On July 17th, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was a scheduled passenger flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur that was shot down while flying over eastern Ukraine killing all 298 on board. This has been huge news in the Netherlands, and when...
Duncan Speakman's Only Expansion was an augmented audio tour showing at the IDFA DocLab that was doing real-time modulation of the surrounding soundscape mixed with produced sounds in order to create a unique experience. The headphones had...
In the Event of a Moon Disaster uses AI deep fake and speech synthesis technology to produce a Nixon speech that never happened. Bill Safire wrote a contingency speech on July 18, 1969 for President Richard Nixon to read in the event that something...
Tender Claws' The Under Presents is a landmark experience in the evolution of immersive storytelling. It packs in so many narrative innovations, novel game mechanics, experimental VR interactions, and even includes live immersive theater actors in a...
This is an XR Ethics Manifesto that I presented at Greenlight's XR Strategy Conference on October 18, 2019. This is the culmination of seven focused months of panel discussions, interviews, and talks exploring many of the nuances of ethics and...
Tony Parisi is the Head of AR/VR Ad Strategy at Unity Technologies, and he's committing to taking an ethical approach to advertising. Much of the advertising at Unity is done within the context of a mobile game, and so there is less pressure to...
Wendy Seltzer is the Lead Strategist and Counsel for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and she says that the concerns of privacy and security on the web have been taking up a lot of her time lately. I had a chance to talk to her at Mozilla's View...
The W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) published a set of Ethical Web Principles on May 30, 2019 in order to provide an ethical framework when evaluating new standards. The TAG group doesn't have any formal power in the W3C, but their...
Selena Deckelmann is the Senior Director of Firefox Browser Engineering, and she gave a great talk at Mozilla's View Source conference titled 'Our privacy and the web' that covered a lot of the work that she's been doing to protect user privacy...
Mozilla's Diane Hosfelt is the Privacy and Security Lead on Mozilla’s Mixed Reality Team, and I had a chance to sit down with her again a two months after our SIGGRAPH panel discussion. Hosfelt has been spending a lot of time writing academic papers...
At the VR Privacy Summit in November 2018, I met a number of privacy engineers who were actively implementing privacy-first architectures. I wanted to bring together some a group of these forward-thinking privacy architects together for a more...
Danny O'Brien is the Director of Strategy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has been around since 1990. He describes it as the ACLU for geeks on the Internet as they're made up of technologists, activists, and lawyers who are trying to...
The Virtual World Society provided me an opportunity to give a main stage talk at Augmented World Expo on the Ethical and Moral Dilemmas of Mixed Reality. I tried to lay out as many of the ethical implications of XR as I could in this talk after...
Sophia Batchelor is a recent neuroscientist graduate from UC Berkeley who focused on immersive technologies and neuroethics. We talk about the power of XR for creating new memories, the moral implications of experiential design when XR can be so...
Avi Bar-Zeev has been involved with immersive technologies for over 27 years, including working on the very first prototypes of Microsoft's HoloLens back in 2010. He's mostly been working on secret projects for the last 11 years, and so I got was...
Open AR Cloud held it's first symposium before the start of Augmented World Expo this year, and I participated on a panel discussion on XR Privacy & Security which included the following panelists:
For the past seven months, I've been investigating the topic of ethics in XR by participating on a number of panel discussions, conducting interviews, and presenting talks. At SXSW this year, I was invited by Rory DuBoff, who is Accenture...
Ethics in Mixed Reality is a hot topic, and I moderated a panel discussion at SIGGRAPH. This panel was attended by a number of people in the immersive industry including HTC's Daniel Robbins, who works as a principal UX designer at HTC Creative Labs...
Jon Oakes is the Technology Labs Coordinator at the San Jose State University Library, and he's also been quite involved in helping to organize the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Meetup and Conference. He held a VR Connect gathering at SJSU the day...
Nathaniel de Jong is a VR content creator on YouTube as 'Nathie' who is focusing on Virtual Reality games. I had a chance to talk with him at the Oculus Connect about the VR content ecosystem for games, the curation policies of Oculus and the...
Tested editor Norm Chan has been covering the evolution of Virtual Reality since seeing a early prototype of the Oculus Rift at CES 2013, which was after the initial debut at E3 2012 & the successful Kickstarter in August 2012. So Chan has been...
Andre Elijah is an independent VR developer who recently launched Viewport Interactive working on branded experiences for car companies and beyond. We talk about the Elixir Quest Handracking demo that he tried at Oculus Connect 6, and how it shifted...
Doug North Cook is an assistant professor at Chatham University, and he holds an immersive design residency at Fallingwater architectural landmark in Pittsburg. North Cook is trying to synthesize the many different design frameworks and principles...
Walter Greenleaf has been involved with the intersection of virtual reality and medicine for 35 years, and I had a chance to catch up with him at Oculus Connect in order to get some of his impressions from the keynote announcements. He was at the...
Punchdrunk is a 20 year-old immersive theater company who likes to blur the line between what's real and what's an imaginal dream-like storyworld. They collaborated with Samsung in 2016 to create a blend of immersive theater and virtual reality in...
7 Lives aims to explore the underlying structure of fluidity and interdependence by taking a non-narrative, symbolic, and embodied poetic approach. You witness an experience, and then time freezes as you're able to explore how that event is related...
Bodyless was one of my favorite VR experiences that I saw at the Venice International Film Festival. The experience was the most like walking into someone else's dream that I've ever had in VR. The experience alternated between an on-rails guided...
The Key is an immersive narrative that won the Tribeca Storyscapes and the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival. It uses embodied metaphors and dream logic as a mode of storytelling, and these innovations are extremely effective and powerful...
Maciek Szczerbowski & Chris Lavis of Clyde Henry Productions are stop motion artists at Clyde behind who wanted to deliver a dream while you're awake. They collaborated with Félix & Paul Studios and the National Film Board Interactive of Canada on...
There's been a virtual reality training revolution that's been slowly brewing over the last five years, and STRIVR has been at the forefront of innovation working with everyone from elite athletes in the NFL to thousands of Walmart employees. STRIVR...
Healium XR won the XR pitch competition at CES and SXSW this year for their immersive experiences that respond to biometric data. I saw the first demo of Healium XR (powered by StoryUp) back in 2017 at Oculus Connect 4, which I talk about more here...
Joel Zylberberg has a background in physics and cosmology, but then he got interested in theoretical neuroscience and he's been researching the nature of perception in humans and in machines through the lens of computational neuroscience. He's the...
University of Cambridge's Dr. David Menon is a clinical neurointensivist who is specializing in traumatic brain injury. He's an advisor for the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Azrieli Brain, Mind & Consciousness program, and he was an...
Laurel Trainor is the Director of McMaster Institute for Music and the Mind, which has a LIVElab concert hall for 100 people that allows her to do a lot of studies in the relationship between musical performance and how it's received by an audience...
CTRL-labs is creating neural interfaces for robotics and immersive worlds that leverage electromyography (EMG) signals that are radiated from muscle contractions. This gives them the ability to isolate individual motor neurons, which is opening up a...
Dr. Sook-Lei Liew is an assistant professor at the University of Southern California, and the director of the Neural Plasticity & Neurorehabilitation Labatory at USC. At IEEE VR 2017, she was showing off a DIY Brain Computer Interface called...
Neurable is building a brain-computer interface that integrates directly into the virtual reality headset. Neurable uses dry EEG sensors from Wearable Sensing, which means that it doesn't require gel in order to get a good signal from the EEG making...
UCSF professor Adam Gazzaley is a pioneer in the realm of experiential medicine as he's getting a video game approved by the FDA for ADHD treatment. He's a co-founder of Akili Interactive and the chief scientist at JAZZ Venture partners, where he's...
MindMaze is creating Brain-Computer Interface that's integrated with VR head-mounted displays, and they're also creating immersive technologies that neurorehabilitation. I had a chance to talk with MindMaze founder and CEO Tej Tadi at the XTech...
Noah Falstein started as a game design pioneer back in 1980, and lately he's been collaborating a lot with virtual reality companies like MindMaze, Akili Interactive Labs, StoryUp, and AppliedVR on different immersive medical applications and...
The Canadian Institute for Advanced Research invited me to moderate a panel discussion at GDC titled 'The Future of VR: Neuroscience and Biosensor Driven Development' featuring CIFAR scholars Craig Chapman and Alona Fyshe, as well as Jake Stauch...
Craig Chapman is a movement neuroscientist at the University of Alberta, and he's received an EEG in the Wild grant form the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research in order to study the combination of movement tracked by VR technologies, eye gaze...
Alex Coulombe's Agile Lens takes an interdisciplinary approach to immersive technologies at the intersection between theater and architecture. He was showing off a demo piece called That Kind of Guy at XR for Change, which explored a variety of...
I speak with three recent graduates of architecture school about how they're using virtual spaces for speculative design. Paula Strunden is working with the interface between physical objects and mixed reality environments. Nicholas Zembashi uses...
Richard Lemarchand directed a minimalist VR experience with the USC Game Innovation Lab
Andreea Ion Cojocaru is one of the few architects who is designing both virtual experiences as well as real buildings with Numena VR. I first met her in Germany during VR Now in November where I talked to her about her award-winning experiments in...
Architects Anna Mill & Luke Jones spent eight years creating a graphic novel called Square Eyes that explores the speculative design of augmented reality technologies and interfaces. They see this project as an in-depth paper architecture...
Yasmin Yesilipek is an architecture student at the Architectural Association who has been primarily focusing on virtual reality. She's been creating spaces for online gatherings, and trying to recreate a campfire digitally through experimenting with...
Space Popular is a multidisciplinary design and research practice led by Lara Lesmes & Fredrik Hellberg, and they've been architecture students for the last eight years about spatial design as well as the latest immersive technologies. They've been...
Robin Stethem & Colin Northway want to start a movement of virtual reality art. They've built the Museum of Other Realities (aka 'MOR'), which is a virtual gallery space that has VR pieces from some of the top virtual reality artists in the industry...