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...
Custom avatars in social VR add a lot of fidelity of identity expression and creative flair in applications like VRChat or High Fidelity. Morph3D is a custom avatar solution that offers a number of free avatars within VRChat, but they also have a...
Anyland is a social VR experience focusing on worldbuilding and avatar creation tools that allow you to create interactive experiences while in VR. They've also implemented an open sharing feature that makes it easy to collect objects from the world...
AltSpaceVR held it's final official Good Bye gathering on Thursday, August 3rd as they announced on July 27th that they had run out of money and their investors decided to not invest any more. News of AltSpaceVR's closing rippled throughout the VR...
Dance is all about bodies moving through space, and it's something that shows the strength of the VR medium since there's something that's lost when it's translated onto a 2D screen. Lily Baldwin observed how audience members heard the music...
Decentraland is a virtual world that is using the Ethereum Blockchain to sell plots of virtual real estate. They're having an initial coin offering for the ERC-20 token MANA from August 8 to August 16, 2017, and they'll have up to 2 million plots of...
The Institute of Noetic Sciences was founded by Apollo 14 Astronaut Edgar Mitchell after he had a mystical experience on the way back from being the sixth man to walk on the moon. After finding a description of his spiritual awakening experience as...
One of the unique affordances of virtual reality is it's power to convey the vastness of scale, which can invoke feelings of awe. Denise Quesnel is a graduate student at Simon Frasier University's iSpace Lab, and she has been studying the process of...
Ida Benedetto is an experiential designer who has developed a framework she calls 'Patterns of Transformation: Designing Sex, Death, and Survival in the 21st Century. She started curating Trespass Adventures, which were private & exclusive one-off...
Dustin Chertoff has pulled experiential design insights from the advertising world to come up with a more holistic theory of presence in virtual reality. In 2008, he was in graduate school and was dissatisfied with the major theories of VR presence...
VR Presence researcher Mel Slater is fascinated by what makes the medium of virtual reality unique and different from other communications mediums. He says that VR activates our sensorimotor contingencies in a way that fools our brain that we're...
Mel Slater's Theory of Presence includes two major components including the Place Illusion (the degree to which you're transported to another world), and the Plausibility Illusion (the degree to which you believe what's happening in that world is...
Nick Ochoa curated some of the top artists producing work entirely in VR for the Magik Gallery show that happened in San Francisco, CA on May 20th. It was an ambitious effort to introduce VR creation tools for artists within a fine arts context in...
Virtual Reality Headsets have not sold as many units as some of the more optimistic analysts have predicted, and VR Fund's Tipatat Chennavasin says that the relatively quick adoption of smart phone technologies have spoiled a lot of people within...
In March 2016, Oculus announced their Oculus Launchpad program with the idea that in order for VR to be successful, then there needs to be a diverse range of content created from diverse set of creators who are informed by different ethnicities...
There was an amazing projection mapped, immersive theater piece at Sundance this year by Heartcorps called 'Riders of the Storyboard.' Trained street performers interacted with a virtual projection-mapped 2D objects, and through the slight of hand...
VR World NYC is a new VR arcade that opened on June 24th in New York City right next to the Empire State Building. They have three floors with 55 different VR experiences, and they're using an all-you-eat buffet business model of paying $39-$49 to...
The process of diagnosing a concussion is largely a subjective process of variations of attention, focus, and balance, which means that the existing self-reporting methods are unreliable and easily gamed. Using foundational research from military...
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...