Punchdrunk is a 20 year-old immersive theater company who likes to blur the line between what's real and what's an imaginal dream-like storyworld. They collaborated with Samsung in 2016 to create a blend of immersive theater and virtual reality in...
7 Lives aims to explore the underlying structure of fluidity and interdependence by taking a non-narrative, symbolic, and embodied poetic approach. You witness an experience, and then time freezes as you're able to explore how that event is related...
Bodyless was one of my favorite VR experiences that I saw at the Venice International Film Festival. The experience was the most like walking into someone else's dream that I've ever had in VR. The experience alternated between an on-rails guided...
The Key is an immersive narrative that won the Tribeca Storyscapes and the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival. It uses embodied metaphors and dream logic as a mode of storytelling, and these innovations are extremely effective and powerful...
Maciek Szczerbowski & Chris Lavis of Clyde Henry Productions are stop motion artists at Clyde behind who wanted to deliver a dream while you're awake. They collaborated with Félix & Paul Studios and the National Film Board Interactive of Canada on...
There's been a virtual reality training revolution that's been slowly brewing over the last five years, and STRIVR has been at the forefront of innovation working with everyone from elite athletes in the NFL to thousands of Walmart employees. STRIVR...
Healium XR won the XR pitch competition at CES and SXSW this year for their immersive experiences that respond to biometric data. I saw the first demo of Healium XR (powered by StoryUp) back in 2017 at Oculus Connect 4, which I talk about more here...
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...
University of Cambridge's Dr. David Menon is a clinical neurointensivist who is specializing in traumatic brain injury. He's an advisor for the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Azrieli Brain, Mind & Consciousness program, and he was an...
Laurel Trainor is the Director of McMaster Institute for Music and the Mind, which has a LIVElab concert hall for 100 people that allows her to do a lot of studies in the relationship between musical performance and how it's received by an audience...
CTRL-labs is creating neural interfaces for robotics and immersive worlds that leverage electromyography (EMG) signals that are radiated from muscle contractions. This gives them the ability to isolate individual motor neurons, which is opening up a...
Dr. Sook-Lei Liew is an assistant professor at the University of Southern California, and the director of the Neural Plasticity & Neurorehabilitation Labatory at USC. At IEEE VR 2017, she was showing off a DIY Brain Computer Interface called...
Neurable is building a brain-computer interface that integrates directly into the virtual reality headset. Neurable uses dry EEG sensors from Wearable Sensing, which means that it doesn't require gel in order to get a good signal from the EEG making...
UCSF professor Adam Gazzaley is a pioneer in the realm of experiential medicine as he's getting a video game approved by the FDA for ADHD treatment. He's a co-founder of Akili Interactive and the chief scientist at JAZZ Venture partners, where he's...
MindMaze is creating Brain-Computer Interface that's integrated with VR head-mounted displays, and they're also creating immersive technologies that neurorehabilitation. I had a chance to talk with MindMaze founder and CEO Tej Tadi at the XTech...
Noah Falstein started as a game design pioneer back in 1980, and lately he's been collaborating a lot with virtual reality companies like MindMaze, Akili Interactive Labs, StoryUp, and AppliedVR on different immersive medical applications and...
The Canadian Institute for Advanced Research invited me to moderate a panel discussion at GDC titled 'The Future of VR: Neuroscience and Biosensor Driven Development' featuring CIFAR scholars Craig Chapman and Alona Fyshe, as well as Jake Stauch...
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...