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...
Kevin Mack is a VR artist who has created a series of surrealistic immersive experiences including Zen Parade, Blortasia, and Anandala. Mack starts with mathematically-inspired geometric forms that are generated by collapsing a 5-dimensional...
Chelley Sherman is an XR artist who has been working in VR for 4 years, creating audio-visual performances, and exploring how to created heightened, highly-perceptive experiences. Sherman says that her experience with scoliosis early in her life...
Omer Shapira is a developer for VR who does both art and software development, and he's interested in the reciprocal relationship between humans and technology. Shapira started working as a graduate student with Ken Perlin at NYU in 2012, and...
Amelia Winger-Bearskin is a VR director & performance artist who is building communities for artists, creators, and technologies working in emerging technology. She uses metaphor as her primary method for exploring emerging technologies like virtual...
Jakob Kudsk Steensen is a Danish artist who has been creating virtual landscapes for 15 years, and has recently been creating virtual reality environments. Steensen comes from the fine arts world, and he's been working as a VR artist with different...
Estella Tse discovered Tilt Brush at the Unity Vision AR/VR Summit in February 2016 where she met the developers, and became a beta tester where she provided feedback. She was invited to become an artist in residence with Google where she...
Buffalo Vision's Ben Vance is the artist, designer, & director behind Irrational Exuberance: Prologue. He started developing this experience on the Oculus Rift DK1 in 2013, and it wasn't until he saw the Valve Room demo that he was convinced that...
Wesley Allsbrook is an artist, art director, and writer who started as editorial illustrator and comic book creator before working at Oculus Story Studio as the lead artist on Dear Angelica. Allsbrook has been working with Quill since 2015, and she...
Goro Fujita is an artist in residence at Facebook, and he's been creating virtual reality art and animations since 2015 when he started working at Oculus Story Studio as an art director. I had a chance to talk to him at F8 in 2018 where he told me...
Brittan Heller is a technology & human rights fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard University where she is investigating the intersection of technology & policy when it comes to online harassment & hate speech within virtual worlds...
The RLab is a publicly-Funded XR center for research, entrepreneurship, and education located in Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York. It's being managed under NYU's Tandon School of Engineering in collaboration with Columbia, CUNY, & New School. The RLab...