New Update Available – Version 2.1 is a VR installation piece that blends contemporary audio documentary recordings of computer help sessions for the elderly, but then recreates these characters in VR within a speculative future where elders...
You Destroy. We Create: The War on Ukraine’s Culture is a 360-video documentary by NowHere Media & Meta’s VR for Good that was released on Meta Quest TV on November 30th. Shot over the course of 2 weeks and a distance of 4000 kilometers by co...
XRMust is part online magazine covering the immersive storytelling industry through news and interviews, but it’s in process of aggregating thousands of immersive stories into a database that have been showing on the festival circuit (with a...
Time Detectives AR by Picture This Productions is a site-specific AR trail experience meant to be seen at the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth, UK, but you can also experience it remotely as a table-top experience at home. Time Detectives AR asks...
Black Movement Library: Movement Portraits is a motion capture database project and series of experiences across different media by multi-media artist LaJuné McMillian. She wanted to see more black dancers represented in motion capture data, but...
The Child of Empire is an immersive story that tells the story of the India-Pakistan Partition of 1947, which is one of the largest forced migrations in human history. It uses puppet theatre-styled motion graphics in the beginning to provide a crash...
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...
Facebook's Project Aria announcement in September at Facebook Connect raised a number of different ethical questions with anthropologists and technological ethicists. Journalist Lawrence Dodds described it on Twitter by saying, 'Facebook will send...
On January 14, 2021, VR developer Fox Buchele announced on Twitter that he was fired by Owlchemy Labs in 2020, and 'I'm sharing this now because I'm done with this industry. And I don't see myself coming back.' He described being a VR developer as...
Athena Demos is the Chief Cultural & Community Officer for Black Rock Creative and Black Rock City VR (BRCvr). I previously covered BRCvr's officially-sanctioned multiverse world in AltSpaceVR for Burning Man 2020 with my conversation with lead...
John Robb has a concept of Networked Tribalism, which is a result of the combination of filter bubbles, AI algorithms, and political polarization. Robb is a military analyst who looks at the impact of technology on culture, and he started his Global...
Carl H Smith's work is at the intersection of VR, psychedelics, and esoteric contemplative practices. He's the director of the Learning Technology Research Center at the Ravensbourne University London, co-founder of The Cyberdelic Society, co...
StoryFile is an interactive storytelling platform that allows you to interact with someone as they tell their story. A comprehensive oral history could be as many as 1000 questions and 20 hours of content, and StoryFile's combination of a...
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...
Astrid Feringa had a video essay installation at the IDFA DocLab where she was critiquing how the British Institute of Digital Archaeology was using photogrammetry to reconstruct a piece of destroyed architecture. What are the ethics around...
Ali Eslami is an Iranian VR creator whose livelong project is an ever-expanding virtual city called False Mirror, and he was showing off the latest edition at IDFA DocLab called Nerd_Funk. Nerd_Funk is a surrealistic, guided tour through an...
In the Event of a Moon Disaster uses AI deep fake and speech synthesis technology to produce a Nixon speech that never happened. Bill Safire wrote a contingency speech on July 18, 1969 for President Richard Nixon to read in the event that something...
Andre Elijah is an independent VR developer who recently launched Viewport Interactive working on branded experiences for car companies and beyond. We talk about the Elixir Quest Handracking demo that he tried at Oculus Connect 6, and how it shifted...
Bodyless was one of my favorite VR experiences that I saw at the Venice International Film Festival. The experience was the most like walking into someone else's dream that I've ever had in VR. The experience alternated between an on-rails guided...
Jessica Outlaw is a culture and behavioral researcher who released a qualitative study of the experiences of 13 women in social VR in October 17 2017, and then on April 4, 2018, she released a survey of 600 users in social VR getting some robust...
East Forest has been crafting musical rituals for psilocybin journeys for the past decade, and he just released a five-hour album titled 'Music For Mushrooms: A Soundtrack For The Psychedelic Practitioner' coincidentally just a few days after Denver...
Consciousness Hacking produced the The Awakened Futures Summit in San Francisco on May 18th & 19th, looking at the intersection between psychedelics, technology, and meditation. Consciousness Hacking previously hosted a sold-out event on October...
I recently attended Consciousness Hacking's Awakened Futures Summit that explored the cross-section of psychedelics, technology, and meditation. I ended up conducting 10 interviews totaling over 6 hours of conversations with neuroscientists...
Douglas Rushkoff is the host of the Team Human podcast and author of Team Human as well as a dozen other bestselling books on media, technology, and culture. He was invited to the VRTO conference in Toronto to record a live Team Human podcast about...
Ida Benedetto gave the opening keynote of the Immersive Design Summit where she shared some of the work that she's doing as an experiential designer as a corporate consultant at SYPartners working with companies on organizational transformation and...
Restorative Justice practices are an alternative form of justice that's a victim-centered that creates a space for offenders to own the harm done, and for victims to tell the story of their experiences of that harm directly to the offender. It's a...
There's a lot of intensity in the world right now, and it reminded me of a short excerpt about VR shooters from a longer conversation that I had with Danny Bittman back at Oculus Connect 4 in 2017. I think it speaks to some of what's happening in...
Kathy Bisbee started the first publicly funded VR lab called PublicVR Lab, and she's leading an initiative for the 1500 community media centers in the United States to start offering kits and programs to help create community media immersive...
Frankenstein AI from the Columbia Digital Storytelling Lab debuted at Sundance 2018. It was a cross-displinary collaboration that used machine learning, immersive theater, dance, and prompts for social interactions. I talk with choreographer Brandon...
Pilgrim is an AR audio documentary that I experienced at the IDFA DocLab premiere as I was walking through the streets of Amsterdam. Co-director Lauren Hutchinson captured audio stories of people as they were walking the Camino de Santiago trail in...
#721: Introspective Hero’s Journey of Self-Reflection & Emotional Education with “Where Thoughts Go”
Where Thoughts Go: Prologue is one of my favorite VR storytelling experiences of the year, as I think that creator Lucas Rizzotto has discovered a number of different design innovations that push forward the storytelling potential of the VR medium...
The VR Privacy Summit happened at Standord University on November 8th to explore pressing issues around biometric data privacy in virtual reality. There were around 50 representatives from around the VR industry with representatives from nearly all...
Ken Wilber is a philosopher known for his 'Integral Theory' framework that mapping of all dimensions of reality, consciousness, and stages of human development. He's synthesized maps and models from various Buddhist wisdom traditions, psychology...
On April 4th, Jessica Outlaw released a survey of 600 regular virtual reality users about harassment experiences in VR, which was funded by Pluto VR.
Marlon Fuentes is a ethnomusicologist who looks at the culture of how people relate to music through an anthropological lens. He's an emerging technologist who is tracking how virtual reality provides new opportunities for new culture to develop...
ICOs are disrupting late stage venture capital. Shawn Cheng was working at the Vayner/RSE VC, but now he's working with Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin's Consensys where he's helping to manage a portfolio of over 40 blockchain companies. Cheng talks...
There’s a tension on the web today between creating a safe space to be online versions the costs to censorship and free speech. Spam, bots, trolls, harassment, hate speech, and terrorism are on the frontlines of making the web an unpleasant place to...
Brewster Kahle told me that the average of a web page on the Internet is 100 days before it either changes or disappears completely. Kahle realized that you can’t run a culture when you have no institutional memory, and so he started the Internet...
In “Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace,” Lawrence Lessig wrote about four socioeconomic regulators of society as being the law, cultural norms, economic markets, and architecture/code (i.e. technology). All of these four factors combine in order to...
Hotdogs, Horseshoes, and Hand Grenades (aka H3) is an open-ended sandbox VR experience where you can play with a variety of exotic firearms. It's a puzzle game where you have to figure out how to activate, load, and fire a huge range of different...
One of the recurring themes that was coming up at the IEEE VR academic conference was how VR is starting to catalyze interdisciplinary collaborations between different academic fields including computer science, social science, neuroscience, and...
LumièreVR's Jenny Guo is building bridges between the East and West through virtual reality. She's producing 360 content for the Netflix of China, & she's a consultant building cross-cultural collaborations & helping companies navigate the VR...
Here's a bit more information on the game mechanics of Light Strike Array:
Darryll Starr is a former game developer who now teaching underprivileged youth how to create VR experiences with Unity at the David E Glover Education and Technology Center in Oakland, CA. Starr is the lead instructor and curriculum developer who...
The Columbia Digital Storytelling Lab had a design research project at Sundance that is exploring new models of cooperative storytelling and collaborative sensemaking, but it was also on the bleeding edge of integrating technologies ranging from...
The sexual harassment lawsuit against UploadVR was reported to be settled via Tech Crunch on September 6th, and a week later the New York Times followed with more details about how Upload had been barely dented. The case was settled without any...
Dr. Marilyn Schlitz is a social anthropologist, consciousness researcher, and co-author of the books Consciousness & Healing and Living Deeply. Her anthropological work has been at the frontier of researching how different cultures use various...
UploadVR opened up their new 20,000 square foot Upload LA co-working space on April 13, 2017. I had a chance to catch up with co-founders Taylor Freeman and Will Mason as VRLA to get the inside scoop. Mason told me that opening up this huge co...
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...
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...