Live Action Role Playing (LARPing) is something that emerged out of table top games like Dungeons & Dragons in the 1970s driven by a desire to be more immersed in living out fantasy scenarios. Boffer LARPs use foam weapons to simulate D&D-style...
Tommy Honton is an experiential designer in the immersive theater space, and he's helped to design interactive narratives that can handle a range of different disruptive responses that can ruin the experience for other people. One question for all...
John Bucher wrote a book titled 'Storytelling for Virtual Reality: Methods and Principles for Crafting Immersive Narratives' where he includes interviews with dozens of VR experience designers and the major insights into immersive storytelling...
Miyubi is Felix & Paul Studios' first scripted narrative piece that is 40 minutes in length, and it transports you to the early 1980s as you embody an imminently obsolete toy robot. Felix & Paul instructed the individual actors to unexpectedly try...
Punchdrunk's immersive theater piece of Sleep No More opened in March 2011, and it's inspired countless experiential designers of immersive theater, and virtual and augmented reality experiences. It was a paradigm shift that broke the fourth wall...
The Immersive Design Summit brought together over 150 of the top experiential designers from around the world, mostly from the performance community of immersive theater productions and escape rooms, but also with a small number of people focusing...
The Columbia University School of the Arts' Digital Storytelling Lab has been conducting interactive storytelling experiments to create guidelines, rules, and structures for facilitating emergent and interactive stories through an open-ended...
VRChat is becoming one of the top streamed VR game as different Twitch personalities like pokelawls, dyrus, greekgodx, and LIRIK and YouTube personalities Jameskii & Nagzz21 start to role play in virtual worlds, and then capture clips of candid and...
OSSIC's Jason Riggs told me at CES last year that the future of music is going to be immersive and interactive. Interactive sound design where user agency is considered a part of the experience is a key ingredient to creating fully immersive audio...
Emilie Joly says that the rules of interaction are the stories within interactive narratives, and Apelab is creating the Spatial Stories plug-in and toolset in order to make it easier to define those rules. Unity uses an object-oriented approach for...
Otoy is a rendering company that pushing the limits of digital light fields and physically-based rendering. Now that Otoy's Octane Renderer has shipped in Unity, they're pivoting from focusing on licensing their rendering engine to selling cloud...
Over the past couple of years, Dani Bittman has logged over 1800 hours in programs like Tiltbrush & Google Blocks on her way to becoming a full-time VR artist. Bittman started studying film, but realized that she had a lot to catch up with of over...
Soundboxing is a VR rhythm game that has found a community of people who use it for exercising in VR, with some people reporting that they've lost up to 50 pounds from playing it. Soundboxing is similar to Audioshield in that you punch orbs set to...
After talking to a lot of independent VR storytellers, Kaleidoscope VR's René Pinnell identified that funding was one of the biggest blockers for continued experimentation. Cinematic VR pieces do not have many established distribution channels yet...
Linda Jacobson got into VR when she helped organize the 1990 CyberArts International gathering of artists and technologists who were using virtual reality technologies. She edited a compilation of CyberArts essays from that first gathering, and she...
Jaron Lanier is a pioneer of the first commercially-available virtual reality systems with his VPL Research Inc startup that was founded in 1984. He has written a memoir called Dawn of the New Everything about his life leading up to and during his...
Every culture around the world has their own beliefs around what happens to us after we die, and virtual reality may be a great medium to explore all of these different rituals and mythologies. The Tibetan Book of the Dead contains descriptions of...
In 1978, a number of film scholars gathered at a conference in Brighton to re-evaluate the early days of film in terms of a developing new medium on it's own terms rather than though the lens of a mature narrative and storytelling communications...
Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL) premiered an experience called Becoming Homeless: A Human Experience at the Tribeca Film Festival in April. It was an experiment researching whether it's possible to cultivate empathy through emboding...
Cognitive scientist and phenomenologist Lynda Joy Gerry got into virtual reality after seeing the body swap experiments by Machine to Be Another as well as Shawn Gallager's A Neurophenomenology of Awe and Wonder research. Gerry's master's thesis was...
STRIVR started as a VR training platform for elite athletes for college and professional quarterbacks, but they've been recently expanding into corporate training for Walmart. Over 200 Walmart Academy location will soon be equipped with virtual...
I recently gave the keynote at the Immersive Technology Conference in Houston, TX where I talked about the many different maps that I use to understand reality & virtual reality. Because virtual reality is simulating reality, then a lot of these...
Auto is a 360-video and morality tale available on Jaunt that takes a near-future look at the human impact of automation and emerging technology. It's not a grotesque satire in the vein of Black Mirror, but it's done in a more of a future realistic...
Patrick Hagan is a technical specialist for the Houston Fire Department who had an opportunity to try out a VR demo by HTX Labs featuring an active shooter critical response training scenario. This demo inspired him to start collaborating with HTX...
Ravé Mehta talks about how he was able to deal with recovering from a health condition through achieving progressively deeper, longer, and more consistent levels of flow states. He talks about his holistic philosophy of flow, what he learned from...
VR represents a shift from telling stories to building story worlds that people experience and interact with. There is a process of world building and experiential design that first creates the conditions of the environment, and then the full...
The Dark Corner app is creating a new distribution channel for immersive horror experiences and 360-degree videos. Guy Shelmerdine and Teal Greyhavens are hoping that fans of the horror genre will be enthusiastic enough about the potential of VR to...
UTURN is a 360-degree video that seamlessly blends together two 180-degree hemisphere worlds containing parallel storylines of two different perspectives at a tech start up. One perspective is from a male founder's point of view and the other...
Without explicitly announcing a new specific product, Samsung quietly implied that they may be developing a new standalone mobile VR HMD during a session during their developer conference last week. While there were no big VR announcements during...
Facebook's Oculus Connect 4 developer conference happened last week, and I share some of the highlights including my hands-on impression of the standalone Santa Cruz headset, the latest updates from Facebook Spaces, and a number of updates to be...
There is a growing backlash against technology being catalyzed by some of the architects of the persuasive habit-forming techniques. The Guardian does a survey of user experience designers and engineers who are taking drastic actions to curtail...
At Google's 10/4 press conference, they announced a new Pixel 2 phone and a range of new ambient computing devices powered by AI-enabled conversational interfaces including new Google Mini and Max speakers, Google Clips camera, and wireless Pixel...
Brian Blau is the vice president of research for personal technologies at Gartner Research where he's in the business of making predictions about the consumer adoption of virtual reality and augmented reality technologies. I last interviewed Blau in...
Ramez Naam is the author of The Nexus Trilogy sci-fi novels, which explores the moral and sociological implications of technology that can directly interface with the brain. He gave the keynote at the Experiential Technology Conference in March...
Kevin Mack is an Oscar-winning visual effects artist and abstract artist who creates digital spaces with fluidly moving textures that are awe-inspiring in it's ability to create a novel experience unique to VR. In Blortasia you float weightlessly...
The sexual harassment lawsuit against UploadVR was reported to be settled via Tech Crunch on September 6th, and a week later the New York Times followed with more details about how Upload had been barely dented. The case was settled without any...
ARQUA! was one of the ARKit launch applications that was designed by VR veteran Isaac 'Cabbibo' Cohen, and it has the same indie charm and shader art aesthetic as his previous VR experiences of Blarp! and L U N E. ARQUA's gameplay involves you...
Intel is investing in the future of immersive computing through their Virtual Reality Center for Excellence. They're pushing the boundaries of high-end of VR gaming experiences, pursuing initiatives to help VR reach critical mass, and exploring how...
The White House VR documentary People's House by Felix & Paul Studios won a Emmy for the outstanding original interactive, and I had a chance to talk with Paul Raphael about how the challenges of producing a high-profile piece. They didn't know how...
Do patients with anorexia nervosa suffer from body image distortion due to how they perceive their body or is it due to attitudinal beliefs? Betty Mohler has been using VR technologies to study whether body representation is more perceptual or...
Marshmallow Laser Feast is a collective of artists who are interested in using VR technologies to capture the aesthetic beauty of nature, and provide immersive experiences that inspire people to cultivate an even deeper with the reality that...
The National Theatre has created an Immersive Storytelling Studio to better understand the practices, protocols, opportunities of how virtual and augmented reality technologies are creating new storytelling possibilities. They collaborated with the...
One of the most emotionally-moving VR experiences that I've had in VR was bearing witness to Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter share his experiences at Majdanek Concentration Camp in The Last Goodbye. Gutter not provides a guided tour, but he is...
The design team behind Bioflight VR has worked on television shows such as CSI and ER, and they've been able to translate their VFX visualization skills into a virtual reality medical education venture. Their original plans were to use virtual...
Dr. Skip Rizzo heads the Medical VR Research Group at USC's Institute for Creative Technologies, which has been exploring how to use VR for psychological treatments, cognitive assessment, motor rehabilitation therapy, as well as interactions with...
Dean Radin is the lead scientist of the Institute of Noetic Sciences where he's been working on cutting-edge consciousness research of showing measurable mind and matter interactions with quantum phenomena. He's published 17 papers showing...
The hard problem of the mind/body split and the ultimate nature consciousness is an open question in the science community, and there are a range of philosophies that try to handle this split. Cartesian dualists explicitly acknowledge this split as...
Killing Floor: Incursion is a horror game featuring lots of gore that is sure to evoke visceral reactions in players. I had a chance to play a demo at GDC, and I can say that it's definitely an experience has stuck with me. The mechanics of beating...
Dr. Marilyn Schlitz is a social anthropologist, consciousness researcher, and co-author of the books Consciousness & Healing and Living Deeply. Her anthropological work has been at the frontier of researching how different cultures use various...
Gunter S. Thompson has been hosting VR meetups in VRChat for the past 3 years where he will give guided tours through the latest additions to the VRChat metaverse, and he also hosts a live talk show every Tuesday called 'Gunter's Universe.' I had a...