The Electronic Frontier Foundation is a non-profit that has been defending civil liberties & digital rights for over 30 years since it was first announced on July 10, 1990. My first conversation with the EFF was with Dave Maass at the VR Privacy...
In her Contextual Integrity theory of privacy, Helen Nissembaum defines privacy as 'appropriate flows of information' where the appropriateness is defined by the context and its contextual informational norms. Contextual Integrity is a paradigm...
Ellysse Dick is a policy analyst who has written 10 technology policy publications over the last year about VR & AR for the The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation. The ITIF is a non-partisan, non-profit tech policy think tank, who says...
OpenBCI's Project Galea was originally announced on November 19, 2020 as a 'hardware and software platform that merges next-generation biometrics with mixed reality.' OpenBCI has been collaborating with MIT Ph.D. student Guillermo Bernal in...
Breonna's Garden is an augmented reality experience that premiered at the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival that was created by Lady PheOnix in collaboration with Ju'Niyah Palmer to honor the life of her sister, Breonna Taylor. I found it to be a...
Neuroscientist researcher Rafael Yuste started the Columbia University's Neuro-Rights Initiative to promote an ethical framework to preserve a set of human rights within neuro-technologies. He co-authored a Nature paper titled 'Four ethical...
HTC announced two new, enterprise-focused VR headsets at their Vivecon on Tuesday May 11th. The Vive Focus 3 is a standalone VR HMD with an impressive 2,448 x 2,448 per-eye resolution, 90Hz, 120° FoV, new controllers, swappable battery, and priced...
The second volume of the Immersive Arcade Showcase featuring four immersive stories from the United Kingdom launches today as DLC within the Museum of Other Realities. The theme of the second volume is Memories & Dreams and features Vestige, Limbo...
Facebook's Project Aria announcement in September at Facebook Connect raised a number of different ethical questions with anthropologists and technological ethicists. Journalist Lawrence Dodds described it on Twitter by saying, 'Facebook will send...
The 29 immersive experiences that are a part of the Tribeca Immersive 2021 line-up were announced on Tuesday, April 29. There will be 11 Virtual Arcade experiences available starting on June 9 within the Museum of Other Realities, 5 Storyscape...
On April 22, 2020, Magic Leap announced layoffs of somewhere between 600 to 1000 employees, which amounted to around 1/3 to 1/2 of their total staff. On December 2019, The Information reported that Magic Leap had only sold 6,000 AR headsets against...
Brittan Heller is a human rights lawyer who recently published a paper pointing out that there are some significant gaps in privacy laws that do not cover the types of physiological and biometric data that will be available from virtual and...
On March 18th, Facebook Reality Labs Research announced some of their research into next-generation neuromotor input devices for mixed reality applications. I paraphrased the most interesting insights from their press conferences announcement, but I...
Dream was a series of 10 live performances over 8 days that used motion captured actors who had virtual embodiments set within an immersive storyworld of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream powered by the Unreal Engine. This project was a research...
I participated in a Facebook press event on Tuesday, March 16th that featuring some Facebook Human-Computer Interaction Research on AR Neural Inputs, Haptics, Contextually-Aware-AI, & Intelligent Clicks. It was an on-the-record event for print...
Kiira Benzing's Loveseat was an ambitious fusion of live theater performance with VR technologies that premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2019. They performed live for the audience in Venice while wearing VR headets as their performances were...
SXSW Online is happening March 16-20, and I had a chance to get a sneak peak of the SXSW Online XR world in VRChat and talk with the chief curator of the SXSW Virtual Cinema program Blake Kammerdiener about the program and special events that he's...
The Polys WebXR Awards was an awards show on February 20th, 2021 founded by Ben Irwin in collaboration with Sophia Moshasha and Julie Smithson. Irwin wanted to feature a lot of the work that's been happening on the immersive web in the year 2020...
One of my favorite pieces at Sundance New Frontier 2021 this year was a series of four open web experiences created as a part of the piece Traveling the Interstitium with Octavia Butler. Born out of The Guild of Future Architects' Futurist Writer...
Worldbuilding and speculative design was a big theme at Sundance New Frontier 2021, and I had a chance to participate in an experience that facilitated a collaborative & deliberative process of worldbuilding that was called Beyond the Breakdown...
Nightss is an sensual experience that's structured around an erotic Polish-language poem by Weronika Lewandowska that uses dance and spatial metaphors in VR to create an immersive poem. She collaborated with co-director and co-screenwriter Sandra...
Depthkit's volumetric capture solution is democratizing access to the tools of volumetric filmmaking. I had a chance to do a deep dive with two of the co-founders of Scatter, James George (CEO) & Alexander Porter, who have been pioneers in the...
The Changing Same is one of the most ambitious pieces of volumetric filmmaking yet since it combines all sorts of volumetric capture techniques with Scatter's new Depthkit Studio multi-depth sensor set up, photogrammetry, and a fusion of rigged...
I've been an executive committee member of the IEEE Global Initiative of the Ethics of Extended Reality for the past six months, and we had our official kickoff meeting on Friday, February 5th. The goal of this effort is to produce a white paper...
After watching the 14 immersive experiences at Sundance New Frontier 2021, I invited three other immersive critics for a roundtable discussion unpacking each of the experiences inlucing CNET's Joan Solsman, Forbes contributor Jesse Damiani, and...
On January 14, 2021, VR developer Fox Buchele announced on Twitter that he was fired by Owlchemy Labs in 2020, and 'I'm sharing this now because I'm done with this industry. And I don't see myself coming back.' He described being a VR developer as...
Sundance New Frontier 2021 features 14 immersive experiences that will be accessible via the $25 Sundance Explorer pass starting on Friday, January 29th until Wednesday, February 3, 2021. The New Frontier site will also be hosting virtual premiere...
Aardvark is an AR platform within the context of virtual reality applications. Here's how Aardvark is described on it's Steam page:Aardvark is a new kind of web browser that allows users to bring multiple interactive, 3D 'gadgets' into any SteamVR...
Mark Pesce's new book Augmented Reality: Unboxing Tech's Next Big Thing was released on Friday, January 8th, 2021. It's a lucidly-written look at the past, present, and future of augmented reality. He contextualizes AR within the history of...
Note: This is a sponsored content post from the University University of North Carolina School of the ArtsI was a mentor for the UNCSA's Media + Emerging Technology Lab's Immersive Storytelling Residency program in 2020, which was a 6-month program...
The Devouring is an epic, 5-6 hour horror adventure game within VRChat that launched on August 14, 2020. It quickly went viral in the VRChat community because it was a unique, shared experience that had a vast world to explore, an evocative...
Virtual Market 5 opens today December 18th, 2020 at 6p PST (Dec 19th at 11a JST), and will run until January 10th at 6a PST (11p JST). It will feature over 1500 VR artists and creators in 30+ worlds in VRChat that features avatars, meshes, clothes...
Note: This is a sponsored content post from the University University of North Carolina School of the Arts
Pluto VR is a general-purpose VR, telepresence application that hopes to provide the social presence glue for a standards-driven, multiple-application ecosystem using SteamVR on the PC. I had some new conceptual breakthroughs about the potential...
Virtual reality has the potential catalyze a paradigm shift around our concepts about the nature of reality, and one of the most influential philosophers on my thinking has been Alfred North Whitehead. His Process Philosophy emphases unfolding...
On October 4th, YUR Fit co-founder Cix Liv spoke out on social media about his frustrations in collaborating with Facebook as an independent developer by saying, 'they will block you from the store without reason, break your application, try to...
Inside COVID-19 is a new 360 video series that premiered on Oculus TV on Friday, November 20, 2020, and it features Dr. Josiah Child who manages emergency departments at five different hospitals. Dr. Child contracted COVID-19, and this film takes us...
The new Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy's Edge VR experience releases today, and I had a chance to play through it and talk to a couple of the creators from ILMxLab about their latest steps towards their vision of 'storyliving.' It represents a lot...
The first VR Awards shows was produced by Academy of International Extended Reality (AIXR) in 2017, and after producing three annual events in London the producers were forced to produce their fourth show in 2020 virtually. After evaluating many of...
Athena Demos is the Chief Cultural & Community Officer for Black Rock Creative and Black Rock City VR (BRCvr). I previously covered BRCvr's officially-sanctioned multiverse world in AltSpaceVR for Burning Man 2020 with my conversation with lead...
John Robb has a concept of Networked Tribalism, which is a result of the combination of filter bubbles, AI algorithms, and political polarization. Robb is a military analyst who looks at the impact of technology on culture, and he started his Global...
There is a lot of sensitive data that will captured by virtual reality devices that present a wide range of ethical and moral dilemmas that I've been covering on The Voices of VR podcast since 2016. During Facebook Connect, Facebook released their...
I talk with the founder of the FIVARS VR & AR story festival Keram Malicki-Sánchez & WebXR developer James Baicoianu to talk about how the repurposed the open source JanusXR code in order to create a platform to deliver 360 video. It's a pioneering...
Mária Rakušanová got her start in the VR industry in 2014 when she was a product marketer for the Gear VR at Samsung. Her job meant that she would watch a lot of immersive content that she would use to market this stand-alone, mobile VR headset. In...
Human Interact's Alexander Mejia has a hard time describing what exactly Starship Commander: Arcade is. For movie lovers, he says it's a choose-your-adventure narrative where your the main character of your own movie. For gamers, he calls it a...
Stanford University has just published an important research paper that hows how motion tracked data in VR can be identifiable of specific users. The paper titled Personal identifiability of user tracking data during observation of 360-degree VR...
On October 6, 2020, Dr. Brennan Spiegel released his book titled 'VRx: How Virtual Therapeutics Will Revolutionize Medicine,' which is an amazing survey of different applications of what could be called virtual medicine, experiential medicine...
The XR Association is a non-profit 501(c)(6) trade association with members including Facebook/Oculus, Google, Microsoft, Sony, & HTC. They're focused on general awareness and education, lobbying Congress on XR policy issues, and promoting research...
Virtual and Augmented Reality pose unique privacy challenges, and so it's worth going back to look at the evolution of privacy laws in the United States to see how we got to this point today. There's also a lot of current discussions for the need...
Darkfield Radio have released a couple of binaural audio performances that transform your home into a immersive audio stage. Their experiences are intended to be experienced with another person, each of their own mobile phones at a specific time so...