uSens is working on gestural input and inside-out tracking for both AR and VR. I had a chance to catch up with uSens' vice president of product development, Yiwen Rong, at GDC in March to talk about some of their current tracking research and larger...
Anshel Sag is an analyst for Moore Insights and Strategies where he has focused on mobile computing platforms. I had a chance to catch up with him at VRLA where talked about his content highlights there as well as why he thinks that 2017 is going to...
Ken Perlin is a professor of computer science at NYU, and is researching how to use VR to enhance social interactions. I had a chance to talk with him about that as well as how he's combined his passions for math and art with his procedural textures.
I talk with Shauna Heller from Clay Park VR about here thoughts about non-entertainment and non-gaming VR content in education, medicine, and enterprise applications.
I had a chance to do a demo of Eyefluence, which has created a new model for eye interactions within virtual and augmented reality apps. Rather than using the normal eye interaction paradigm of dwelling focus or explicitly winking to select...
In 1968, Douglas Engelbart gave 'The Mother of All Demos' where he gave the first public demonstration of a mouse as a computer control device. For the last 48 years, the mouse and keyboard have remained the primary input devices for Human Computer...
When I was at SIGGRAPH this year, one of the hottest topics was figuring out the workflows for how to deal with the complexity of capturing, processing, and distributing volumetric digital light fields. Otoy's Jules Urbach had a lot of insights, and...
Dungeons & Dragons is a form of collaborative storytelling that isn't constrained by time or budget. Because it's all happening within the theater of the mind, then if you can imagine it, then it can be constructed instantaneously within everyone's...
HBO premiered a VR experience for their new Westworld series at TechCrunch Disrupt, and they used Spherica's camera stabilization technology in order to pull off an extended live-action tracking shot in VR. Common advice given to new VR filmmakers...
When Ted Schilowitz was looking for what to do after traveling the world as the first RED Camera employee, he happened upon an opportunity to serve as a futurist for 20th Century Fox for looking at how to use emerging technologies for storytelling...
One of the best VR experiences I did at PAX West this year was Funomena's Luna, which is a unique blend of tactile puzzles, creative world building, musical improvisation within the context of an emotionally-charged narrative. Luna is designed by...
It was on a San Jose sidewalk in 2015 that I first tried the SubPac, and it blew me away. I felt like I was immediately transported into a dance club standing in front of giant subwoofers with the soundwaves of bass rippling through my body, but yet...
OptiTrack premiered a new demo at GDC that shows the extent of their tracking technology precision. They put passive tracking markers on a basketball and football that allowed people to go toss a ball back and forth to each other in VR. I had a...
The IEEE VR held a new pre-conference workshop this year on Virtual Humans and Crowds for Immersive Environments. Movies like Lord of the Rings and video games like Assassin's Creed use this research in order to create convincing group behaviors...
I had a chance to try out the Manus VR hand-tracked controller on the expo floor of GDC this year, and saw that there a couple of really strong use cases for having your hands and fingers tracked in VR. You can be a lot more expressive within Social...
When Owlchemy Labs' Alex Schwartz saw that Rick and Morty creator Justin Roiland was a fan of their Job Simulator VR experience, then he reached out and met up with Justin in Los Angeles. They came up with the idea of creating an interactive Rick...
When Rand Miller was a kid, he played Dungeons & Dragons with his brother Robyn where they would go on adventures together exploring and creating imaginal worlds. They wanted to embed that same sense of wonder and awe of exploration and discovery...
Stephanie Harvey (aka 'missharvey') is a professional eSports gamer playing Counter-Strike: Global Offensive with the Counter Logic Gaming Red team. I had a chance to catch up with her at PAX West to talk about the future of eSports in VR, the...
Theresa Duringer has a fear of flying, and rather than treating her aviophobia with VR exposure therapy she's been experimenting with using VR to just completely opt out of the real-life signals of the flying experience altogether. She's found some...
When Derek Belch was a kicker on Stanford's football team in 2004, he took a class with the Virtual Human Interaction Lab's Jeremy Bailenson where he was exposed to virtual reality technologies for the first time. Belch asked Bailenson if it was...
Sensomotoric Instruments (SMI) is a German-based eye tracking company who has released an eye tracking kit for the Oculus DK2 & Gear VR, and most recently for the HTC Vive. At SIGGRAPH this year, Nvidia was showing a foveated rendering demo where it...
TheWave VR coordinated two days worth of DJs playing musical sets in the world's first VR Rave at VRLA. It was TheWave's first event since announcing that they raised a round of $2.5 million to build out an interactive, VR music concert platform. I...
Originally launched in 2012, Sketchfab has grown to be the largest social media website for sharing 3D objects and scenes with over 500,000 members and close to 1 million experiences. At SIGGRAPH, Sketchfab launched their VR browser to be able to...
There was a VR Village again this year at the SIGGRAPH conference where a lot of experimental interactive technologies were on display. Virtual Reality was the common thread, but there were other immersive technologies like different prototype...
Back in February, Amazon announced that they had purchased and forked Crytek's Cryengine and made the full source code available in a free AAA game engine offering called Lumberyard. The only catch is that if you want to use any public cloud...
At Google I/O this year, Google announced the Daydream VR platform and mobile headset that will be coming to the latest Android phones later this year. There's a DIY dev kit that you can start using today to start developing Daydream-ready apps, and...
The artist Zenka has been documenting the evolution of virtual reality by making raku sculptures of head-mounted displays. She's also created an interactive timeline of some of the major VR and AR HMDs. Technology has been progressing so quickly...
The Khronos Group announced that the open standard of glTF was gaining momentum by some of the key players within the graphics industry before SIGGRAPH this year. glTF provides a standardized baseline and interchange format to deliver 3D meshes to...
Visionary VR premiered their Mindshow interactive storytelling platform at VRLA, and was quite a unique experience to be able to record an improv acting session within the body of a virtual character and then step outside of myself to then watch my...
Cerevrum Inc is building an ambitious educational platform starting with training people to become better public speakers with Speech Center VR. The basic mechanic is that you stand in a variety of different virtual rooms in front of an animated...
SIGGRAPH is a conference where GPU manufacturers announce new versions of professional graphics cards designed for the visual effects industry and high-end virtual reality content producers in architectural visualization and engineering. NVIDIA...
Team training scenarios are often difficult to schedule due to the logistics involved coordinating many different people's schedules. One solution has been to use virtual humans as stand-ins for actual humans in team training scenarios where the...
One of the gold standards of a VR experience is being able to achieve presence, but presence is an elusive concept to precisely define. Mel Slater is one of the leading researchers into presence and Mel says that it's a combination of the Place...
People were waiting in lines for over an hour to see Pearl both at SIGGRAPH and VRLA, which is one of the best narrative VR experiences that I've seen so far. The central character in the story is a car named 'Pearl' who gives selfless service to...
AMD has made a number of different announcements over the past couple of weeks at both SIGGRAPH and VRLA. They announced some new Radeon Pro graphics cards designed for professional visual effects creators, as well an open source VR video stitching...
Digital lightfields are a cutting-edge technology that can render photorealistic VR scenes, and Otoy has been a pioneer of the rendering and compression techniques to deal with the massive amounts of data required to create them. Their OctaneRender...
During the Enlightenment, René Descartes declared that the mind and body were split and that we should think about them as separate dualistic entities. But more and more evidence is pointing to the fact that our bodies are much more involved in...
When the recession hit in 2008, book publisher Charlie Melcher looked to reinvent how Melcher Media told stories using the latest smart phone technologies. They developed an iOS app for Al Gore's Our Choice, and started having a lot of conversations...
Adventure Time creator Pendleton Ward has been fascinated by the idea of virtual reality since he first read Snow Crash as a teenager. He backed the Oculus Kickstarter, and has been exploring many of the early VR prototypes over the last three years...
Wizard of Oz' VR experiences use improv actors to drive either a single or multiple virtual characters. This technique is commonly used within VR training applications where it's cheaper to have a single actor puppeting multiple virtual characters...
Catherine Rehwinkel is working on creating a conceptual framework that enables storytellers to storyboard linear stories in VR. She's a filmmaker who recently finished a master's degree computational & systems thinking at NYU. She's been inspired by...
Back in 2014, the CLOUDS interactive documentary premiered at Sundance New Frontier where it debuted a VR interface to navigate over 40 oral history interviews with creative coding pioneers. Movies have typically been pretty linear, but how could a...
Brett Leonard's journey into VR all started when he moved to Santa Cruz and started partying and smoking pot with some of the elite visionaries from the Silicon Valley technology scene. He was an aspiring writer and film director who got inspired by...
Roy Sherrill is enabling the time travelers from the future to get a sense of presence at a number of different tech and cultural events around the San Francisco Bay Area. Roy's been shooting a lot of 360 videos from his wheelchair at a number of...
Pokémon Go has quickly become the #1 mobile game of all time, and while there's been some debate as to whether it should be considered Augmented Reality or not, it's clear that location-based gaming has taken to the next level. I had a chance to...
What are the game design considerations for creating a VR experience that will be compelling for not only the primary player, but also the spectators who may be watching it on a livestream with VREAL? This was the big question that I discussed with...
When people dream about what they want to do in VR, it inevitably involves actually moving around within a virtual environment. But VR locomotion triggers simulator sickness in a lot of people, and solving it is one of the biggest open problems in...
Dr. Ming Lin has been working on realtime physics simulations before physics engines were cool. Ming is now actively researching how to simulate audio in real-time. Rather than recording or generating sounds that are then simulated within a virtual...
Pete Moss is known as the 'VR Dude' within Unity, and has long seen the potential of virtual reality. He's really been on the frontlines of this virtual reality revolution over the past 3-4 years creating a bridge between the hardware manufacturers...
Two years ago, not very many people were thinking about how important audio was going to be for consumer VR. Jason Riggs was pitching what would eventually become OSSIC by claiming that it was going to be the Oculus for audio headphones. Two years...