Diagnosia is an immersive, non-linear environmental storytelling piece that takes you inside of a Chinese Internet Addiction Camp. In the early 2000s in China, there was a moral panic around video game use as state-run Chinese media started to...
I was invited to participate on panel on Metaverse Ethics at Gamesbeat's Into the Metaverse 2 summit on January 26, 2022. Privacy in XR was the biggest theme and open question that each of the panelists focused on. This is a recording of the...
On the Morning You Wake (to the End of the World) is one of the most powerful experiences I've seen in VR, and is also one of my favorite piece in the Sundance New Frontier 2022 selection. It tells the story of a errant emergency alert text message...
Gondwana VR simulates 100 years of climate change in the Daintree Rainforest within a 24-hour durational simulation that's running each day throughout the Sundance New Frontier 2022 selection. Lead artists Ben Joseph Andrews and Emma Roberts...
We Met in Virtual Reality is feature-length documentary by Joe Hunting premiering today at the Sundance film festival. It follows five different protagonists (2 couples in long distance relationships and a sign language teacher) throughout the...
The Sundance New Frontier 2022 selection of 15 immersive stories is available starting today until January 30th, and I had a chance to speak with chief curator Shari Frilot an overview of this year's selection. Access to New Frontier Spaceship and...
Philosopher David Chalmers has an amazing book called 'Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy' that is being released on January 25th, and I was able to get early access and interview him about the many provocative ideas that he...
William Uricchio is a Professor of Comparitive Media Studies at MIT, who started Open Documentary Lab in 2012 as a research initiative to look at implications of emerging technologies & the implications for the work of documentary. The MIT Co...
Michaela French is a visual artist working with moving image, primarily in immersive experiences in the context of a full dome space. She's been collaborating with DocLab since 2019 in creating dome content, supporting new artists, and promoting a...
Francesca Panetta is a freelance immersive artist, director, journalist who worked at The Guardian experimenting with new forms of storytelling, then as a creative director at MIT experimenting with new forms of storytelling using AI, and now is an...
Vincent Morisset is the founder of the studio AATOAA, and has been doing interactive projects for the past 2 decades. He's worked with folks like Arcade Fire and the National Film Board of Canada on projects spanning mediums from screens, XR...
Ali Eslami is an Iranian artist who has been working with VR since 2014 & living in Amsterdam since 2018, and we talked about these projects that have been featured at DocLab since 2016:
Roel Wouters is a founding partner of Moniker, which is a small tight-nit studio doing projects on how people relate to technologies, social impact of technologies, and the side effects to our lives. We talked about many of their social experiments...
#1036: [DocLab] Victoria Mapplebeck’s Self-Shooting Smartphone Filmmaking, & Immersive Video & Audio
Victoria Mapplebeck has been a storyteller for more than 30 years across different platforms, genres, and technologies. She's a self-shooting director who shifted to smartphone filmmaking, & more recently immersive 360 video & immersive sound. We...
May Abdalla & Amy Rose are co-founders of Anagram, which has been exploring ways of telling non-fiction stories experientially using technology. There some of my favorite creators in this space, and they also think very deeply about the medium. We...
Tamara Shogaolu is an interdisciplinary artist & director who works in film and as a creative technologist that mixes analog with digital including VR, AR, and mixed media forms. We discussed these following immersive projects that she has had at...
Rahima Gambo is a multimedia journalist based between Abuja, Nigeria & London, UK, and presented 'A Rest Guide for a Tired Nigerian Artist,' which is a both a podcast series, series of book, and an immersive experience that was presented at DocLab...
Polymorpf is small design collective & studio based in Holland that creates of all kinds of different immersive experiences that usually revolving around the senses and the human body. I spoke with Polymorf founder Marcel van Brakel as well as Mark...
The IDFA DocLab is celebrating it's 15th year anniversary, and I collaborated with DocLab to produce a series of a dozen interviews reflecting on the evolution of immersive storytelling and interactive documentaries since 2007. I'm kicking off the...
I caught up with the XR Safety Initiative CEO & Founder Kavya Pearlman as well as Kristina Podnar, who is an independent Digital Policy Consultant, XRSI's Global Digital Policy Advisor, & the chair of XRSI's Metaverse Reality Check. We...
Felix & Paul Studios just released Episode #3 of their Space Explorers: ISS Experience, which features some absolutely stunning & breathtaking shots captured outside of the International Space Station. They gave a sneak peak of some of this footage...
Asad J. Malik is an AR artist who spent a lot time making work for the HoloLens on the film festival circuit, and then started a AR Hologram company named Jadu creating volumetric captures of celebrities and musicians using the high-end Microsoft...
On March 23, 2021, Rec Room announced that they raised $100M with a valuation of $1.25 billion, which makes them the first VR software company to achieve 'unicorn' status. Rec Room was launched for the Vive on June 1, 2016 after 99 days of...
The Oregon Shakespeare Festival in collaboration with Artizen producers Ana Brzezińska and René J. Pinnell commissioned & produced four VR pieces that premiered at the inaugural Quillsfest, which was a two-day event November 19-20 held within the...
Exploring Home is a full-body tracked, dance performance in a VRChat world that premiered at Venice VR Expanded 2021. It explores issues around identity, avatar representations, being outcast and discriminated against, and it's a unique blend of...
Hope for Haiti is a Haitian-based, non-profit with the goal to improve the quality of life for Haitian people through education, medical, clean water initiatives, and economic development programs. After a visceral experience with a number of VR...
The MetaMovie Presents: Alien Rescue is one of the most immersive experiences I've had in VR. It's part Cinematic Adventure, part Immersive Theater, and part game that's fusing the affordances of each of these different mediums in a unique way...
Tosca Terán (aka Nanotopia) is an interdisciplinary artist at intersections of ecology, bioart, mycology, and sound, and she collaborated in creating the 'Mycelia' performance with the Metaverse Crew and Sara Lisa Vogl (aka _ROOT_) to bring her...
One of the most magical AR demos I've ever had a chance to see was Tilt Five at Augmented World Expo 2021. Jeri Ellsworth stumbled upon a complete paradigm shift towards AR while she was at Valve and accidentally had a beam splitter turned around...
I had a chance to do a demo of the Lynx R-1 standalone mixed reality headset at the Augmented World Expo, which was a really compelling experience that blended the virtual and real better than any other headset I've seen do before. Part of the magic...
On November 9th at the beginning of the Augmented World Expo (AWE),Qualcomm announced Snapdragon Spaces, which is a series of AR tools striving to cultivate an 'open, cross-device horizontal platform and ecosystem.' The Snapdragon Spaces tools...
Monika Bielskyte is a world designer, immersive artist, science fiction critic, and cultivator of Protopia Futures (@ProtopiaFutures on Instagram), which is a an intersectional design practice that was distilled down into a Protopia Futures...
The third annual Virtual Beings & Virtual Societies Summit happened on October 29-30, and I had a chance to attend and unpack it with the co-founder of Fable Studio and instigator of a new Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) called the The...
Connect 2021 happened on Thrusday October 28, 2021 where Facebook rebranded to Meta on their path towards becoming a Metaverse company, and they provided a lot of vague, speculative designs for some of the social experiences that they can imagine...
The Severance Theory: Welcome to Respite is a VR adaptation of an immersive theatre piece of the same name originally produced in 2019 by CoAct Productions founder Lyndsie Scoggin. Immersive theatre & VR performer Deirdre Lyons did some voice work...
On October 21, there was a five-hour AR/VR Policy Conference organized by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation as well as XR Association covering some other public policy issues relevant to XR technologies, but also really focused on...
Tony Parisi published really great Metaverse manifesto on October 22nd titled The Seven Rules for the Metaverse, which attempts to rein in some of the more hyperbolic musings about what the Metaverse is or could be.
Adam Draper is the founder of Boost VC, which a technology accelerator that has funded over 70 VR companies and over 100 crypto companies since 2012. He's been in a really unique position to understand how blockchain technologies and the more...
I talk with Joey J. Lee & Elliot Hu-Au about a paper they published in Frontiers of Virtual Reality called 'E3XR: An Analytical Framework for Ethical, Educational and Eudaimonic XR Design,' which looks at the intersection of XR ethics, best practice...
The WebXR Design Summit was a 9-hour series of talks about immersive design & experiential design that was organized by Ben Erwin and his WebXR Polys Awards team on October 12th. I was the host and moderator for the day, but also helped to curate a...
The Festival of International Virtual and Augmented Reality Stories (FIVARS) is holding a hybrid event where the IRL component in LA starts today October 15th, and the virtual festival starts on October 22nd. FIVARS has been curating independent and...
HTC is launching the Vive Flow today available for pre-order $499 and launching in early November. They're 6-DoF 'immersive glasses' weighing 189 grams that are meant to be the tablet of VR. You have to bring your own power supply, and so you'll...
HP's G2 Reverb Omnicept edition is a special version of their VR headset targeted for enterprises that includes Tobii eye tracking that can track real-time pupil dilation, eye saccades, visual attention with eye gaze vectors, a camera for facial...
The London Film Festival Expanded runs from October 6-17 with a total of 18 pieces of immersive stories and art, with 9 of those pieces available remotely via their LFF Expanse art gallery that is available for free on Viveport (with nine...
Container is a hyperreal 180-degree spatial art installation that explores modern day slavery. Visual artist/visual anthropologist Meghna Singh and documentary filmmaker Simon Wood utilize the shipping container as consistent piece of architecture...
#1004: ANANDALA is an Awe-Inspiring, Generative Art of Embodied AI that Cultivates Perpetual Novelty
Kevin Mack's Anandala is an awe-inspiring piece of VR-native, generative, abstract art with some really compelling experiments in interactive, embodied NPC entities he calls 'blorts.' There are 130 of these blorts spread out throughout a massive...
GOLIATH: PLAYING WITH REALITY is an interactive VR story that explores the experience of schizophrenia & psychosis through the story of a Twitch Streamer named GoliathGames. It's a really strong piece of immersive storytelling balancing...
Kusunda is a spatial documentary about a indigenous language in Nepal that is on the brink of going dormant and falling asleep. It's an incredibly powerful story that uses photogrammetry, Tilt Brush interpretations of oral history, and interactive...
The Venice VR Expanded portion of the Venice Film Festival opens today, and runs from September 1-19, 2021. I had a chance to talk to the co-creators Liz Rosenthal and Michel Reilhac to get a sneak peak of the 37 immersive storytelling projects with...
Episode #1000 of the Voices of VR podcast is a special, three-hour retrospective featuring over 100 of the best answers I've received about the ultimate potential of VR over the past 7 years. I hope that it serves as a primer on the scope and...