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 Unity’s Vision Summit awards in walking away with the best VR experience award. Even Tony thought that either crowd favorite Fantastic Contraption or Job Simulator would be rewarded, and so there was a collective gasp of surprise when they won the award. I had a chance to catch up with Kai and Tony to get their reactions to winning, what’s it like to be a father/son team, and how their Thunderbird puzzle adventure takes inspiration from dreams, myths, and Eastern religions.
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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 cameras, the Expeditions educational program, WebVR, Project Tango, Google Glass, Magic Leap, Tilt Brush, voice recognition, machine learning, the Android ecosystem & their complicated relationship with Oculus & Samsung, and predictions about what type of VR or AR HMD that they may be manufacturing.

It’s clear that Google has some significant in the virtual reality space, and we discuss everything that we know about what they’re currently doing and make some predictions as to where we think we’re going in the future.
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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 connections within the art world. I had a chance to catch up WoofbertVR developer Phillip Moses, who is the head of Reload Studios’ Rascali VR Lab. He talks some of the intentions behind this educational app as well as future plans to expand into multi-player functionality that would enable tour guides to give live art history lessons. We also talk about some of their locomotion approach, and the tradeoffs between the artistic decision to maintain a sense of presence versus minimizing motion sickness. WoofbertVR has a lot of ambitious plans for the future of education in VR, so much so that they count Kevin Spacey as a patron and investor in their project. It’s currently a free download available in the Gear VR store, and will be coming to desktops & consoles later this year.
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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 and 371 Productions. It contained a mixture of live-action, 360 video documentary along with a room-scale, CGI recreation of walking past protestors who are calling you everything from a “whore” to “wicked jezebel feminist.” It’s a visceral, emotional, and intense experience, and Molly Eagan was there to talk to people before and after they experienced it. She’s the Vice President of Planned Parenthood Experience, and I had a chance to catch up with her to talk about some of the reactions and how this project came about.
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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 before the Meta demo” and “life after the Meta demo.’ Robert hinted to me that he’s going to be making some significant changes over the next couple of months to put more of his focus into covering what’s happening in AR and VR space, and he decided at the last minute to fly out to Unity’s AR/VR Vision Summit to network with attendees. So what was it about the Meta Two demo that was so mind blowing for him, even more so than his first experience with the Oculus Crescent Bay prototype? I caught up with him at the vision summit where he talked about the Meta demo where he could place TV screens around the room, talk to holograms, and use natural gestures to have interactions with virtual objects that made him feel like he was living in Tony Stark’s futuristic lab.
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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 Rift, and he’s biting his nails waiting to see how it will be received. The early indications are that it’s going to be a beloved platformer game that people associate as one of their earliest VR gaming experiences, which is why a lot of people have been saying that it’s the The Super Mario Brothers of VR. It’s a surprisingly immersive, incredibly compelling, and just a super fun game to play, and helps to define the genre of a VR platformer, which is why Oculus wanted to bundle it for free to everyone who buys a Rift.
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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 vision of creating a virtual world that was overlaid on top of a physical world to create a mixed reality experience. They created an initial proof of concept that convinced them they were on to something really compelling, but they still had to solve a number of big problems in order to create their “Vision Of Infinite Dimensions” that The VOID set out to accomplish. So the VOID turned to ‘magic’ to solve them.
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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 of immersive journalism pieces ranging from torture in Guantanamo Bay, homelessness in LA, the Syrian refugee crisis, and most recently domestic violence with Kiya and what it’s like to walk through an abortion clinic protest with Across the Line. I had a chance to catch up with Nonny at Sundance to get more insight into how she cultivates empathy within VR, but also why she’s so motivated to always stand up for the underdog within her work.
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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 spacecraft, and assisting astronauts with augmented expert assistants. Jeff was at the Unity AR/VR Vision Summit where he provided an inspiring speech about how NASA is using all of the latest immersive technologies to explore and discover more about our Universe.
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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 reality from the perspective of filmmakers who were trying to tell a story. In the end, Sonar makes a number of different innovations to the language of cinematic VR that I think are worth unpacking. I caught up with the two creators at Sundance New Frontier where Sonar featured within the mobile VR section.
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