Sean Dougherty and Jeffrey Colon are Access Technology Experts who work for the LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired non-profit, and they were very active at the XR Access Symposium during a number of sessions focusing on the NSF-grant...
Yvonne Felix has been using augmented reality as an assistive technology since 2012. They tell me, “I actually wear an augmented reality device that allows me to see. I’m legally blind, so that means that I have about 2% of my vision...
Ohan Oda works at Google on an AR feature in Google Maps called Live View that he was showing off during the demo session at the XR Access Symposium. It adds some screenreader support for geospatial browsing where users can search for nearby...
Liv Erickson is the ecosystem development lead at Mozilla focusing on innovation in spatial computing and AI technologies, and they are the former director of the Mozilla Hubs team. They gave a presentation at the XR Access Symposium that they...
Owlchemy Labs has been on the leading edge of accessible VR game design since 2016. starting with Job Simulator, and then following up with key accessibility features for Vacation Simulator, and Cosmonious High. They were at XR Access Symposium...
Joel Ward is an Emerging Technology Manager at Booz Allen Hamilton who has been working within Web Accessibility since around the time Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act was enacted on August 7, 1998 and the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility...
Michael Cooper works for the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Accessibility Initiative, and he was attending the XR Access Symposium to learn more about the existing XR accessibility efforts but also to moderate a break-out session about...
Mark Steelman is a XR Access Working Group Member and Senior Unity Engineer at Transfr, which uses virtual reality to “train people for well-paying careers available now in high-demand fields.” Steelman was at XR Access showing off some...
Liz Hyman President and the CEO of the XR Association (XRA), which is a non-profit, industry trade association representing 47 XR companies including major players like Meta, Google, Microsoft, HTC, Sony Interactive Entertainment, Unity, and HTC...
Dylan Fox is the Director of Operations for the XR Access Initiative, where he focuses on outreach and advocacy for making virtual and augmented reality accessible for people who have disabilities. I previously interviewed Fox for the white paper on...
I had a chance to do six brief interviews during the poster session of XR Access Symposium 2023 that I’ve compiled into this single podcast episode. This gives a great overview of some of the emerging topics for XR accessibility including XR...
Christian Vogler leads the Technical Access Program at Gallaudet University, and has been looking into captions for VR and 3D spatial environments for folks who are deaf and hard of hearing. I had a chance to catch up with him at the XR Access...
Reginé Gilbert is the author of the book Inclusive Design for a Digital World: Designing with Accessibility in Mind, and teaches at the New York University in the Tandon School of Engineering. She has been teaching UX for nearly a decade now, and is...
Christine Hemphill started Open Inclusion in 2018 as a disability-inclusive research and design organization that is working at the intersection between accessibility and emerging technologies. She makes sense of the broad spectrum of disabilities...
This is the first of fifteen in a Voices of VR podcast series on XR Accessibility based upon my coverage from the XR Access Symposium 2023 that happened in New York City on June 15th and 16th. I’m kicking off my 8 hours of coverage with an...
Figural Bodies is a research project out of Goldsmiths college that uses motion captured dance with disabled, non-disabled, and neurodivergent dancers in order to explore non-normative avatar representations as well as the accessibility challenges...
On November 1st, 2022 the XR Association (XRA) trade association for VR, AR, and Mixed Reality companies announced the formation of the XR for All Foundation at XRA’s Limitless Future Conference. The press release says, “The XR for All Foundation’s...
Continuing on my series on XR Ethics in collaboration with the IEEE Global Initiative on the Ethics of Extended Reality, this episode dives into the White Paper on Diversity, Inclusion, & Accessibility featuring Isabel Guenette Thornton (Ph.D...
The immersive story of Notes on Blindness: Into the Darkness (2016) VR experience (Quest, Rift) was awarded with a Legacy Peabody Award for Digital & Interactive Storytelling along with 15 other projects on Thursday, March 24th. This experience has...
Episode #1000 of the Voices of VR podcast is a special, three-hour retrospective featuring over 100 of the best answers I've received about the ultimate potential of VR over the past 7 years. I hope that it serves as a primer on the scope and...
The new Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy's Edge VR experience releases today, and I had a chance to play through it and talk to a couple of the creators from ILMxLab about their latest steps towards their vision of 'storyliving.' It represents a lot...
The XR Association is a non-profit 501(c)(6) trade association with members including Facebook/Oculus, Google, Microsoft, Sony, & HTC. They're focused on general awareness and education, lobbying Congress on XR policy issues, and promoting research...
In 2015, Donna Davis and Tom Boellstorff received a three-year National Science Foundation grant on The Role of People with Disability in the Innovation of Online Technology where they studied how differently-abled populations were using virtual...
Kai Frazier is a history teacher who decided to make a complete pivot into creating accessible and diverse educational content and kits for education. She curates 360 videos and produces content aimed for underrepresented minorities to be able to...
On November 26, 2016, Rosario Perazolo gave a TEDxCórdoba talk about a wide range of cultural taboos she experiences as someone in a wheelchair. She talks about the transition of ooking at the world from the perspective of someone who was 5'7', but...
This is an XR Ethics Manifesto that I presented at Greenlight's XR Strategy Conference on October 18, 2019. This is the culmination of seven focused months of panel discussions, interviews, and talks exploring many of the nuances of ethics and...
The W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) published a set of Ethical Web Principles on May 30, 2019 in order to provide an ethical framework when evaluating new standards. The TAG group doesn't have any formal power in the W3C, but their...
Doug North Cook is an assistant professor at Chatham University, and he holds an immersive design residency at Fallingwater architectural landmark in Pittsburg. North Cook is trying to synthesize the many different design frameworks and principles...
Kevin Mack is a VR artist who has created a series of surrealistic immersive experiences including Zen Parade, Blortasia, and Anandala. Mack starts with mathematically-inspired geometric forms that are generated by collapsing a 5-dimensional...
BehaviorMe is using virtual reality to enhance behavior therapy for children and young adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). It's started by four people including two therapy practioners with fifteen years of experience working with clients...
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...
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...
Katie Goode is the Creative Director of Triangular Pixels, which has developed Smash Hit Plunder for the Gear VR and Unseen Diplomacy for the Vive. Unseen Diplomacy is a room-scale experience that has people crawling through tunnels as a spy, but...