenes in Unity's real-time game engine to rendering the...
The Columbia Digital Storytelling Lab had a design research project at Sundance that is exploring new models of cooperative storytelling and collaborative sensemaking, but it was also on the bleeding edge of integrating technologies ranging from...
At SIGGRAPH 2017, NVIDIA was showing off their Isaac Robot that had been trained to play dominos within a virtual world environment of NVIDIA's Project Holodeck. They're using Unreal Engine to simulate interactions with people in VR to train a robot...
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...
Tender Claws, the creators of the award-winning interactive VR narrative Virtual Virtual Reality, premiered a new, site-specific, interactive AR narrative experience at the Sundance New Frontier called TendAR. It was a social augmented reality...
Auto is a 360-video and morality tale available on Jaunt that takes a near-future look at the human impact of automation and emerging technology. It's not a grotesque satire in the vein of Black Mirror, but it's done in a more of a future realistic...
Kevin Mack is an Oscar-winning visual effects artist and abstract artist who creates digital spaces with fluidly moving textures that are awe-inspiring in it's ability to create a novel experience unique to VR. In Blortasia you float weightlessly...
Kyle Russell is on the deal & research team for Andreessen Horowitz (aka A16z) where he's focusing on investing in technologies ranging from virtual & augmented reality, artificial intelligence, drones, and other exponential technologies like...