Google announced some new features for ARCore at Google I/O last week including Sceneform to help Java developers integrated 3D content into apps, augmented images to trigger immersive AR experiences off of trained images, and cloud anchors to...
May 16th is the five-year anniversary for Silicon Valley Virtual Reality meetup, and founder Karl Krantz is announcing a couple of new initiatives as SVVR reorganizes itself as a public-benefit corporation. They're going to be formally announcing...
Google's mission statement is to 'organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful,' and so it's a natural fit that they'd be a leader in creating educational experiences for AR & VR. Google Expeditions continues to...
The Oculus Go was released on Tuesday, May 1st at the Facebook F8 developer conference, and it is a self-contained, 3-DoF mobile VR HMD with a price of $199 that is optimized for media consumption and social VR interactions. Facebook showed off four...
Beat Saber is a rhythm game that is like an embodied puzzle game that creates a visceral connection to 10 custom music tracks. It's similar to Soundboxing and Audio Shield, but you use extended light sabers rather than your fists, which makes you...
Matt Miesnieks is creating an AR cloud with 6D.AI, which aims to 'synchronize 3D computer vision data across devices, time and space' in order to enable 'persistent content, occlusion, and real-time shared experiences.' Miesnieks has founded a...
One of the things that inspires me to do the Voices of VR podcast is being able to talk with hundreds of people listening for the underlying patterns of experiential design. VR & AR are reflections of the human experience, and so any experiential...
Oculus will be releasing a new Privacy Policy and Terms of Service tomorrow that will go into effect on May 20th, just five days before the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) privacy law enforcement deadline of May 25th. I had a chance...
John Root co-founded VRLA with Cosmo Scharf in 2014, and it has organically grown into a thriving VR event with over 10,000 attendees in the Los Angeles Convention Center. VRLA is a non-profit where funding from sponsors helps to support about half...
Keiichi Matsuda went from being a dystopian filmmaker to becoming the vice president of design at hand-tracking company Leap Motion. Matsuda is probably the most famous for his HYPER-REALITY dystopian filmthat imagined an commodified & gamified AR...
The open metaverse is going to be built on web standards like the WebXR Device API (formly WebVR), but the larger community of web developers has been waiting to fully commit to building immersive WebVR experiences until there's universal support in...
The future of VR storytelling will be immersive and interactive. Yelena Rachitsky is an executive producer of experiences at Oculus, and she's been inspired by how interactive narratives have allowed her to feel like a participant who is more...
Ready Player One was released on March 29th, and the current VR experience that comes the closest to realizing the vision of the OASIS depicted in the movie is the social VR experience of VRChat. By 2045, I predict that we'll have a decentralized...
What is happening with the VR industry? Is the adoption and growth still on target to support a vibrant and diverse ecosystem of independent VR developers? Leading headset manufacturers have not been transparent in sharing any specific information...
Ela Darling calls herself the 'Queen of VR porn' as she co-founded CAM4 and became the first virtual reality cam girl from VR tech integrations that her company developed. She shared her founding story with me in a previous interview in 2015, and I...
The VR Unicorns use a rapid iteration, game jamming approach to VR development, and co-founder Julie Heyde does daily playtesting and quality assurance gathering feedback and guidance for the development team. Heyde has also been experiencing a...
Darryll Starr is a former game developer who now teaching underprivileged youth how to create VR experiences with Unity at the David E Glover Education and Technology Center in Oakland, CA. Starr is the lead instructor and curriculum developer who...
The Columbia Digital Storytelling Lab had a design research project at Sundance that is exploring new models of cooperative storytelling and collaborative sensemaking, but it was also on the bleeding edge of integrating technologies ranging from...
Each year, the Sundance New Frontier features VR experiences, films, and live performances that push the boundaries of storytelling. Cory McAbee did live performance of a piece called Deep Astronomy and the Romantic Sciences, which combines elements...
The Sundance Film Festival's New Frontier Program featured over 20 different VR, AR, and AI experiences that were pushing the boundaries of immersive storytelling. After seeing all of the experiences, I had a chance to unpack and analyze the larger...
Tony Parisi is the Head of AR & VR strategy at Unity so he has an insider's perspective of not only where the VR and AR industry is today, but some hints as to what xR is going to look like by 2025. Parisi had a fireside chat with HTC Viveport...
The full release of CloudGate Studios' VR survival game Island 359 is now available, and there's some special embodiment features for anyone who has 1-3 of HTC's Vive Trackers. They've developed an adaptive system that uses 1 tracking puck on your...
Felix & Paul Studios had two experiences at Sundance this year. One featured the training of NASA astronauts in Space Explorers, and the other was a time-lapse VR story featuring characters from Wes Anderson's Ilse of Dogs film in front half with a...
Holonet is an open source project that implements the Decentralized Identity Specifications for open web VR platforms like WebXR. A self-sovereign identity system could enable the seamless portability of your avatar identity across multiple sites...
Rose Colored by INVAR Studios & Adam Cosco won the award for best live-acton VR experience at the Advanced Imaging Society's Lumiere Awards on February 12th. I previously interviewed Cosco at VRLA last year, and I had a chance to talk with INVAR's...
At SIGGRAPH 2017, NVIDIA was showing off their Isaac Robot that had been trained to play dominos within a virtual world environment of NVIDIA's Project Holodeck. They're using Unreal Engine to simulate interactions with people in VR to train a robot...
The Sun Ladies VR is an amazing story about a group of Yazidi women from the Northern Iraq community of Sinjar, who escaped as sex slaves and started an all-female unit to fight ISIS. ISIS raided the Sinjar District in August 2014 and massacred over...
Tender Claws' Virtual Virtual Reality is a Daydream-exclusive interactive story that won the best VR experience at the 2017 Google Play Awards VR, and it's one of my personal favorite interactive narratives within VR. Virtual Virtual Reality (aka...
Tender Claws, the creators of the award-winning interactive VR narrative Virtual Virtual Reality, premiered a new, site-specific, interactive AR narrative experience at the Sundance New Frontier called TendAR. It was a social augmented reality...
The HaptX Glove that was showed at Sundance was one of the most convincing haptics experiences that I've had in VR. While it was still primitive, I was able to grab a virtual object in VR, and for the first time have enough haptic feedback to...
Dinner Party is an immersive exploration of Betty and Barney Hill's alien abduction story that premiered at the Sundance New Frontier. Rather than using normal alien abduction tropes, writers Laura Wexler & Charlotte Stoudt chose to use the spatial...
Sundance New Frontier had a solid line-up of VR experiences this year with a number of immersive storytelling innovations including SPHERES: Songs of Spacetime, which takes you on a journey into the center of a black hole. It's a hero's journey that...
Jeremy Bailenson founding director of Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, and his latest book Experience on Demand traces his academic journey through virtual reality. It's an intellectual memoir that focuses on his personal work in...
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...