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...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
If it were up to Agnes Callard, she would be having a lot more philosophical encounters in her life. But conversational norms lean towards agreeability, surface-level interactions, and, in some contexts, a polarizing battlefield of ideologies that...
I interviewed producer Dan Tucker at IDFA DocLab 2024 about the lessons learned from touring In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats across 20 different venues over the past couple of years. See the transcript down below for more context on our conversation...
I interviewed Myriam Achard about the new distribution arm of Phi Studio (as of now there is still no official name yet) as well as the exciting new Phi Contemporary set to open in 2028 that will be fusing together the contemporary art world with...
I interviewed VR researcher Julia Scott Stevenson at IDFA DocLab 2024 about her research into embodiment and AI within the context of immersive stories as well as her work around climate change. See the transcript down below for more context on our...
I interviewed co-directors Marcel van Brakel and Hazal Ertürkan about Future Botanica that showed at IDFA DocLab 2024. See the transcript down below for more context on our conversation. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR...
I interviewed director Seán Hannan about You Can Sing Me on My Way that showed at IDFA DocLab 2024. See the transcript down below for more context on our conversation. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music:...
I interviewed director Lisa Schamlé about Me, A Depiction that showed at IDFA DocLab 2024. See the transcript down below for more context on our conversation. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality :...
I interviewed director Queer.Space about Dollhouse for Queer Imaginaries that showed at IDFA DocLab 2024. See the transcript down below for more context on our conversation. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon...
I interviewed director Aphra Taghizadeh about Speechless Witness of a Wandering Tree that showed at IDFA DocLab 2024. See the transcript down below for more context on our conversation. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR...
I interviewed director Wen Yee Hsieh and producer Sebox Hong about Limbophobia that showed at IDFA DocLab 2024. See the transcript down below for more context on our conversation. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon...
I interviewed director Wen Yee Hsieh about Limbotopia that showed at Film Gate Interactive in Miami Florida back in 2023. See the transcript down below for more context on our conversation. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of...
I interviewed director Steye Hallema about Ancestors that showed at IDFA DocLab 2024. See the transcript down below for more context on our conversation. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality : Play...
I interviewed director Stanislaw Liguzinski about ROAMance that showed at IDFA DocLab 2024. See the transcript down below for more context on our conversation. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality :...
I interviewed director Vincent Abert about Walking Alone Text You When I’m Home that showed at IDFA DocLab 2024. See the transcript down below for more context on our conversation. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR...
I interviewed co-directors Nienke Huitenga and Lieven Heeremans about Drift that showed at IDFA DocLab 2024. See the transcript down below for more context on our conversation. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon...
I interviewed director Alaa Al Minawi about The Liminal that showed at IDFA DocLab 2024. See the transcript down below for more context on our conversation. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality :...
I interviewed director Gregor Petrikovič about Sincerely Victor Pike that showed at IDFA DocLab 2024. You can watch this short film here. See the transcript down below for more context on our conversation. This is a listener-supported podcast...
I interviewed director Pegah Tabassinejad about Entropic FIelds of Displacement that showed at IDFA DocLab 2024. See the transcript down below for more context on our conversation. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR...
I interviewed co-directors Francisca Silva and Maria Jose Diaz about Ancestral Secrets VR that showed at IDFA DocLab 2024. See the transcript down below for more context on our conversation. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of...