Ben Lang says that we've been at Year Zero of VR for three years now, and the official release of the Gear VR today marks the first official launch of a consumer-ready virtual ready head-mounted display. Ben joins me on the podcast to talk about...
Nick Ochoa is a co-founder of UploadVR, and he was recently at the VRX Virtual Reality Intelligence conference hosting a panel on social VR. Nick talks about of his open questions about social VR such as what does it mean to be a social VR app, and...
Matt McIlwain is a managing director at the Madrona Venture Group, which recently announced their first investment in the virtual reality space with a $4 million Series A round of funding for Envelop VR. Matt talks about why Seattle is one of the...
Tom Furness has been pioneering virtual and augmented reality for the past 50 years, which is longer than anyone else in the world. He has an amazing history that started back in 1966 while he was in the Air Force building some of the first helmet...
Layla Mah is the lead architect of virtual reality and advanced rendering at AMD. She talks about AMD's LiquidVR technology built to help bring comfort, compatibility and content to virtual reality. VR requires a lot of graphics processing...
Daniel 'SvenViking' Fearon is a developer behind the Scorched Battalion turn-based artillery game, which won the Silver prize for the Oculus Mobile Game Jam. Daniel talks about some of the design principles between alternating between first and...
Specular Theory CMO Ryan Pulliam and founder Morris May talk about some of the 360-degree video experiences that they've produced over the last year including an edgy Sundance film called Perspective: The Party, which tells the story of a sexual...
Jason Storey (aka apieceoffruit) is a VR developer, Left-Handed VR podcast co-host, and all-around VR enthusiast who has worked on number of different VR experiences. He talks about working on the gaze-control mechanism in the cinematic VR...
Tony Parisi has been working towards creating an open ecosystem of virtual reality helping to co-create the Virtual Reality Modeling Language in the early 90s. He recently took a position at WEVR, and while he's not revealing too much about the...
Dora Cheng is one of the co-founders of uForis VR, which is a VR company that is focused on creating pragmatic applications of virtual reality. One of their first big VR projects was to create virtual tours for the Domus Student Housing. They had to...
I had a chance to catch up with E McNeill at Oculus Connect about his design process for the Real-Time Strategy game called Tactera, which he developed for the Oculus Mobile Game Jam. He talks about some of the design constraints that he had by only...
Blair Renaud is the creator of Technolust, and he talks about his strategy for creating different experiences out of the Technolust universe for the Vive, Playstation VR, Oculus Rift, and Gear VR. Technolust has been one of the early VR adventure...
Envelop VR is a productivity tool that provides a virtual shell to allow users to use all of their existing 2D applications within the context of virtual reality. I had a chance to talk to the founder Bob Berry at the SEA-VR Expo, which he also...
I talk with Ikrima Elhassan of Kite & Lightning about their new tabletop VR game called Bebylon Battle Royale, which is a 'Vehicular Melee Party Brawler.' Kite & Lightning has a made a name of creating high-end cinematic VR experiences such as Senza...
Hao Li is an assistant professor at USC who has been collaborating with Oculus Research on facial tracking while wearing a virtual reality head-mounted display. They presented their initial prototype and research paper 'Facial Performance Sensing...
Mary Spio is the president and founder of Next Galaxy, and she's working on a number of different VR experiences including music videos, medical training, and enterprise applications. They're also developing the Ceekars 4D Headphones in order to...
There are a number of different 3D audio plug-ins available for game engines like Unity, but there have not been any solutions for mixing 3D audio for cinematic VR productions. Two Big Ears just released the 3DCeption Spatial Workstation, which is a...
Aashna Mago talks about the first Women in VR event in San Francisco that she helped organize on September 20th, 2015. There were over 200 people who attended the event that featured 13 women luminaries who are working in virtual reality, demos from...
Gunter S. Thompson has been hosting talk shows in virtual reality since April of 2014, and been participating in many of the early social VR experiences ranging from Minecrift, VRChat, and Riftmax Theater. He talks about some of the unique social...
Geoff Skow is a co-founder of Fish Bowl VR, which has over 200 early adopter, VR enthusiasts available to do user testing for VR experiences. VR developers can get a monthly subscription to get on-demand, user testing with let's play videos as well...
The Oculus Touch Toybox demo was shown to the most number of people in one day at Oculus Connect 2 on September 23rd. This was the first time that a lot of developers were able to get their hands on the Half Moon Prototype VR input controllers. But...
For the past three years, Will Smith and Norman Chan have been playing the latest virtual reality demos and tracking the evolution of VR with their Tested.com reviews. Will was able to see Oculus VR's Toybox demo at E3 this year, and the amount of...
Timoni West is a principle designer for Unity Labs, and she's working on creating professional tools for creating VR scenes in Unity while being in VR. These tools are still in the prototype phase of development, but it's something that Unity is...
Alex Tenyotkin is a senior design lead at Hulu, and he talks about how virtual reality went from being a passion project to being announced as part of the keynote at Oculus Connect 2. Alex talks about some of the design challenges for designing a VR...
Jon Brouchoud is an architect at Arch Virtual who has been putting architectural projects within Unity since before the Oculus Rift came out. He's been using virtual reality for architectural clients for over a year now, and says that VR has the...
Jesse Schell has been involved in virtual reality for over 20 years, and he's also the author of the popular The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses. He was able to combine his background in VR and game design at Schell Games to create the very...
Arthur van Hoff is the CTO of Jaunt, and I had a chance to catch up with him at Oculus Connect 2 to go over some of the most important specifications for their Jaunt ONE 360-degree camera,formerly known as 'Neo.' Arthur talks about how they're using...
Nicole Lazzaro is the founder and president of XEODesign, Inc., has twenty years expertise in Player Experience Design for mass-market entertainment products. She's recently started developing and consulting on a number of different virtual reality...
Nicolas Férey was presenting a number of papers at the first-ever workshop on Virtual and Augmented Reality for Molecular Science at the IEEE VR. Nicolas was presenting different navigational paradigms for molecular biology tasks that were designed...
Florian Frieß is from the Visualization Research Center at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. His presentation on using sonification to highlight events extracted from a molecular dynamics simulation. This talk on sonification was mentioned by a...
At the IEEE VR conference this year, there was the first-ever workshop on Virtual and Augmented Reality for Molecular Science (VARMS). Molecular science is one branch of science where virtual reality has a lot of applications, and Logan Herche from...
Himanshu Chaturvedi wanted to investigate the impact of the uncanny valley within training simulations that include interactions with virtual humans. The specific training scenario was a simulation for nurses to help them identify the signs of rapid...
Johanna Latt was at IEEE VR talking about the impact of avatar anthropomorphism on the Virtual Body Ownership Illusion effect. She found that there was some uncanny effects when the avatar looked more like a human than a more stylized robot or block...
Indira Thouvenin teaches Virtual Reality at the University of Technology Compiegne. Her research focuses on informed interaction in virtual environments, and how knowledge representation and sensory motor knowledge are linked within these...
The new JavaScript SDK from AltspaceVR is going to allow front-end web developers to quickly and easily create social VR applications. The AltspaceVR SDK is based upon three.js, which means that developers can create a WebVR-enabled application on...
Frank Steinicke is professor for Human-Computer Interaction at the Department of Informatics at the University of Hamburg. His research into VR strives to understand the limitations of human perceptual, cognitive and motor abilities to reform the 3D...
Madis Vasser is a psychology student at University of Tartu Virtual Neuroscience Lab, and he collaborated with the computer science department to create a VR toolbox for doing experimental psychology research. He was showing off a demo of a change...
Sébastien Kuntz is the founder of MiddleVR, which is a middleware solution that allows you to connect to a wide range of consumer and industrial VR peripheral devices. He talks about some of the other VR locomotion and 3DUI features that are...
Max Pfeiffer was at the IEEE VR talking a demo where he's experimenting with off-the-shelf Electrical Muscle Stimulation (ESM) message devices in order to provide haptic feedback for pointing with your hand within 3D virtual environments. He's...
There are some open questions within the data visualization community as to what benefits the third dimension might add to visualizing information that doesn't have an inherent spatial component. Ragaad Al Tarawneh was at the 3DUI conference...
Quentin Parent is a sales engineer at Haption, and he talks about some of their force-feedback haptic devices that are used in different industry applications. These are haptic feedback systems are used to train astronauts, for nuclear training, as...
Michael Block of Culture Shock Games talks about his interactive documentary VR game experience called We Are Chicago about gang violence in Chicago's south side. It has a single ending to the story, but there are many different branching actions...
Pollen is a first-person exploration game set in space by Helsinki-based Mindfield Games. I had a chance to catch up with Project Lead Olli Sinerma at PAX Prime to talk about the story behind the game as well as some of the lessons learned from...
John Nagle is the CTO at Phaser Lock Interactive, who is developing a Vive game called Final Approach. The gameplay of Final Approach involves selecting miniature planes flying through the air and then drawing landing paths in 3D space with a 6DOF...
One of the challenges with a first-person VR adventure game is that locomotion causes some people motion sickness. People have a wide range of tolerances for how much they can move around a VR space with a controller, and room-scale VR helps to...
Sarah Northway & Colin Northway talk about the process of converting an open world building game of Fantastic Contraption to a room-scale VR experience with the HTC Vive. The gameplay is very straightforward and intuitive in that you have a limited...
Daniel O'Brien is the Vice President of Business Planning and Management for Virtual Reality at HTC. I had a chance to catch up with him at PAX Prime in the HTV Vive private demo area. Dan talks about the first time that he tried Valve's room-scale...
Evan Suma is an assistant professor at the University of Southern California Institute of Creative Technologies. He was at IEEE VR presenting a poster on 'Towards Context-Sensitive Reorientation for Real Walking in Virtual Reality' led by his USC...
Niels Christian Nilsson is a graduate student at the Aalborg University Copenhagen, and he was at the IEEE VR presenting a poster on Factors that Effect Perceived Naturalness of Virtual Walking Speeds.
Kasim Özacar is a Ph.D. Student at Tohoku University working with Virtual Reality. He was presenting a poster at IEEE VR 2015 about Physical-Virtual 3D Collaborative Interaction Environment with Coupled Clay.This is a really interesting mixed...