I’ve spoken to Whitehead scholar Matt Segall a couple of times before, and I was really keen to catch up with him to hear his process-relational and process philosophical takes on AI, intelligence and consciousness. I was responding to a piece he...
I spoke with the curators of Tribeca Immersive 2025 Jazia Hammoudi and Casey Baltes to unpack the 11 impact project that are being feature in this year’s selection. We also talk about Tribeca’s new collaboration with Onassis ONX and Agog, how the...
I spoke with Raindance Immersive curators Mária Rakušanová, Joe Hunting, Fangs about the 2025 selection of projects across 8 different categories. Tune in to get all of the latest tips from this year’s selection that is mostly happening on social VR...
I spoke with producer Victor Agulhon of Targo Stories about their collaboration with TIME Studios to produce D-Day: The Camera Soldier, which he calls the most technologically advance immersive documentary produced up to this point. They took...
The Portland Art Museum Center for an Untold Tomorrow (PAM CUT) has acquired the Tomorrow Theater in South East Portland, and is curating 25 unique events a month and over 250 unique events a year. Most of the experiences are grounded within the...
We are in the middle of a hype cycle peak around AI as there are a lot of hyperbolic claims being made about the capabilities and performance of large-language models (LLMs). Computational Linguist Emily M. Bender and Sociologist Alex Hanna have...
#1562: Highlights of Creature’s IGN XR Gaming Showcase + State of VR Vibe Check with Doug North Cook
The Creature label features a lot of really innovative VR and MR games with rich and innovative gameplay mechanics, and they just featured three new games, a new DLC pack, and lots of updates about the games in a half-hour Creature Feature gaming...
NOTE: This sponsored episode was produced by Kent Bye in partnership with PHI and participation from Agog: Immersive Media Institute and immersive artist Peter Burr. PHI and Agog: Immersive Media Institute are collaborating on the PHI Immersive: XR...
Walkabout Mini Golf is really an incredible accomplishment of VR design with its fusion of worldbuilding, compelling physics-based gameplay, the unique social dynamics and community it’s able to cultivate, and over 4 1/2 years of consistent DLC...
asses.masses is a unique, 7-hour, live performance that uses video game logic to expand the narrative possibilities and social dramaturgy of experimental theater. With a single video game controller at the front of a movie theater with lights up so...
Charlotte Mikkelborg is the series director of the Adventure series on Apple TV, which is shot on Apple Immersive Video and co-produced by Atlantic Studios (formerly Atlantic Productions) and Apple. I think it has the strongest storytelling released...
Ant Williams is a freediving athlete featured in the third episode of The Adventure Series titled “Ice Dive” that’s co-produced by Apple and Atlantic Studios (formerly Atlantic Productions). In the episode, Williams attempts to swim a world record...
CURRENTS is a stunning debut from Jake Oleson as it pushes the grammar of 180 filmmaking to new heights. Oleson comes from the world of advertising and music videos, and he went through a rigorous pre-production process where he had actually already...
OTO’S PLANET was being exhibited on the Quest at SXSW, but I had a chance to check out the Apple Pro Version ahead of the SXSW festival and I felt like I much preferred it. OTO’S PLANET picked up the second place prize at Venice Immersive, but I...
Another Apple Vision Pro piece at SXSW 2025 was COSMOS IN FOCUS by Atlantic Studios (recently rebranded from Atlantic Productions). This was a short and sweet educational experience that allowed you to explore the imagery of the James Webb...
There was an projection-based immersive experience called ORIGINS – LIFE’S EPIC JOURNEY that was originally formatted for a digital art museum in Germany called Kunstkraftwerk Leipzig, but it was translated into a three-channel video installation...
FLY TO YOU tells the story of Kang Songjeol who was separated from her childhood friends in the aftermath of the 1950 split between North and South Korea. Oral history interviews were captured in 360 video, and her childhood memories were recreated...
SYMPHONI is a brand new hand-tracked rhythm game that was inspired by the mechanics of conducting a symphony. It was directed by Ingram Mao and developed by a number of undergrads and graduates of the USC Games program. This game also goes from...
ECHOVISION is the latest experience from multi-disciplinary artist Jiabao Li that has three major parts. The first part is a mobile-phone based mixed reality experience that does a metaphoric translation of echolocation by using LiDAR to detect your...
There were a number of pieces at SXSW that were centered around embodied interactions including HONEY FUNGUS, which is a series of interactive embodied experiments telling a broader story of cultivating intimacy with ecology. This piece leans more...
1906 ATLANTA RACE MASSACRE is a phone-based AR experience directed by Nonny de la Peña that digs into the forgotten history of the violent attacks on the black community by white mobs incited by race-baiting politicians and newspapers. The arc of...
THE CHOICE returns to SXSW with the latest Chapters 2 and 3, and continues to capture intimate testimonials of women and couples who make the choice to abort their pregnancies. Chapters 1 and 2 take place in Texas where abortion is now nearly...
WAYS OF KNOWING: A NAVAJO NUCLEAR HISTORY tells the story of the impact of uranium mining on the Navajo community. This film is a unique collaboration between a Navajo storyteller Sunny Dooley and nuclear nonproliferation expert Lovely Umayam where...
SHELTER is a 360 video documentary telling the story of civilians in Ukraine seeking protection in bomb shelters. The film poetically transports you the many different ways Ukrainians are sheltering from small cramped basements to parking garages to...
TRACES: THE GRIEF PROCESSOR is a multi-user interactive VR experience where four people are invited to poetically explore and learn more about their grief. Created by documentary filmmaker Vali Fugulin, it features didactic conversations about grief...
There were a number of projects exploring social dynamics within immersive pieces, including the special jury prize winner for the XR competition PROOF AS IF PROOF WERE NEEDED. This was a projection-based video project that featured video feeds from...
The final AI-related piece this year was THE LAST PRACTICE, which I unfortunately have not had a chance to see yet because there were a number of technical glitches that prevented me from seeing it on site. I did however have a chance to remotely...
Another AI-based project at SXSW this year was SWEET! by Dutch designer and artist René van Engelenburg of DROPSTUFF MEDIA. This is a projection-mapped physical installation designed to facilitate a very brief conversation with an OpenAI LLM-driven...
Curating archives was a theme that I also explored in a conversation with Tamara Shogaolu about her piece ORYZA: HEALING GROUND that premiered at DocLab 2024. She was at SXSW showing the interactive AR story game ANOUSCHKA exploring the memories of...
The SXSW XR Competition jury prize winner REFLECTIONS OF LITTLE RED DOT had some really innovative mixed reality integrations, and was also a part of a new trend of cultivating an archive of material as an artistic practice. This piece by director...
THE SECRET LIFE OF MONSTERS: THE GATEWAY EXPERIENCE is a mixed reality puzzle game created by Wallrus Creative Technologies as an immersive demo in order to feature the unique tracking technology they’ve created in order to better facilitate LBE...
Andrew Schneider’s “NOWISWHENWEARE (the stars)” absolutely blew me away, and it was a story-driven, immersive art exhibit at the University of Texas Performing Arts Center that opened at the end of SXSW. It uses a cube of 4000 LED lights in a dark...
Wayne Powell is the Global Artist Relations Manager for d&b audiotechnik, and he’s been getting more and more interested in how independent artists and musicians are using spatial audio. He was in Austin, Texas with an array of 13 speakers enabling...
On the last day of immersive exhibitions, I saw Roman Rappak’s latest RISTBAND mixed reality live performance experiment, which now has a 4-year streak going at SXSW. This year he added an array of 13 d&b audiotechnik speakers that used wave field...
The Polyphonic Spree band founder Tim Delaughter was looking for innovative ways to get people to listen to the entirety of his latest album called Salvage Enterprise. He was driving around a lot of speakers in his van and setting up pop-up...
Web developer Pete Adams created seven different really cool WebXR worlds for his songs featured in the A NUMBER FROM THE GHOST experience. His music was really great to listen to as I explored his abstract open worlds that were being modulated by...
Tenderclaws debuted their first piece in competition at SXSW with a short called FACE JUMPING, which was a surreal, seemingly open world experience with a number of interactive experiments leveraging eye tracking in novel ways. Tenderclaws has...
IN THE CURRENT OF BEING is a powerfully-told story about electroshock conversion therapy using haptics, mixed reality, and a free-flowing dream logic structure paired with a documentary interview of a survivor. It was a deeply moving experience, and...
There is a six-month exhibition titled “Other Worlds Are Possible” featuring a retrospective of a dozen different immersive storytelling pieces that will shown at the Le Pavillion in Nemur, Belgium from March 22 to September 21, 2025. The exhibition...
The SXSW XR Experience Selection runs from March 9-11 and contains 15 pieces in competition and 16 pieces in the spotlight, and I had a chance to chat with SXSW’s XR programmer Blake Kammerdiener about each of these pieces. He provides some...
The Theater application for the Apple Vision Pro by Sandwich Vision launched in June 2024 with the spatial livestreaming of John Gruber’s live interview of Apple Executives at WWDC. They have been collaborating with independent producers of spatial...
Lovesick is a narrative game featuring a character-driven story of a bank on the brink of collapse that faces a series of supernatural events that they must escape from. It features a lot of escape room and puzzle mechanics that are mixed with...
In a series of posts from February 8th to 11th, open source developer Matthieu Bucchianeri started making allegations that Meta’s OVRPlugin is blocking non-Meta OpenXR runtimes, thereby undermining the open and interoperable spirit of OpenXR. He...
Niantic launched their Into the Scaniverse application on Quest 3 on February 26th, 2025 that features over 50,000 Gaussian Spats from 120 different countries. They originally launched the WebXR version on December 10th, 2024 at IntoTheScaniverse...
HTC has launched Viverse platform that is aiming to become the YouTube of 3D Content. It’s a platform that hosts 3D content and worlds built on PlayCanvas as well as many other open source technologies like WebXR, WebGPU, and VRM. It is sort of like...
The latest Polys Ombudsperson of the Year is Ingrid Kopp, and previous winners Brittan Heller, Michaela Montagna, and myself gathered again on December 8 2024 to reflect on the current state of the XR industry as well as the specific ethical...
Oliver Kadel’s 1618 Digital specializes in spatial audio sound design and engineering across linear immersive storytelling and interactive immersive experiences. Kadel also co-hosts The Immersive Audio Podcast with Monica Bolles, and I was recently...
The Khronos Group is working on a new open standard tentatively called the glTF External Reference Format (or glTFx for short), which will allow users to add multiple glTF assets to a single scene. This used to be called the “glTF Experience Format...
I dig into my archives to unpack the one-on-one, immersive theatre piece that I saw online back in 2021 called TM that used a Socratic dialectic to interrogate you as you’re going through a process of joining an imaginary cult. I spoke with...
VR filmmakers Joe Hunting and Max Willson are premiering their short documentary film The Reality of Hope at the Sundance film festival this week (online tickets are still available here from Jan 30 to Feb 2 and it’ll also be available later this...