One of the most immersive and memorable experiences that I tried at the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference yesterday was TheWave. Just as TiltBrush is able to unlock your creative expression through 3D drawing, TheWave has the potential to...
Redirected walking is a concept within VR that tricks a user into walking into circles, but gives them visual feedback that they're walking in a straight line. We tend to trust our visual input over our other senses, and so redirected touch using...
Kevin Cornish is a LA-based VR filmmaker who teamed up with AMD to do some interactive narrative experiments using gazed-based content in Believe VR. Depending on which character you look at different moments will triggered up to 32 different...
Liv Erikson was able to to live out one of her dreams when she stepped into the Star Wars universe to battle against a lightsaber training Remote within Sixense's VR demo. This helped her discover that she has a passion for immersive technologies...
Tom Furness has been working in virtual reality longer than anyone else on the planet, and he's starting a new phase of his legendary career. He's starting to build a coalition of content creators and financial backers through the Virtual World...
It's not every day that someone gains an entirely new sense, but James Blaha did just that. He created a virtual reality vision therapy experience that essentially cured his lazy eye and enabled him to see in 3D for the first time in his life. When...
At GDC this year, Epic Games had a VR Lounge where they were showing off 10 different VR experiences that used the Unreal Engine. One of those experiences was Create VR's The Walk VR Experience, where you can walk across a tightrope between the two...
Nine different New Revolution Virtual Reality Coasters open to the general public at Six Flags theme parks around the country this Thursday, April 21st. A couple of roller coaster veterans Six Flags who had seen every roller coaster imaginable and...
I was invited to cover the VR Intelligence Conference that debuted in San Francisco on November 9-10, 2015. It was a smaller but very focused gathering of decision-makers from a wide range of different industries, and they're holding a European VR...
Milica Zec grew up in war-torn Serbia, but this was a part of her life that she preferred to just forget about and leave behind. After telling screenwriter Lizzie Donahue her story, she was encouraged to tell her story in a short film. Milica...
One of my favorite VR games is the Kokoromi Collective's SUPERHYPERCUBE, which is a very stylized 3D Tetris game with amazing sound design. It's a VR experience that really gives your brain a stimulating spatial memory workout. I first had a chance...
At GDC this year, I had a chance to talk with Valve developer Jeremy Selan and tracking engineer Ben Jackson about the evolution of room-scale tracking technologies, as well as some of the oral history stories that include some of their favorite...
Rob Morgan is the writer of The Assembly, and he spoke last year at GDC about narrative design in VR and the importance of accurate body language in NPCs to maintain a sense of presence. He returned to GDC this year to talk about some of his lessons...
VR Unicorns is a Copenhagen-based development collective that developed #SelfieTennis. They were working on Julie Heyde's RagnarökVR until they stated experimenting with room-scale sports experiences.Playing tennis against yourself in VR was the...
VR has the capability to take us into completely new realms, and experimental artist Isaac 'Cabbibo' Cohen has been creating some of the most surreal and transportive experiences that I've seen. I had a chance to try out a number of Cabbibo's Vive...
Valve's Chet Faliszek has been a key virtual reality evangelist & developer relations liaison over the past couple of years for the HTC Vive, and I had a chance to sit down with him at GDC as they were showing off many of their launch titles. Chet...
HoloLens development kits started shipping last week following Microsoft's Build conference and there were also a number of NDAs that were lifted, which allowed some companies to start talking about their HoloLens projects for the first time. One of...
Virtual Reality has the power to transport you to anywhere in the world, and NextVR has been one of the leaders of giving you a front row seat to live sporting events including hockey, boxing, NASCAR, basketball, soccer, and golf. NextVR recently...
Timoni West is a principle designer at Unity Labs, and she's been working on creating tools within Unity to be able to create VR within VR. I first talked with Timoni in October about these content creation tools, and these were revealed to the VR...
I got the first glimpse of what advertising within a VR experience might look like when I saw a demo of some ads playing on the Immersv platform. I was within an movie theater similar to Oculus Cinema watching a 2D video screen where there was a 30...
Part of the challenge of creating a first-person perspective game in VR is that there are limited locomotion options for moving around in VR in a way that's comfortable for most people. Damaged Core is a Oculus Rift launch title that uses a unique...
When most people think about the types of things that want to do in virtual reality, then they almost always think of experiences that are from the first-person perspective. But Lucky's Tale proved to me that there are going to be a whole range of...
Slightly Mad Studios been making racing games for the past 10 years, and they raised over $3 million dollars in crowd-funding to produce their own racing game called Project CARS. It's a AAA racing simulation game that was first released in May...
James Green is the creative director at Carbon Games, and he was inspired to create AirMech: Command from playing a 1989 game called Herzog Zwei, which was one of the first real-time strategy games that also used a gamepad as the primary control...
Jeep Barnett is a programmer at Valve Corporation who has been on the VR team for the last couple year. He was at GDC showing off The Lab, which is a series of mini-games demonstrating different design principles within VR. I had a chance to catch...
Gunfire Games' Chronos is an atmospheric RPG with over 10 hours of action and adventure, and it uses a satisfying combat game mechanic that's very similar to their Herobound: Spirit Journey on the Gear VR. Chronos had a lot of buzz from GDC as being...
Jeff Pobst admits that it's probably not a new Rift owner's first thought to go out and buy a tower defense game, but Defense Grid 2: Enhanced VR Edition proved to me how compelling a tower defense game can be in VR. It's a tabletop scale strategy &...
Road to VR co-founder Ben Lang and writer Scott Hayden join me in our third and final GDC round table discussion talking about our demo highlights including Valve's The Lab and a series of different shooters. There is a theme that's emerging in VR...
I'm joined again by Road to VR co-founder Ben Lang & writer Scott Hayden to do a wrap-up of Wednesday's GDC news including all of Sony's PlayStation VR Announcements, the Star Wars Trials on Tatooine experience by ILMxLAB, and Scott's in-depth...
Road to VR co-founder Ben Lang and writer Scott Hayden attended the Oculus Game Days 2016 event on Sunday and joined me for a roundtable discussion about their launch title highlights, some analysis about the event, the future of Touch as well as...
Yesterday AMD announced the Radeon Pro Duo water-cooled card, which is a dual-GPU with 16 TFLOPS of single-precision performance that's based on the Fiji architecture and will sell for $1499. Tom's Hardware reports that it 'combines two Fiji GPUs...
Fantastic Contraption is an amazingly fun and super compelling world building tool where you make contraptions that can get from point A to B, and it was recently announced as one of the games that's going to be bundled with the launch of the HTC...
VRChat was one of the first social VR applications, and they've been holding regular virtual meetups for the past couple of years. VRChat has a Social SDK that allows Unity developers to add social functionality, and so they have been focusing on...
One of the most compelling applications of VR will be the educational experiences that will be possible, and David Whelan's Immersive VR Education has been making some big innovations in this space. They've created the VR documentary about the...
Dioselin Gonzalez is a senior VR engineer at Unity Labs who is working on bringing VR creation tools to the masses. Project 'Carte Blanche' will be launching sometime in 2017 and will be targeting desktop VR consumers with an Oculus Touch or HTC...
Sylvio Drouin is the Executive Vice President of Unity Labs, which for the past year has been doing advanced research into VR authoring tools both for developers and consumers as well as graphic research. I caught up with Sylvio at Unity's VR/AR...
Michel Reilhac is a French filmmaker who wanted to explore intimacy and polyamory within an immersive 360 video called Viens! (Come!). His Sundance New Frontier piece featured 3 women and four men exploring sensual touch and sexual intimacy with...
Adi Robertson is a senior reporter for The Verge, and she was at Sundance covering the latest developments of VR storytelling. I caught up with her to unpack some of her New Frontier highlights including narrative innovations, how empathy pieces...
Budget Cuts is a first-person stealth game that's one of the more fun and engaging room-scale Vive experiences that I've played. You're an aspiring spy trying to infiltrate a robot-protected building in order to approve your job application. Part of...
One of the most inspiring keynotes at Unity's AR/VR Vision Summit was by Alex McDowell on world building and storytelling. Alex was production designer for Minority Report, Fight Club, & Lawnmower Man, and so he's been creating imaginal worlds for...
XEODesign's Nicole Lazarro has been researching emotional reactions of gamers in VR to discover the unique properties of the medium. You can't just port a 2D game into VR and expect it to work, and so she's calling for design leadership in the field...
Nancy Bennett is the chief content officer at Two-Bit Circus, which is a start-up specializing in creating immersive digital out of home entertainment experiences for the Indianapolis 500, NFL, NBA, and the Olympics. Nancy talks about some of the...
Jesse Schell wrote the book 'The Art of Game Design: A book of lenses,' and his company Schell Games produced I Expect You to Die. It's one of the top-ranked VR games on Oculus Share, and it also won the Vision Inspire Award at Unity's Vision Summit...
For the past year, Tony Davidson and his 17-year old son Kai have been tucked away in the hills of Oregon collaborating on a VR experience that was inspired from one of Kai's dreams. Thunderbird is a puzzle adventure game that surprised everyone at...
I'm joined on the podcast today by Road to VR Executive Editor Ben Lang and Moor Insights Analyst Anshel Sag for a 45-minute roundtable discussion about Google and what they're doing in VR. We cover everything including Google Cardboard, Jump...
WoofbertVR is an educational application that transports you to virtual museums where you can have an art tour complete with audio narration. It was co-founded by Elizabeth Reede, who used to be a curator of the Museum of Modern Art and has a lot of...
One of the most popular VR experiences at Sundance New Frontier this year was Across the Line, which is a piece that simulated what it feels like to walk through an abortion clinic protest line. It was produced by Nonny de la Peña's Emblematic Group...
Robert Scoble is veteran tech journalist who has seen thousands of demos, but last Thursday he saw a demo of the Meta Two AR glasses and it blew his mind. So much so that he told me that his life can now be separated into the two categories of 'life...
Paul Bettner is anxiously waiting for the Oculus Rift to launch so that he can finally see how real people react to what he's been pouring his heart into over the past three years. Playful Corp's Lucky's Tale is going to be bundled with every Oculus...
The VOID started when Curtis Hickman brought on James Jensen to do some pre-visualization of the Evermore theme park that he was developing with Ken Bretschneider. When Curtis asked James if he had any other cool ideas, he shared his long-time...