Owlchemy Labs recently announced that Job Simulator has grossed over $3 million, and so it's worth reflecting on some of the design principles of agency and plausibility that have proven to be some of the key affordances of the virtual reality...
HTC announced the Vive Tracker at CES this year, which will enable a range of VR peripherals that are targeted to from consumers to high-end virtual reality arcades. One of the higher-end peripherals that debuted was VRsenal's VR-15, which has built...
SynTouch has created a system that can quantify the sense of touch on fifteen different dimensions called the SynTouch Standard, and they're one of the most impressive haptic start-ups that I've seen so far. SynTouch isn't creating haptic displays...
Deep in the basement of the Sands Expo Hall at CES was an area of emerging technologies called Eureka Park, which had a number of VR start-ups hoping to connect with suppliers, manufacturers, investors, or media in order to launch a product or idea...
OSSIC debuted their latest OSSIC X headphone prototype at CES this year with one of the best immersive audio demos that I've heard yet. OSSIC CEO Jason Riggs told me that their headphones do a dynamic calibration of your ears in order to render out...
Virtual Reality has the potential to enable so many amazing utopian futures, but it also has the potential to become one of the most intimate surveillance technologies that could create a Big Brother dystopia of political and economic control. But...
The most significant VR announcement from CES 2017 was the Vive Tracker, which is a modular lighthouse tracked 'puck' attachment that will enable users to track additional objects within VR experiences. It has the potential to drive a lot of new...
When I attended the Experiential Technology Conference in May 2016, I heard from a number of commercial off-the-shelf brain-control interface manufacturers that their systems would not natively work with VR headsets because there are some critical...
Brian Van Buren is a narrative designer at Tomorrow Today Labs, and he's also a wheelchair user who has been evangelizing how to make virtual reality experiences more accessible. I had a chance to catch up with him at the Intel Buzz Workshop in June...
In July, I was invited to give a talk about virtual reality at the bi-annual Illustration Conference with indie VR developer Ashley Pinnick, who studied as an artist and illustrator. On today's Voices of VR podcast, we talk about the process of...
There's been more than 30 years of research into the medical applications of virtual reality, but it's not until the recent consumer VR revolution that the technology has been cost-effective enough to use. The research shows that the combination of...
Larry Hodges is a professor of human computer interaction at Clemson University, and he was one of the co-chairs of the very first IEEE VR academic in 1999. Hodges also co-founded a start-up named Recover, which originated from a successful research...
Felix & Paul Studios have been innovating on their own immersive VR camera technology since they pioneered the first-ever stereoscopic VR video with Strangers with Patrick Watson. They went on to sign a deal with Oculus Studios to produce a number...
Dr. Mary Whitton has been working with interactive computer graphics since 1978 and virtual reality since 1994 in collaboration with Dr. Fred Brooks at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I had a chance to talk with Mary back in 2015 at...
Robin Arnott had a peak experience from a LSD trip at Burning Man, and wanted to see if he could replicate this type of peak psychedelic experience within virtual reality. The result of four years of work is a transcendent experience called...
SUPERHOT VR is one of the standout VR games to come out with the Oculus Touch launch with it's unique blend of the mechanics of a first-person shooter but with the strategy of a puzzle game. Physics-based interactions in VR are already compelling...
VR escape room games are one of the emerging genres that are particularly well-suited for the affordances of VR, and Schell games' I Expect You to Die sets the standard for creating this type of puzzle game. I had a chance to catch up with game...
The Khronos Group announced on Tuesday that they have a critical mass of major VR players who are collaborating on a VR open standard. This VR open standard will have a software and hardware component that will enable VR application portability...
The Oculus Touch motion-tracked controllers are launching on December 6th after eight months of the Rift solely supporting gamepad experiences. I wanted to take a moment to dig into some of the more subtle technical nuances when comparing the Oculus...
Hassan Karaouni is one of the 11 winners of an Oculus Launch Pad scholarship for his project My: home, which allows people to share 360 videos of locations that are meaningful to them. In my Voices of VR episode about Google Earth VR, I talked about...
Cultivating presence is one of the main goals for a lot of VR experiences, but our brains are like a black box of perceptual soup that makes it hard to know all of the right ingredients to achieve this. Kimberly Voll is a cognitive scientist...
I had a chance to talk about storytelling in VR with three of the co-founders of Oculus Story Studio during Oculus Connect 3. Saschka Unseld, Maxwell Planck, and Edward Saatchi were showing off a preview of their third VR experience Dear Angelica as...
The language and terminology around virtual reality is still evolving, but the VR community has been settling into using the phrase 'VR Experience' in order to describe the process of a going through a piece of virtual reality content. I had a...
Google Earth VR has been one of the most mind-blowing experiences that I've had so far in VR, for so many different reasons. It's felt like it's been rewiring my brain to accommodate the new perspectives of the earth in a way similar to what...
There was an immersive dome experience at VRLA called Samskara that was based upon the Hindu Vedas produced by 360art. It featured different Hindu mythological characters reimagined by visionary artist Android Jones. I had a chance to talk to...
Depending on who you were rooting for in the US election, last night was either a shocking and sobering wake-up call to a reality that you don't feel a part of or it was a jubilant celebration of a victory that was doubted and underestimated by the...
Google announced at the W3C WebVR workshop in mid-October that they would be shipping a WebVR-enabled Chromium browser in Q1 of 2017. I had a chance to catch up with Josh Carpenter last week to talk about some of the work that Google is doing to...
Some of the earliest experiments of making VR a first-class citizen on the web originated at Mozilla in 2014. Then the WebVR spec was drafted in a collaboration between Mozilla and Google's implementations. There's been a lot of excitement and...
On October 28-31, there was a virtual & augmented reality art show in San Francisco called 'The Art of Dying.' It featured 15 VR experiences and another dozen artists exploring death and grieving using immersive technologies. The show was produced...
The concept of embodied cognition is a hot topic within immersive education circles, and was a featured topic at during the Embodied Learning educational workshop that happened at the IEEE VR academic conference. Embodied Learning could help...
On today's episode, I talk with Dr. Benjamin Lok from the University of Florida about how they're using Virtual Humans as patients to train medical students. He talks about the key components for creating a plausible training scenario which include...
Oculus Story Studio has been exploring VR storytelling through a series of short narrative experiences starting with Lost and Henry, but they wanted to push the envelope of immersive storytelling with their next short titled Dear Angelica. They...
Cognitive VR is an VR analytics platform that has an impressive system for visualizing a player's movements and gaze within a 3D representation of a VR experience. Their SceneExplorer tool translates the 3D geometry from a Unity or Unreal experience...
There's been a couple of key developments in the evolution of WebVR during the month of October. First, Nate Mitchell announced during his Oculus Connect 3 keynote that Oculus will be supporting the WebVR ecosystem with the React VR framework and a...
Stephanie Hurlburt is a low-level graphics engineer who has previously worked on the Unity Game Engine, Oculus Medium, and Intel's Project Alloy, and now she's creating on a texture compression product called Basis at her company Binomial. I had a...
Joel Breton is the Vice President VR Content at HTC, and I had a chance to catch up with him at the Casual Connect conference in July to talk about the different industry verticals that they've identified. These include commerce, games, healthcare...
Valve premiered a prototype of a new type of VR input controller at Steam Dev Days in order to get some preliminary feedback from developers. They've created a capacitive-touch controller that is attached to your hand so that you can open and close...
Oculus Medium may be the first professional 3D modeling creation tool for the Oculus Touch controllers. It was created with the goal to democratize the process of creating 3D art and prototyping 3D-printed objects. The Medium developers didn't set...
Epic Games has had a long history of releasing new demo content at big gaming and developer conferences to showcase the latest Oculus hardware, and this year was no different. Oculus Studios provided funding to further develop the Bullet Train demo...
In this episode of the Voices of VR podcast, I recap some of my highlights from Oculus Connect 3, but also dive into some of my biggest concerns and questions coming out of this year’s big developer conference. My two biggest concerns were the...
VR is a new communications medium, and as such it'll likely be applied to anywhere other existing communications mediums are already used -- such as in courtrooms for presenting evidence. Kineticorp VR has already been presenting 3D forensic...
Reverend Kyle and I recorded a recap of the first day of Oculus Connect 3 as a part of the Oculus Livestream sponsored by Intel. We went around Oculus Connect 3 trying out a number of multiplayer VR experiences with the Oculus Touch and the gamepad...
On October 4th, Google revealed Daydream View, which is their reference design for their mobile VR headset. Google CEO Sandar Pichai also announced the first Daydream-ready phone designed called Pixel, which also has native hardware support for...
At PAX West, Reload Studios made a strong push for cultivating World War Toons as a VR eSports title. They were livestreaming a couple of shoutcasters announcing a four-on-four player capture the flag game of World War Toons, which is a free-to...
Cohh Carnage is a professional Twitch streamer, and I had a chance to catch up with him at PAX West after he had a chance to scout out the expo floor for games that he's interested in streaming. As streamer, he has to cultivate a sense of presence...
Alexander Porter & James George want to democratize volumetric capture with Depthkit. Depthkit combines depth sensor devices like the Kinect or RealSense cameras with high-end digital SLR cameras. They're able to create a 3D mesh from the captured...
Andy Beall is the CEO of Worldviz, and has been doing VR since 1992. I had a chance to catch up with him at SIGGRAPH where he told me about the type of work that Worldviz has been doing in the VR space since 1992, including creating warehouse-scale...
Once a developer creates a VR experience, then the real difficult phase begins in trying to market their experience. VR is a new communication medium, and so traditional photos or videos don't always do the experience justice. At Casual Connect, I...
At VRLA, I had a chance to catch up with Sarah Hill, who is the CEO and Chief Storyteller for StoryUp VR. She's been doing some VR for Good projects including giving virtual Honor Flights for WWII veterans as a part of Honor Everywhere as well as...
The story of how DODOcase started the Google Cardboard VR ecosystem within 24 hours, and became responsible for producing 20% of all of the Cardboard headsets is really quite an incredible story. I had a chance to catch up with CEO and founder Craig...