Chomsky vs Chomsky: First Encounter is a virtual reality experience where you get to interact with a virtual representation of Noam Chomsky, and essentially ask him any question that you want to. Trained on a corpus of 60 years worth of Chomsky...
Solastalgia is a site-specific augmented reality experience on the HoloLens 2 where you explore the surface of a depopulated planet in ruin, and colonized by a number of human ghost holograms. 'Solastalgia' is a neologism coined by philosopher Glenn...
All Kinds of Limbo featured the ability to show a volumetric-captured, virtual reality performance to 20 users within the Oculus Quest. Nubiya Brandon narrates her experience of being a mixed-race woman in the United Kingdom, and takes a tour...
The Book of Distance is one of the best VR narratives or immersive stories I've ever seen. Director Randall Okita tells the story of his grandfather Yonezo Okita's journey from Hiroshima, Japan to Canada in 1935 to begin a new life. It has some...
Living Distance is a contemporary piece of immersive art from China that casts the audience in the role of a tooth that takes a celestial journey into space. Director Xin Liu 刘昕 is an artist and mechanical engineer, who built a physical, crystalline...
Hypha is a VR experience that premiered at Sundance New Frontier 2020 that allos you to embody the full life cycle of a mushroom. You start as a spore in space that comes to Earth, you find enough water, and the go underground to grow into a hypha...
There have been a number of documentaries at Sundance over the past three years that have taken a critical lens the social impacts of technology including The Cleaners (2018), The Great Hack (2019), The Social Dilemma (2020), and Coded Bias (2020)...
Al Jazeera Contrast is an immersive storytelling and media innovation studio that is interested in telling the stories of the Global South and communities of color. They premiered a multi-media experience at Sundance New Frontier called Still Here...
Disney premiered the VR short Myth: A Frozen Tale at the November 7th, 2019 world premiere of Frozen II at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, and the creative team came to Park City during Sundance 2020 to privately screen it to industry professionals...
Google discontinued their Daydream VR headset and support for Pixel 4 in October 2019, but they still have a number of different initiatives within virtual reality including Tilt Brush, Google Earth VR, games from Owlchemy Labs, WebXR integrations...
Breathe is a Magic Leap, mixed reality experience with four people in shared environment that uses a biometric sensor measuring chest movements in order to explore how our breathing connects us to each other and to the atmosphere. It's a powerful...
Spaced Out is an aquatic virtual reality piece that premiered at the swimming pool at Sundance's Festival Headquarters at the Sheraton Park City Hotel. It uses Ballast VR's DIVR system that includes a waterproof VR headset, a snorkel,as well as a...
Atomu is a social VR experience that premiered at the Sundance New Frontier Biodigital Theater on Friday, January 24, 2020 by co-creators Shariffa Ali (half-Kenyan, half-Ethiopian) and Yetunde Dada (half-Zambian, half-Nigerian) who met growing up in...
Scarecrow is an one-on-one immersive theater piece where you engage with an actor in virtual reality. Every person gets the same structure of a story, but the interactions are customized based upon your actions within the piece. There are a number...
In the final interview of this VR for Good series, I'm featuring the WebXR Device API and how this represents a new open standard that allows for the easy creation and distribution of immersive content.
Rec Room is one of the most successful social VR platforms, and they're also on the most platforms including PC VR, Quest, PSVR, PC 2D, PS4 2D, and most recently iOS phones and tablets. There aren't a lot of other casual social mobile app...
Kai Frazier is a history teacher who decided to make a complete pivot into creating accessible and diverse educational content and kits for education. She curates 360 videos and produces content aimed for underrepresented minorities to be able to...
Queerskins VR is an embodied story that explores the range of experiences from love to loss, and the shame, regret, and fears around sexual identity. It's got a magical realism aesthetic that transports you back to the 80s AIDS crisis as two devout...
One of the most intense interactive storytelling experiences I've ever had was the Accenture AVEnueS training application for child welfare caseworkers.
StoryFile is an interactive storytelling platform that allows you to interact with someone as they tell their story. A comprehensive oral history could be as many as 1000 questions and 20 hours of content, and StoryFile's combination of a...
Home After War is an Oculus VR for Good piece that focuses on the civilian causalities of mines and improvised explosive devices. It uses photogrammetry to recreate an Iraqi home, and features haptics and immerskve sound design to provide an...
On 14 April 2014, the terrorist group Boko Haram kidnapped 276 girls from a sleepy, northeastern Nigerian town called Chibok. While it made news around the world, some of the incumbant Nigerian politicians declared it fake news by the opposition...
Tripp is a VR toolkit to gamify meditation in order to help you self-regulate and perform better. They had a really interesting strategy of bootstrapping the company by targeting corporate wellness clients, which allowed them to create a production...
The Ørsted 360° VR Space Safari by Khora VR is one of the best 360 video pieces I've seen.
Nancy Baker Cahill is an artist who is creating the 4th Wall App AR platform that distributes inclusive, augmented reality art at site-specific, locations that are contested in some way. She launched Battlegrounds: New Orleans in December 2019, and...
I talk with Winslow Porter at Tribeca 2017 about Tree VR, which is an experience catalyzed by the Rainforest Alliance where you embody a tree and experience an accelerated life cycle that comes to a premature end as human activity is catalyzing the...
At the Games for Change 2019 conference, Sharang Biswas gave a presentation on 'Promoting Sex-Positivity Through Analog Games.' He won a grant from The Effing Foundation for Sex Positivity to curate an Erotic Art Games Anthology to be published by...
On November 26, 2016, Rosario Perazolo gave a TEDxCórdoba talk about a wide range of cultural taboos she experiences as someone in a wheelchair. She talks about the transition of ooking at the world from the perspective of someone who was 5'7', but...
I got an update from Traveling While Black director Roger Ross Williams after he's been traveling around the world at different outreach & engagement screenings. I did a deep dive discussion with Williams in my interview with him at the debut at...
Asad J. Malik is an augmented reality artist and director who created Terminal 3, which premiered at Tribeca 2018, and Jester's Tale, which premiered at Sundance 2019.
Amy Zimmerman is a senior producer on the innovation group for media & entertainment at Unity Technologies, and she helped to start the Unity for Humanity contest there. We talk about her inspiration for the project, and what type of projects that...
Vulcan Productions has been producing social impact films and XR experiences since 1997, when it was founded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who passed away in October 2018. Their four main topics they're focused on are climate change, ocean...
Vince Kadlubek is one of the co-founders of Meow Wolf, and at the time of this interview on March 24, 2019 he was the CEO (but he recently resigned in October 2019.)
Marshmallow Laser Feast is one of my favorite studios with projects like Into the Eyes of an Animal, Treehugger, Sweet Dreams, & We Live in An Ocean of Air. Most of their work has only shown at Film Festivals like Sundance or Tribeca, but last year...
#864 VR for Good: Kaleidoscope VR is Connecting XR Artists with Funders at the Impact Reality Summit
René Pinnell originally created Kaleidoscope VR in order to show immersive art and stories around the world. After talking with creators, he realized that the biggest blocker for creating immersive art was securing funding and resources to make the...
Note: This is a sponsored content post from the University University of North Carolina School of the ArtsThe Media + Emerging Technology Lab (METL) is situated within the film school of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, and they...
Kathy Brew tried her first VR experience at NASA Ames in 1985. She's been at the intersection of art of technology for a long time, and she was at IDFA DocLab scouting for immersive experiences as a guest curator of Museum of Modern Art's (MoMA) Doc...
Michaela French has been making large-scale immersive, full dome experiences since 1999, and at IDFA DocLab she was showing her Climate Crimes piece, which explores the complex relationship between global air pollution, climate change and human...
Astrid Feringa had a video essay installation at the IDFA DocLab where she was critiquing how the British Institute of Digital Archaeology was using photogrammetry to reconstruct a piece of destroyed architecture. What are the ethics around...
Caspar Sonnen founded the DocLab as a part of the International Documentary Festival in Amsterdam (IDFA) in 2007 after a period of being really skeptical about some of the early overstated and inflated claims of the transformative power of...
Julia Scott-Stevenson got her practice-based Ph.D. on interactive and immersive documentaries (aka 'i-docs') and social impact with her i-doc Giving Time. She's now a research fellow of interactive factual media at the Digital Cultures Research...
Professor Mandy Rose of the University of the West of England, Bristol is one of the three principle investigators of the Virtual Reality: Immersive Documentary Encounters project that's funded by the UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research...
For two years, the BBC VR Hub was producing VR content to test out the potential for immersive technologies to help fulfill the BBC's mission to inform, educate, and entertain the public. The BBC was able to produce at least 10 projects with half of...
The MIT Open Documentary Lab held it's first official event back on Tuesday, March 20, 2012 a day-long summit called 'The New Arts of Documentary.' Part of the MIT Open Doc Lab's mission is to bring 'storytellers, technologists, and scholars...
ARTE is a French German television network that promotes cultural programming that was started in 1992, and they've been pioneers in the digital space for a long time. They've also funded over 60 VR projects over the past 5 years including many...
Look Inside is an immersive experience the premiered at IDFA DocLab 2019 where you get to take an audio tour of a complete stranger's home. This was one of the hottest tickets in all of IDFA DocLab selling out quickly, and being one of the hardest...
Through the Wardrobe was an augmented reality experience by Rob Eagle about gender identity that took place in a pop-up shop in the hallways of Amsterdam's Central Station. The IDFA DocLab had three storefronts in Central Station this year during...
Last Whispers is a virtual reality experience that visualizes the extinction of languages around the world. Director Lena Herzog says that there are about 7,000 active languages on the planet, but that we're loosing one to two languages a week due...
Alexander Devriendt is an immersive theater creator with the company Ontroerend Goed, and he was presenting an interactive piece about artificial intelligence called Artificial: Room One. It was an early-iteration prototype that is starting to...
Ali Eslami is an Iranian VR creator whose livelong project is an ever-expanding virtual city called False Mirror, and he was showing off the latest edition at IDFA DocLab called Nerd_Funk. Nerd_Funk is a surrealistic, guided tour through an...