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...
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...
I had a chance to speak with Tribeca Immersive curator Ana Brzezińska to break down each one of this year’s selection of 13 immersive stories. I’ll be in NYC from June 7-16th covering the festival, and so stay tuned for more coverage...
In my final SXSW interview, I had a chance to catch up with SXSW Immersive Programmer Blake Kammerdiener to do a retrospective look at this year’s program, some of the challenges for VR exhibition, his design intentions for how to intermingle the...
There was an Existing Law and Extended Reality: A Research Symposium held at Stanford Law School on Friday, January 6th, 2023, that brought together legal scholars, industry experts, civil society researchers, and academics to look at how immersive...
In my final interview from IDFA DocLab 2022, I had a chance to catch up with DocLab founder Caspar Sonnen to reflect on the 2022 program and the ecological points made by the piece Okawari, to comment on the “Nervous System” in this...
The ONX + DocLab MoCap Stage at IDFA DocLab 2022 featured a number of experimental XR performances using a high-end OptiTrack – Motion Capture System within a theatrical stage with a screen that was projecting the virtual representations. Each of...
Meta Connect happened this past week on October 11th where Meta announced the Meta Quest Pro, and also released quite a lot of interesting information about their future strategies. I participated in a panel discussion with 3 other immersive...
Mike Salmon is the producer of the VRChat Worlds Gallery at Venice Immersive, which means that the scouts out potential worlds, helps track down potential events to feature, and coordinates all of the physical and virtual docents who helping to...
Two of my favorite experiences at Venice Immersive this year were from Taiwan, All That Remains and The Man Who Couldn't Leave, which took the top jure prize this year. Red Tail was another animated piece from Taiwan that was selected for...
Venice Immersive 2022 featured 30 immersive stories in competition with some of the fiercest competition yet. I’m joined by Pola Weiß to break down, analyze, & critique each one of the 30 experiences in competition starting with the three winners:...
I get an overview of the Venice Immersive festival that's taking place from September 1st to 10th with co-curators Liz Rosenthal and Michel Reilhac. There are 75 total experiences with 30 experiences in competition, 10 project in Best Of Immersive...
I get a preview of Tribeca Immersive 2022 with curator Ana Brzezinska.
On January 10th, Ana Brzezińska was announced to be the new Immersive Curator of the Tribeca Film Festival, and I had a chance to speak to her before this announcement to do a retrospective of her time that she spent as Kaleidoscope VR's Head of...
The Peabody Awards have expanded beyond the traditional categories of Entertainment, News, Podcast & Radio, Documentary, Arts, & Public Service, and into new formats of Digital and Interactive Storytelling that include Transmedia Storytelling...
There are nearly 40 XR experiences and special events programmed as a part of the physical SXSW festival in Austin, and I spoke with lead programmer Blake Kammerdiener to get the full run down of the 12 pieces in the XR Experience Competition, 21...
There's a lot of debates about the Metaverse, and whether or not it's complete BS or if it's the natural evolution of the Internet as a culmination of a spatial computing revolution that's been evolving human computer interaction from 2D frames to...
The Sundance New Frontier 2022 selection of 15 immersive stories is available starting today until January 30th, and I had a chance to speak with chief curator Shari Frilot an overview of this year's selection. Access to New Frontier Spaceship and...
The IDFA DocLab is celebrating it's 15th year anniversary, and I collaborated with DocLab to produce a series of a dozen interviews reflecting on the evolution of immersive storytelling and interactive documentaries since 2007. I'm kicking off the...
The Oregon Shakespeare Festival in collaboration with Artizen producers Ana Brzezińska and René J. Pinnell commissioned & produced four VR pieces that premiered at the inaugural Quillsfest, which was a two-day event November 19-20 held within the...
The third annual Virtual Beings & Virtual Societies Summit happened on October 29-30, and I had a chance to attend and unpack it with the co-founder of Fable Studio and instigator of a new Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) called the The...
Connect 2021 happened on Thrusday October 28, 2021 where Facebook rebranded to Meta on their path towards becoming a Metaverse company, and they provided a lot of vague, speculative designs for some of the social experiences that they can imagine...
On October 21, there was a five-hour AR/VR Policy Conference organized by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation as well as XR Association covering some other public policy issues relevant to XR technologies, but also really focused on...
The Festival of International Virtual and Augmented Reality Stories (FIVARS) is holding a hybrid event where the IRL component in LA starts today October 15th, and the virtual festival starts on October 22nd. FIVARS has been curating independent and...
The London Film Festival Expanded runs from October 6-17 with a total of 18 pieces of immersive stories and art, with 9 of those pieces available remotely via their LFF Expanse art gallery that is available for free on Viveport (with nine...
The Venice VR Expanded portion of the Venice Film Festival opens today, and runs from September 1-19, 2021. I had a chance to talk to the co-creators Liz Rosenthal and Michel Reilhac to get a sneak peak of the 37 immersive storytelling projects with...
The second volume of the Immersive Arcade Showcase featuring four immersive stories from the United Kingdom launches today as DLC within the Museum of Other Realities. The theme of the second volume is Memories & Dreams and features Vestige, Limbo...
The 29 immersive experiences that are a part of the Tribeca Immersive 2021 line-up were announced on Tuesday, April 29. There will be 11 Virtual Arcade experiences available starting on June 9 within the Museum of Other Realities, 5 Storyscape...
SXSW Online is happening March 16-20, and I had a chance to get a sneak peak of the SXSW Online XR world in VRChat and talk with the chief curator of the SXSW Virtual Cinema program Blake Kammerdiener about the program and special events that he's...
The Polys WebXR Awards was an awards show on February 20th, 2021 founded by Ben Irwin in collaboration with Sophia Moshasha and Julie Smithson. Irwin wanted to feature a lot of the work that's been happening on the immersive web in the year 2020...
Sundance New Frontier 2021 features 14 immersive experiences that will be accessible via the $25 Sundance Explorer pass starting on Friday, January 29th until Wednesday, February 3, 2021. The New Frontier site will also be hosting virtual premiere...
Note: This is a sponsored content post from the University University of North Carolina School of the ArtsI was a mentor for the UNCSA's Media + Emerging Technology Lab's Immersive Storytelling Residency program in 2020, which was a 6-month program...
The first VR Awards shows was produced by Academy of International Extended Reality (AIXR) in 2017, and after producing three annual events in London the producers were forced to produce their fourth show in 2020 virtually. After evaluating many of...
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...
I talk with the founder of the FIVARS VR & AR story festival Keram Malicki-Sánchez & WebXR developer James Baicoianu to talk about how the repurposed the open source JanusXR code in order to create a platform to deliver 360 video. It's a pioneering...
Mária Rakušanová got her start in the VR industry in 2014 when she was a product marketer for the Gear VR at Samsung. Her job meant that she would watch a lot of immersive content that she would use to market this stand-alone, mobile VR headset. In...
Oculus Connect has been rebranded Facebook Connect, and what would have been Oculus Connect 7 is now Facebook Connect 1. Facebook Connect happened on September 16, 2020, and I talked with Doug North Cook on the following day. North Cook is the...
In 2014, Greg Edwards took photos of all of the work on the Burning Man Playa, and then set out to create a 1:1 scale 3D model of Black Rock City all in virtual reality (BRCvr). He showed a demo on the Google Cardboard to the Burning Man Board in...
Cannes XR is a part of the Cannes Marché du Film, which is the business side of the Cannes Film Festival. For the past two years, they've collaborated with Kaleidoscope VR to curate a development showcase featuring the creators of immersive stories...
The CannesXR Showcase features over 50 different immersive narrative experiences in the Museum of Other Realities from June 24 to July 3rd, with showcases featuring 12 experiences from Tribeca Film Festival, 12 360 video curated by VeeR, 6...
Back in November 2018, Daniel Dyboski-Bryant and Lorelle VanFossen started a regular meetup of Educators in VR within AltSpaceVR. They've been meeting consistently for the past year and a half, and they're currently hosting 5-8 gatherings per week...
There were not a lot of AR or VR announcements that happened during the main keynotes of Microsoft Build 2020, but there were a number of announcements that I was covering as comprehensively as I could in real-time in this Twitter thread. But Azure...
On March 6th, 2020, the IEEE VR announced a venue change on their website from Atlanta, Georgia to online in virtual reality for the academic conference set to happen between 22-26 March, 2020. The organizers of the IEEE VR conference had two weeks...
Laval Virtual has a AR/VR Business Intelligence division that tracks the use cases and evolution of XR applications, and produces a number of VR/AR newsfeed email lists and reports (like this free magazine on Health Applications of XR). I had a...
The first Laval Virtual Conference happened on 3-4 June, 1999 in Laval France, and had a chance to talk with the founder Simon Richir about the 20+ year history of Laval Virtual when I attended in 2019. It's an amazing history of the evolution of...
In my final episode of my coverage from Sundance New Frontier 2020, I speak with chief curator Shari Frilot about some of the themes of the line-up of XR experiences that were programmed this year. There were a number of themes the embodiment...
Milo Talwani (pronouns they/them) is a curator, and creative technologist who oversees the selection process for New Frontier at the Sundance Film Festival. They're also the technical coordinator for Tribeca Immersive, and they also help curate...
René Pinnell originally created Kaleidoscope VR in order to show immersive art and stories around the world. After talking with creators, he realized that the biggest blocker for creating immersive art was securing funding and resources to make the...
Note: This is a sponsored content post from the University University of North Carolina School of the ArtsThe Media + Emerging Technology Lab (METL) is situated within the film school of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, and they...
Caspar Sonnen founded the DocLab as a part of the International Documentary Festival in Amsterdam (IDFA) in 2007 after a period of being really skeptical about some of the early overstated and inflated claims of the transformative power of...