Croquet is an operating system within the context of a browser that serves as a virtual machine that enables bit-identical simulations across multiple computers synchronized via a dedicated network infrastructure of global reflectors. Croquet...
#1087: IndieWire Editor Eric Kohn on Deepening Critical Discourse within VR & Immersive Storytelling
Eric Kohn has been a professional film critic for 15 years, and he’s currently the Executive Editor at Indiewire, the Vice President of Editorial Strategy, as well as the co-host of IndieWire’s Screen Talk podcast. IndieWire first...
The Ristband music platform (formerly known as Overview Ark) launched an alpha version at SXSW during co-founder Roman Rappak's mixed reality show with his band Miro Shot that I previously covered in episode #1082. Ristband is described as 'your...
Radio Ghost is a 70-minute, interactive and immersive audio piece for three people that's site-specific to a mall. It's meant to unpack the unseen stories of unethical consumption and deconstruct the design patterns of shopping malls. It's has an...
Paradise is an immersive audio piece exploring themes of domestic violence that was an interdisciplinary collaboration between Darkfield, VR documentary filmmaker Gabo Arora of Lightshed.io and researcher and clinician Nancy Glass from the Johns...
Lustration is a 4-part episodic VR series illustrated within Quill that's in the fantasy, detective noir genre, and created by First Nation Creative Ryan Griffen. It allows you to change camera perspectives within Quill as it blends together aspects...
#1082 Roman Rappak’s Mixed Reality Live Music Performance & an Art History Perspective on XR + music
Roman Rappak's Miro Shot band had a unique mixed reality performance of a single song at SXSW to an audience of 50 people who were wearing GearVR headsets. The experience was live mixed by Rappak, who was switching between a monoscopic VR...
#1081: Using VR to Capture Memories of Home with Sunghwan Lee’s “Ihyangjeong: Carving with Memories”
Ihyangjeong: Carving with Memories is by Korean 2D animator Sunghwan Lee of Studio Shelter, who used Quill to tell a spatial story about the connections between home, objects, and memory. The piece tells a larger story of Lee's journey from a dingy...
Targo Stories has created a number of really well-produced and well-told immersive stories using the 360 VR video medium over the past three years. Their latest co-production with Meta is Surviving 9/11: 27 Hours Under the Rubble, which premiered in...
On January 10th, Ana Brzezińska was announced to be the new Immersive Curator of the Tribeca Film Festival, and I had a chance to speak to her before this announcement to do a retrospective of her time that she spent as Kaleidoscope VR's Head of...
FRAMERATE is a timelapse LIDAR art installation by ScanLAB Projects that showed at SXSW. It encourages the audience to 'think and feel in another time scale: geological time, seasonal time, tidal time.' I had a chance to talk with director & ScanLAB...
Black Ice VR is a sci-fi horror immersive narrative that experiments between switching between 3rd person and 1st person POV, and it was produced as a part of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts' The Media + Emerging Technology Lab...
Future Rights was a prototype at SXSW that aimed to bring bringing Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring into VR. They were showing a short demo at SXSW, but they have plans for a sort of dance autotune and collaborative performance that uses AI to...
The Choice is an interactive documentary that explores the issue of reproductive rights in Texas. The team uses a special stereoscopic compositing pipeline that combines depth sensor information with a stereo camera capture, but creates a shader to...
Céline Tricart is an award-winning VR director who gave one of the main SXSW Keynotes about immersive storytelling, live action role play, and emotional bleed. She started as a writer, went to film school, made a cinematic VR documentary Sun Ladies...
Liminal Lands is an environmental VR piece commissioned by Luma Arles to document and volumetrically capture different objects and organisms within 'overlooked wetlands at the edge of the Mediterranean.' It's a piece where the sound design adapts to...
AmazeVR is a VR Concert Platform that premiered part of an experience at SXSW that they will be taking on a 10-city concert tour called Megan Thee Stallion: Enter Thee Hottieverse. I had a chance to speak with AmazeVR's Head of Creative Eric J...
The Peabody Awards have expanded beyond the traditional categories of Entertainment, News, Podcast & Radio, Documentary, Arts, & Public Service, and into new formats of Digital and Interactive Storytelling that include Transmedia Storytelling...
On the Morning You Wake (To the End of the World) is now available for free on Oculus, and it's a must-watch immersive story that won the best XR Experience at SXSW. It's a three-part series that dives into the broader implications of a false...
Forensic Architecture is an innovative interdisciplinary, non-profit research group that uses the tools & techniques of architecture to tell spatial stories of state-sponsored violence and human rights. Their 79 investigations since 2010 have be...
The immersive story of Notes on Blindness: Into the Darkness (2016) VR experience (Quest, Rift) was awarded with a Legacy Peabody Award for Digital & Interactive Storytelling along with 15 other projects on Thursday, March 24th. This experience has...
Nonny de la Peña was one of the 16 Legacy Peabody Award recipients honoring historical work as a part of their new Digital & Interactive Storytelling Award. Specifically, de la Peña is receiving a Field Building honor for her body of work that has...
One of my favorite experiences from SXSW was Vincent Morisset's Composition, which is a physical installation of a table with blocks that serves as the interface of a interactive music piece that continually shifts the algorithm for how it generates...
Ioulia Isserlis' Komez Alef O translates the story of her father's refugee journey of escaping the Nazis during the Holocaust. Isserlis collaborated with her father in distilling his journey down to a dozen moments that were spatially reconstructed...
(Hi)story of a Painting: The Light in the Shadow won a special jury prize at SXSW for Immersive Storytelling as it uses the medium of VR to take us back into history to explain the deeper historical context of the work of Artemisia Gentileschi, a...
On the Morning You Wake (To the End of the World) won the best XR Experience at SXSW, and is set to be released this week on March 24th, 2022. (UPDATE 3/24: It's now been released and can be found here.) It's an amazingly well-told story about how...
Weird Times is an 5-part, VR episodic series that explores issues of teenage mental health that's produced by the teach at Flight School and executive produced by Meta's VR for Good. The first two episodes premiered at SXSW, and focus on Depression...
Gumball Dreams is the latest immersive theatre production in VRChat by The Ferryman Collective, who previously produced Welcome to Respite: The Severance Theory. They just had their World Premiere last week participating in competition at SXSW, and...
I talk with the creators of Choctaw Code Talkers 1918, Kilma Lattin, Founder & CEO of OurWorlds as well as Catherine Eng, Co-founder & CTO of OurWorlds, who are bringing Native American Stories to VR with their platform. OurWorlds won the SXSW EDU...
There are nearly 40 XR experiences and special events programmed as a part of the physical SXSW festival in Austin, and I spoke with lead programmer Blake Kammerdiener to get the full run down of the 12 pieces in the XR Experience Competition, 21...
There's a lot of debates about the Metaverse, and whether or not it's complete BS or if it's the natural evolution of the Internet as a culmination of a spatial computing revolution that's been evolving human computer interaction from 2D frames to...
There are a lot of unsupervised children in different social VR applications, and hopefully this interview with Lance G. Powell, Jr. about his article Parental Guide for the Metaverse can be a part of helping inform parents about some best practices...
Virtual Virtual Reality 2 has so many innovations in immersive storytelling structure through a very unique experience of nested contexts allowing for character persistence while the feeling of open world exploration. I talk with the co-founders of...
Flat Earth VR started as a thought experiment by Lucas Rizzotto who was skewering the idea that VR is an empathy machine by creating an immersive experience that allowed you identify with delusional perspectives. After invoking some emotional...
Tom Ffiske publishes the Immersive Wire Newsletter, and on February 2, 2022 he announced the release of his latest book called The Metaverse: A Professional Guide, which is available on Amazon. The metaverse has certainly seen an increase of...
The Child of Empire is an immersive story that tells the story of the India-Pakistan Partition of 1947, which is one of the largest forced migrations in human history. It uses puppet theatre-styled motion graphics in the beginning to provide a crash...
The State of Global Peace is an immersive experience that debuted at the Sundance Festival New Frontier 2022, which was produced by the Innovation Cell within the UN Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (UNDPPA) as a translation of a UN...
Suga': A Live Virtual Dance Performance was a live performance in Mozilla Hubs that premiered at SIGGRAPH 2021 and also screened at the Sundance New Frontier 2022. This project tells the story of rebellion, resistance, and resilience of the...
This is Not a Ceremony is a cinematic VR piece that asks us to 'collectively bear witness to tragic events in the lives of two Indigenous men — Adam North Peigan and Brian Sinclair — and entrusts us to share what we've seen and heard.' It uses 360...
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...