My wife, Wonder Bright, has absolutely fallen in love with the VR experience Gnomes & Goblins. Her mindset and approach to the game was almost totally opposite from my own. While I focused trying to solve the scavenger hunt puzzles within their core...
The full release of Gnomes & Goblins was released on September 23, 2020, and it has some of the most sophisticated worldbuilding that I've seen in VR so far. Hollywood director Jon Favreau started to collaborate with Wevr's Jake Rowell and Neville...
The creators of Agence call it a 'dynamic film,' but it's part immersive story with game-like interactions and puzzles where you engage with either traditional heuristic game AI bots or bots trained through reinforcement learning processes. There's...
In the aftermath of George Floyd's murder by three police officers on May 25th, 2020, there were Black Lives Matter protests that erupted around the world. Immersive filmmakers Alton Glass and Adam Davis-McGee felt the historic nature of this global...
Oculus Connect has been rebranded Facebook Connect, and what would have been Oculus Connect 7 is now Facebook Connect 1. Facebook Connect happened on September 16, 2020, and I talked with Doug North Cook on the following day. North Cook is the...
On June 11, 2019, Guy Godin announced on Reddit and on Twitter that 'Oculus doesn't want the SteamVR streaming feature in their store' and that he had been asked by Oculus to remove this wireless streaming feature that he had recently added to his...
The Oculus Quest 2 was announced at Facebook Connect today, and I was able to get early access to it last week to try it out. I wanted to invite Road to VR co-founder Ben Lang to share his impressions, and to unpack some of my experiences as well...
Alex Heath reports on Facebook and their competitors for the subscription-only site The Information, and he's been able to get some exclusive interviews and do some in-depth reporting on some of Facebook's VR and AR hardware initiatives. As we're on...
I'm joined by Pola Weiß (Founder, VR Stories / VR Geschichten) & Kathryn Yu (Executive Editor, No Proscenium) to talk about nearly all of the 44 experiences that were a part of the Venice VR Expanded 2020 edition running from September 2 to 12. We...
In 2014, Greg Edwards took photos of all of the work on the Burning Man Playa, and then set out to create a 1:1 scale 3D model of Black Rock City all in virtual reality (BRCvr). He showed a demo on the Google Cardboard to the Burning Man Board in...
Valve is a critical player in the modern resurgence of VR. They are known for their friendly competitions and cooperation they had with Oculus in the early days of virtual reality spanning from July 2012 to March 20113. Blake Harris' History of the...
I was invited to join the F Reality Podcast over the weekend with VR Oasis's Mike, Nathie, Rowdy Guy, and Zimtok5 to be able to talk about this past week's news about Facebook's new requirement that all new VR users and hardware will be required to...
BigScreenVR is in direct competition with some of the same services that Facebook wants to fully control, and their CEO Darshan Shankar has had to resort to posting an thread on Twitter expressing his frustrations in trying to negotiate with...
Anton Hand is an indie VR developer with RUST LTD, who is the project lead for Hotdogs, Horseshoes, & Hand Grenades. Hand made the decision sometime in 2016 to not explicitly support any Facebook APIs or hardware for his indie VR project beyond what...
The Oculus Quest launched on May 21, 2019. Nine days later I was at Augmented World Expo doing interviews and preparing a main stage talk about The Ethical & Moral Dilemmas of Mixed Reality.
In 2015, Donna Davis and Tom Boellstorff received a three-year National Science Foundation grant on The Role of People with Disability in the Innovation of Online Technology where they studied how differently-abled populations were using virtual...
On August 7, 2020, I participated in a panel discussion about Ethical Design in Immersive Media organized by the University of Oregon as a part of Design Week Portland. The panel featured Stanford University Virtual Human Interaction Lab's Jeremy...
Howard Rose has been working in medical VR for over 20 years now, and he's the co-founder and CEO of Firsthand Technology. He reached out to me after listening to the XR for Change panel on Ethics in order to talk about some of the specific ethical...
On March 25, 2019, the IEEE Standards Association published Ethically-Aligned Design: A Vision for Prioritizing Human Well-being with Autonomous and Intelligent Systems (PDF) covering the ethical dimensions of artificial intelligence embedded into...
Ethics in XR is a vast topic, and I had a chance to moderate a panel discussion for Games for Change / XR for Change Talk and Play salon with four people including Tom Ffiske (Editor of VirtualPerceptions.com), Galit Ariel (TechnoFuturist), Kavya...
The IEEE VR 2020 Conference brought together the academic XR community to share their latest research, and to talk about topics that are of interest to the wider immersive technology industry. I participated on a panel discussion on Ethics and...
Dr. Jessica Stone is a licensed psychologist and registered play therapist who has been experimenting with integrating technologies into her therapeutic practice specializing in working with children. She and her husband developed a Virtual Sandtray...
Erica Southgate released a book titled Virtual Reality in Curriculum and Pedagogy: Evidence from Secondary on Classrooms May 19, 2020, which covers the theory and practice of using VR in classrooms. Southgate is an Associate Professor of Emerging...
Carl H Smith's work is at the intersection of VR, psychedelics, and esoteric contemplative practices. He's the director of the Learning Technology Research Center at the Ravensbourne University London, co-founder of The Cyberdelic Society, co...
Cannes XR is a part of the Cannes Marché du Film, which is the business side of the Cannes Film Festival. For the past two years, they've collaborated with Kaleidoscope VR to curate a development showcase featuring the creators of immersive stories...
Tender Claws continues to be one of the most innovative studios pushing forward what's possible for immersive storytelling in VR by launching a Tempest, which is a live, immersive theater show within The Under Presents. It's a show that blends the...
Shola Amoo's Violence is a provocative virtual reality experience that 're-contextualizes the notions of violence by examining it through the lens of state oppression against marginalized groups.' It's difficult to say too much about my experience...
Raqi Syed and Areito Echevarria's Minimum Mass is an emotional, immersive narrative that explores grief of miscarriage. They apply their visual effects knowledge gained from working at WETA Digital in New Zealand to push the real-time game engine to...
The CannesXR Showcase features over 50 different immersive narrative experiences in the Museum of Other Realities from June 24 to July 3rd, with showcases featuring 12 experiences from Tribeca Film Festival, 12 360 video curated by VeeR, 6...
Tetris Effect is one of the most surprising VR games I've played in so far. It's taken a classic 2D puzzler, and re-imagined it into a multi-modal experience in VR with dynamic difficulty synchronized to music, three layers of haptics, and immersive...
The Ford Foundation’s JustFilms program with supplemental support from the Sundance Institute commissioned Kamal Sinclair to do an intensive research project called 'Making a New Reality.' She looked at a number of questions including: 'What is...
I had a conversation with philosopher Lewis Gordon at the American Philosophical Association Eastern Meeting in January 2019 that really stuck with me. He writes about the philosophy of racism, and takes a very holistic and systemic approach in...
Back in November 2018, Daniel Dyboski-Bryant and Lorelle VanFossen started a regular meetup of Educators in VR within AltSpaceVR. They've been meeting consistently for the past year and a half, and they're currently hosting 5-8 gatherings per week...
The Line was just released on the Oculus Quest today, and it is a really sweet, immersive story that won the Best VR Immersive Experience for Interactive Content award at The Venice Film Festival 2019. The original version I saw in Venice used...
HP, Microsoft, & Valve collaborated on the HP Reverb G2, which is opening for pre-orders today for $599 and will start shipping in the Fall. It has the same resolution as the G1 of 2160 x 2160 pixels per eye, but with improved optics. Road to VR's...
There were not a lot of AR or VR announcements that happened during the main keynotes of Microsoft Build 2020, but there were a number of announcements that I was covering as comprehensively as I could in real-time in this Twitter thread. But Azure...
On March 6th, 2020, the IEEE VR announced a venue change on their website from Atlanta, Georgia to online in virtual reality for the academic conference set to happen between 22-26 March, 2020. The organizers of the IEEE VR conference had two weeks...
Akihiko Shirai has been doing research and development in VR live entertainment since 1995, and he's been a key liaison between the XR communities in Japan and France going back to 2004. Since June 2018 he's been researching vTuber (Virtual...
David Nahon is a pioneer of the French XR industry who is currently working at Dassault Systèmes' 3D Experience Lab. I had a chance to talk with Nahon at Laval Virtual 2019 where we talk about how he's using VR for Open Innovation to include more...
Laval Virtual has a AR/VR Business Intelligence division that tracks the use cases and evolution of XR applications, and produces a number of VR/AR newsfeed email lists and reports (like this free magazine on Health Applications of XR). I had a...
The first Laval Virtual Conference happened on 3-4 June, 1999 in Laval France, and had a chance to talk with the founder Simon Richir about the 20+ year history of Laval Virtual when I attended in 2019. It's an amazing history of the evolution of...
The Tribeca Film Festival is releasing fifteen 360 videos that were programmed within their Cinema360 program for free via the Oculus TV platform, and they'll be available to watch until April 26th. This is a great opportunity to see a portion of...
SoundSelf is a technologically-mediated, psychedlic experience (aka 'technodelic') that is being released by Andromeda Media on Wednesday, April 22nd. Developer Robin Arnott has been working on it on 8 years now, and he just released a The...
VRChat is one of the most popular social VR applications out there, and Chief Creator Officer Ron Millar recently told me that they had over 18,000 concurrent users this past weekend. I had a chance to catch up with the co-founders Jesse Joudrey &...
In my final episode of my coverage from Sundance New Frontier 2020, I speak with chief curator Shari Frilot about some of the themes of the line-up of XR experiences that were programmed this year. There were a number of themes the embodiment...
Milo Talwani (pronouns they/them) is a curator, and creative technologist who oversees the selection process for New Frontier at the Sundance Film Festival. They're also the technical coordinator for Tribeca Immersive, and they also help curate...
One of the most powerful explorations of embodiment at Sundance New Frontier 2020 was Metamorphic. The creators describe it as exploring the 'ephemeral nature of the self by allowing participants to redefine their relationships to their own bodies...
ANIMALIA SUM is an animated short VR 360 video / application hybrid with some light, embodied, 3 degree-of-freedom interactions on the Oculus Go. It's a mockumentary exploring the potential of whether or not humans should consider moving from...
Anti-Gone is a mixed reality play that features two actors performing in front of a wall that has an open, virtual world projected on it. One of the actors spends the majority of the time in VR navigating this world and interacting with the other...
A Machine for Viewing was a series of three film essays that were shown to someone in virtual reality, whose first-person perspective was then projected onto the Egyptian movie theater screen at Sundance with a crowd who was watching the film essays...