Chris Milk's TED talk last year popularized the idea that virtual reality has the potential to be the ultimate 'empathy machine.' Emblematic Group's Nonny de la Peña has been one of the original pioneers of exploring empathy in VR through a series...
Dr. Jeff Norris works on Mission Operations Innovation at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory Ops Lab. They've been partnering with all of the major virtual reality & augmented reality companies to accelerate the progress in space exploration, designing...
There was a moment when Philipp Maas and Dominik Stockhausen realized that their sci-fi horror film would be a lot more intense and work better if was a virtual reality experience. So they took the opportunity to explore the language of virtual...
Epic Games' Nick Whiting paired up with Nick Donaldson again before Oculus Connect 2 to build the Bullet Train demo over the course of 10 weeks. They wanted to dogfood the Unreal Engine to optimize the rendering for VR, but also experiment with...
John Gaeta first got into virtual reality when he was approached by the Wachowski siblings to be the visual effects supervisor on The Matrix. Now he's Executive Creative Director of Industrial Light & Magic's Experience LAB (ILMxLAB) where he's...
Andrew Stern doesn't enjoy most AAA video games because he wants to be able to say anything at any moment within a social simulation and participate in an interesting story. About once week, he'd like to engage with a high agency, interactive drama...
For the past year, Devon Dolan has been trying to make sense of the interactive storytelling landscape that's possible within virtual reality. He comes from a world of story where he's currently an associate at Cinetic Media, which is a well-known...
Jessica Brillhart is the principle VR filmmaker at Google working with the Cardboard team to field test the latest 360-degree Jump camera technology. She was working at Google's Creative Lab as a filmmaker when she was invited to start doing test...
Eric Darnell got into animation in the 1980s and eventually landed at Dreamworks Animation where he co-directed Antz, and then co-directed and co-write four Madagascar movies. He's a storyteller at heart, and now he's diving deep into writing and...
The Sundance New Frontier program had 37 different virtual reality experiences showing on two different floors on Main Street in Park City during the Sundance Film Festival. Bechir Sylvain is an independent filmmaker who got his first taste of VR at...
Samsung had a huge presence at Sundance this year as the mobile sponsor of the festival. They were evangelizing Gear VR to independent filmmakers with their Gear VR theater as well as collaborating with Sundance's New Frontier program to provide...
One of the best narrative VR experiences that I had at Sundance New Frontier was 6x9, an immersive experience of solitary confinement. You might ask, 'Why would you ever want to do that?' Well, it was less about having a direct experience of...
Rose Troche knows that the first-person perspective is flawed, and she wanted to show people just how vulnerable it can by telling a single story between four different points of view. She teamed up with Specular Theory's Morris May again for...
Reggie Watts was at Sundance showing off his first 360-degree video VR experience called Waves, which is a surreal trip into his imagination. It's one of the most quirky and entertaining 360 videos I've sen, and could be described as a dream within...
On my way out to cover the VR at Sundance, I had a chance to try out one of the most advanced Digital Out of Home Entertainment systems today in an industrial park in the middle of Utah. The VOID goes beyond room-scale with their minimum 60'x60'...
Eric Romo is the founder and CEO of AltspaceVR, and he shares his story of how he got interested in the potential of social VR from way before the Oculus Kickstarter and Facebook bought Oculus VR. He talks about the surprising amount of body...
David Bowman is Director of Production at Crytek, and he gave me the inside story of how VR went viral within Crytek to the point of having well over 50 developers and multiple triple AAA quality VR projects in development for the Sony PlayStation...
Jim Geduldick is the Professional Marketing Manager at GoPro, which includes all of the ways GoPro cameras are used within cinema, virtual reality, broadcast television & photography. Jim talks about how the history of spherical video at GoPro goes...
Jamie Kelly is a co-founder and president of VR Studios & VRCade. They're creating a series of out-of-home VR gaming experiences that can be played in spaces as small as 15'x15' and as large as 150'x75'. They were at the Seattle VR Expo showing off...
Chandana Ekanayake is a game director & art director at Uber Entertainment where he's working on a VR adventure game for the PlayStation VR titled Wayward Sky. I caught up with Chandana at the Seattle VR Expo where he shared with me some of the...
Linda Lobato is the CEO and co-founder of OBE Immersive, which is a wearable tech start-up that is part of the current Rothenberg River Program. She previously raised $77,000 to kickstart a MIDI Controller Jacket, and after seeing an early Oculus...
Michael Lenzi is the CEO & co-founder of Atomic VR, and they've spent the last couple of years experimenting with untethered VR experiences. They've created a backpack with custom hardware that can run a desktop GPU for up to an hour, and they've...
Mike Alger just finished up his master's degree focusing on VR interaction design methods, and he's released a couple of popular videos summarizing his insights into immersive usr interfaces. I caught up with Mike at the Seattle VR expo talking...
Kayla Kinnunen is a game director at Roadhouse Interactive, which is an independent game development studio based out of Vancouver, BC. She talks about her process of evangelizing VR at her studio and slowly ramping up a VR team. She made a goal to...
Greg Howes is the founder and CEO of the high-tech building company IDEAbuilder, and he's on a mission to disrupt the $8.5 trillion annual building industry using immersive technologies to bridge design & fabrication directly with consumer demand...
Michael Aratow is a clinician and health care executive who founded VRecover, which is health care startup making physical rehabilitation exercises more engaging with VR. He says that rehab is like homework, but that sometimes up to 90% of people...
Trond Nilsen studied with Tom Furness at The University of Washington and currently works with him the RATLab LLC. He has a Ph.D. from University of Washington, which focused on building educational games that teach human anatomy. He moderated a...
Damon Hernandez has been an interactive 3D developer for the past 15 years, and he's interested in developing VR applications that solve real world problems within the construction industry. He's interested in using the web as a distribution...
Matt Henderson is a visual artist from Portland, OR who has been creating art installations of abstracted Christmas nativity scenes for the past six years. Matt has been inspired to use virtual reality in order to document and preserve his 'NTVTY'...
The Virtual Reality Company is a 360-degree video production studio in Hollywood that has Steven Spielberg as an advisor. I had a chance to catch up with Joshua Watson, Emily Cooper, & Chris Edwards at Oculus Connect 2 to get a sneak peak of some of...
The Virtual Reality Girls group was started as a Instagram and Twitter accounts by Paisley Smith, Ashley Pinnick, & Julie Young. I had a chance to catch up with Paisley and Ashley at Oculus Connect 2 about their efforts to celebrate and promote...
Mike Gallagher is the CEO of the Entertainment Software Association, which is the political arm of the interactive industry. The ESA established the Entertainment Software Ratings Board in 1994 in response to criticism of violent content found in...
Tim Sweeney is the founder of Epic Games, which has been collaborating with Oculus over the last two years creating a number of different tech demos with their Unreal Engine 4. I had a chance to catch up with Tim at the VRX conference, and ask him...
Tony Tamasi is the senior vice president of content and technology at NVIDIA, and they recently announced the first steps towards supporting foveated rendering with Multi-Res Shading as well as VR SLI integration in Unreal Engine 4. I talked with...
Sony has been looking into virtual reality for a long time, and Sony Magic Labs' Director Richard Marks tells me about this long history and the development of PlayStation VR. He helped to create the PlayStation Move, which is a 6 degree of freedom...
James McCrae wants to lower the barrier to entry for creating virtual worlds with janusVR. He has a PhD in computer science from University of Toronto, and he's created a sophisticated technology stack that allows front-end web developers to rapidly...
Presence Capital is a new early-stage venture capital firm that's focused on funding virtual reality and augmented reality startups. I had the chance to interview one of the co-founders Amitt Mahajan at the VRX Conference about this new fund and how...
Shauna Heller worked as a developer relations specialist focusing on non-gaming and non-entertainment experiences at Oculus for a year and a half before leaving to start her consultancy Clay Park VR. She's had a lot of exposure to the leading non...
Brian Blau is the research director in the personal technologies group at Gartner specializing in mobile apps and video game software in the consumer domain. He's also been analyzing the market for virtual and augmented reality for the past five...
The Night Café is an amazingly surreal immersive VR experience of walking through a space that's inspired by a painting by Vincent van Gogh. I speak with Mac Cauley about his inspiration and process to in creating The Night Café, which won both the...
Maureen Fan is the former vice president of gaming at Zynga, but she's always had a passion for animation. Maureen's mind was blown open the first time she experienced VR because she saw that the future of animation was going to be within Virtual...
Pete Moss is Unity's 'VR Dude' in that he's been a long-time believer and advocate in the cross section between VR and gaming and how the Unity game engine could play a significant part. He talks to me about his dual role of content creator and...
Sophia Dominguez is going all in with virtual reality, and she talks her journey of making virtual reality a career. She's the author of the weekly AllThingsVR newsletter, and she has been working as the entrepreneur in residence at the Rothenberg...
Sunny Dhillon is a principal and co-founder of Signia Venture Partners as well as a lifelong gamer. Signia has been an investor in mobile games, and so he knows what to look for in terms of a solid team and distinct art style that resonates with...
Joe Kraus is a general partner at Google Ventures, and he was on a panel at the Virtual Reality Intelligence conference in San Francisco talking about VC investment trends in virtual reality. Joe predicts that 2016 will be a 'perceptual year of...
Darrick Morrison is a the founder and CEO of Prizmiq, which is working as e-commerce tools to scan products with photogrammetry techniques, and then embed them within a shopping cart experience. Darrick comes from an ecommerce background, and he has...
Matthew Terndrup is a virtual reality journalist and content creator who's interested in exploring how the combination of psychedelics & virtual reality can help the process of self-discovery. Matt traces the influence that psychedelics have had in...
Domna Banakou is a Ph.D. student studying with Mel Slater at the Event Lab in Barcelona, Spain. She's been researching different aspects of the virtual body ownership illusion in order to investigate the short-term and long-term impacts of embodying...
Hilmar Veigar Pétursson has a bold vision for CCP with the mission statement 'To create virtual worlds more meaningful that real life.' He believes that after someone's basic needs on Maslow's hierarchy of needs are met, then humans will always be...
Ray Davis is the Studio Manager of Epic Games Seattle, and he talks about working on Bullet Train, which is Epic's latest VR tech demo that uses the Oculus Touch controllers and debuted at the Oculus Connect 2 gathering. I had a chance to catch up...