Oculus premiered about a dozen games ahead of GDC this year, and one that stood out to me was Mage's Tale dungeon crawler for it's distinct art style and passion in using VR to fulfill childhood fantasies of becoming a spell-casting magician. Mage's...
My favorite narrative VR piece that I've seen so far this year is Rose Colored by Adam Cosco that premiered at VRLA. It's a science fiction morality tale that is asking us to look at a potential future of immersive technology. I'm cautious to say...
Sprint Vector is an 'adrenaline platformer' racing game that relies upon a unique locomotion technique of swinging your arms in order to run through an obstacle course. It's the latest game from Raw Data developer Survios, but with a much more light...
AxonVR was awarded US Patent No. 9,652,037 of a 'whole-body human-computer interface' on May 16th, which includes an external exoskeleton as well as a generalized haptic display made out of microfluidic technology. I had a chance to demo AxonVR's...
Augmented Reality has played a huge role at the developer conferences for Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Google, which is a great sign that the industry is moving towards spatially-aware computing. Microsoft is the only company to start with head...
There's an invisible cyber war that's happening between major nation states, and Zero Days VR takes you inside of it in a completely new way using virtual reality. You go on a journey into a hyper-stylized cyberspace world where you embody the...
Funomena's Woorld won the best AR experience at the recent Google Play awards. You scan your room with a Google Tango-enabled phone, and then you're encouraged to decorate your space with extremely cute art and characters designed by Katamari's...
Testimony is one of the most profound and powerful applications of virtual reality that I've seen so far. It's an experimental documentary that captures the stories of sexual assault from five women broken up into five segments. You're completely...
Kyle Russell is on the deal & research team for Andreessen Horowitz (aka A16z) where he's focusing on investing in technologies ranging from virtual & augmented reality, artificial intelligence, drones, and other exponential technologies like...
Google's mission to organize all of the world's information, and so it's a natural fit for Google to be one of the leading innovators for using VR for immersive education. Google Expeditions was born out of a hackathon soon after the Google Carboard...
Mozilla's mission statement is to ensure that the Internet remains a global public resource, open and accessible to all, and they've been helping bring VR to the web for the past three years. A-Frame is an open source framework that has gained a lot...
Google's mission is to organize the world's information, and so they've been long-time advocates for the open web. At Google I/O last week, they announced that they'll soon be shipping Google Chrome for Android with WebVR, and that they're going to...
Cory Doctorow's new sci-fi book 'Walkaway' is a optimistic disaster novel that imagines what society might look like if people walked away from competitive market-driven laws, norms, and technological infrastructure and into an open-source inspired...
The HoloLens is the most impressive augmented reality HMD on the market today, and their developer kit is already being deployed into production in industries ranging from architecture, engineering, design, sales, medicine, and education. Microsoft...
The Microsoft Build conference starts this week, and I expect that we'll be learning more about the HoloLens as well as Microsoft's Windows Mixed Reality operating system. Microsoft has been evangelizing about virtual reality the past couple of...
Philip Rosedale has been thinking deeply about how to architect large-scale, distributed virtual worlds after experiencing many bottlenecks in running Second Life. High Fidelity is taking a much more distributed approach with how it's being...
Eric Matzner identifies as a Techno-Optimistic Futurist who sometimes works an entire second workday within VR exploring different ways to expand his mind. He's pushing the limits of mental presence by using nootropic supplements for cognitive...
The keynote from Unity's Vision VR/AR Summit yesterday showcased just how far Unity is reaching into non-gaming content when it comes to augmented and virtual reality. The person who is in charge of Unity's xR strategy is Tony Parisi, who is a co...
UploadVR opened up their new 20,000 square foot Upload LA co-working space on April 13, 2017. I had a chance to catch up with co-founders Taylor Freeman and Will Mason as VRLA to get the inside scoop. Mason told me that opening up this huge co...
The Tribeca Film Festival featured over 30 different VR experiences within their Storyscapes and Immersive Virtual Arcade, and I had a chance to catch up with curator Loren Hammonds about some of the highlights of the festival program with genres...
Mark Pesce is a VR pioneer who has been thinking about networked virtual and augmented reality for over 20 years now. He developed the Ono-Sendai Sega VR helmet prototype, co-created VRML, and presented his Cyberspace Protocol spec at the first Web...
Back in 2015, Neuroscientist David Eagleman gave a TED talk about the potential to expand and create new senses. He showed off a haptic vest prototype that could translate audio input into an array of 32 vibrating motors that could be fed directly...
At Sundance this year, I had a chance to catch up with a couple of representatives from Google to talk about what's happening on the YouTube VR platform with 360 videos. I talked with Jamie Byrne, YouTube's Director of Global Creator & Enterprise...
One of the most immersive flying experiences that I've had a chance to have so far was Mindride Airflow. I had a chance to try it out last fall at VRLA, and the weightless harness combined with a variety of different wind speeds gave me a deep sense...
Shooting a bow and arrow in VR is a satisfying game mechanic. It uses both hands in a 6-DoF interaction that can only happen in VR. VR Unicorns' #Archery takes this bow and arrow shooting mechanic to the logical extreme in a quirky fashion that's...
April 4th was the one-year anniversary of the HTC Vive, and HTC released the subscription service for Viveport for $6.99 to try out five new VR applications per month. I had a chance to catch up with Viveport president Rikard Steiber at GDC to talk...
Shari Frilot started the New Frontier at Sundance in 2007, and programmed the festival's first VR experience in 2012 with Nonny de la Peña's Hunger in LA using an early Oculus Rift prototype made by Palmer Luckey. Frilot has since programmed around...
I had the chance to give the keynote at the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference where I provide some historical context for virtual reality tracing the evolution of communications mediums in order to contextualize my elemental theory of...
I had a chance to catch up with Oculus' Nate Mitchell at GDC where I asked him about privacy in VR. Oculus has delegated the design and maintenance of their privacy policy to their parent company of Facebook so that Oculus can focus on providing the...
The developers at Harmonix didn't set out to create an open-ended music creativity tool with Rock Band VR, but once they realized how compelling it was to simulate the feeling of being a rock star on stage in VR, then they completely pivoted the...
Advanced Brain Monitoring is a 17-year old neurotechnology company that has been able to extract a lot of really useful information from EEG data. They've developed specific EEG Metrics for drowsiness, inducing flow states, engagement, stress...
I recently attended the Experiential Technology Conference where there were a lot of companies looking at how to use biometric data to get insights into health & wellness, education for cognitive enhancement, and market research. Over the next...
When I was at the GDC VR Mixer, Jim Preston struck up a conversation about his concerns about privacy in VR. He works at the VR eye tracking company of FOVE, but wanted to speak to me on his own behalf about some of the deeper philosophical...
I believe that the principle of Embodied Cognition is probably one of the most significant and important concepts to understand about virtual reality. Cognitive science researchers have been connecting the dots the importance of our bodies when it...
The eye tracking company Tobii had some VR demos that they were showing on the GDC Expo Hall floor as well as within Valve's booth. They were primarily focusing on the new user interaction paradigms that are made available by using eye gazing to...
At GDC this year, SensoMotoric Instruments (SMI) showed a couple of new eye tracking demos at Valve's booth. They added eye tracking to avatars in the social VR experiences of Pluto VR and Rec Room, which provided an amazing boost to the social...
Using language to translate an experience into words is one of the highest levels of abstraction that you can have. Using the power of visual metaphor through poetry is able to get to deeper levels of emotion, and virtual reality is able to remove...
Labs is a immersive design collective made up of women of color, and they had a sci-fi VR experience at Sundance this year called Neurospeculative Afrofeminism. Their VR experience features black women as some of the pioneers of brain optimization...
Last week BigscreenVR announced that they raised $3 million dollars for their 'social utility' VR application. BigscreenVR gives you access to your computer screen in VR, which is a deceptively simple idea but one that is unlocking new ways of...
Valve's Joe Ludwig talks about the latest updates on the Khronos Group's VR standardization process that is now being called 'OpenXR.' Ludwig says that OpenXR is still primarily creating an open and royalty-free open standard for virtual reality...
Danfung Dennis has an ambitious vision for the potential of virtual reality, and it's one of the most radical ones that I've come across. He believes that VR can be used as a tool to cultivate compassion through having an embodied experience of...
Tilt Brush launched on the Oculus Rift today, and I had a chance to catch up with Tilt Brush product manager Elisabeth Morant, launching. We have a broad discussion about adapting Tilt Brush for the Touch controllers, the Tilt Brush Artist in...
Alvin Wang Graylin is the China President of Vive at HTC, and I had a chance to talk with him at CES this year about what's happening in China. He provided me with a lot of cultural context, which includes support from the highest levels of Chinese...
At Unity's Unite keynote in November, Otoy's Jules Urbach announced that their Octane Renderer was going to be built into Unity to bake light field scenes. But this is also setting up the potential for real-time ray tracing of light fields using...
Within premiered their first real-time rendered, interactive experience at Sundance New Frontier this year with Life of Us, which is the story of life on the planet as told through embodying a series of characters who are evolving into humans. The...
Human Interact announced this past week that they are collaborating with Microsoft's Cognitive Services in order to power the conversational interface behind their Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, interactive narrative title named Starship Commander...
Jessica Brillhart is the principle filmmaker for virtual reality at Google, and she been exploring the cross section of artificial intelligence and storytelling in VR. I had a chance to catch up with her at Sundance again this year where we did a...
Last year, Baobab Studios' Eric Darnell was skeptical about adding interactivity to virtual reality stories because he felt like there was a tradeoff between empathy and interactivity. But after watching people experience their first VR short...
There are a number of immersive storytelling innovations Sundance 2017 in a number of experiences including Dear Angelica, Zero Day VR, Miyubi, and Life of Us, but Mindshow VR's collaborative storytelling platform was the most significant long-term...
Gabo Arora founded the United Nations VR, and directed some for the more well-known VR empathy experiences starting with Clouds Over Sidra in December 2014 in collaboration with Chris Milk and Here Be Dragons. Milk first showed Clouds Over Sidra...