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304 episodes

#668: Guns, Money, & Morals: A Debate on the Ethics of VR Simulation, Capitalism, & the Limits of Decentralized Techno-Utopianism

by kentbyeJuly 31, 2018

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...

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#667: JanusVR’s Vesta Hub is the Beginnings of the Decentralized Metaverse

by kentbyeJuly 28, 2018

There is a lot of promise of a decentralized metaverse built on top of the open web, but the idealism of that promise isn't yet matching the quality & stability of experiences from centralized, native applications built on top of Unity or Unreal...

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#665: Using VR for Interdisciplinary Collaboration & Social Science Research

by kentbyeJuly 24, 2018

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...

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#659: VR in China: Bridging the East & West with LumiereVR’s Jenny Guo

by kentbyeJuly 4, 2018

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...

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#658: VR in China: Storytelling & Sandbox Immersive Festival

by kentbyeJuly 4, 2018

Eddie Lou is the founder of Sandman Studios in Beijing, and he is also the founder of the Sandbox Immersive Festival that took place in Qingdao China on June 23-27, 2018. I was able to travel to Qingdao for the festival, and the next seven podcasts...

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#656: Racial Justice: Using AR to Reclaim History with Site-Specific Context

by kentbyeJune 18, 2018

Our stores of the past shape our future. There is a growing movement to use augmented reality technologies to reclaim suppressed histories by creating site-specific AR art installations that challenge institutionally-backed narratives. Glenn...

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#654: Indigenous Futurism & Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace with Jason Edward Lewis

by kentbyeJune 8, 2018

I talk with Jason Edward Lewis about the Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace initiative, as well as the two 2167 Indigenous Storytelling in VR that he helped to produce. How do we reckon the past, present, and the future, and what types of...

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#651: Anime-Inspired, Embodied Game Design & the Spectacle of VR eSports with “Light Strike Array”

by kentbyeMay 23, 2018

Here's a bit more information on the game mechanics of Light Strike Array:

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#648: New ARCore Features, Google I/O Highlights, & Open Questions about Ethics & Privacy

by kentbyeMay 19, 2018

Google announced some new features for ARCore at Google I/O last week including Sceneform to help Java developers integrated 3D content into apps, augmented images to trigger immersive AR experiences off of trained images, and cloud anchors to...

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#647: Merging IRL events with VR via SVVR’s Reality Portals & Metaverse Intiative

by kentbyeMay 17, 2018

May 16th is the five-year anniversary for Silicon Valley Virtual Reality meetup, and founder Karl Krantz is announcing a couple of new initiatives as SVVR reorganizes itself as a public-benefit corporation. They're going to be formally announcing...

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#640: John Root on VRLA, AR, Privacy, & eSports in VR

by kentbyeApril 14, 2018

John Root co-founded VRLA with Cosmo Scharf in 2014, and it has organically grown into a thriving VR event with over 10,000 attendees in the Los Angeles Convention Center. VRLA is a non-profit where funding from sponsors helps to support about half...

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#638: Updates on the Decentralized Metaverse: WebVR, A-Frame, & Supermedium VR

by kentbyeApril 6, 2018

The open metaverse is going to be built on web standards like the WebXR Device API (formly WebVR), but the larger community of web developers has been waiting to fully commit to building immersive WebVR experiences until there's universal support in...

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#632: Bringing VR to Underprivileged Communities with The Glover Center

by kentbyeMarch 13, 2018

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...

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#631: Using AI to Drive Conversations, Create Culture, & Foster Understanding

by kentbyeMarch 9, 2018

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...

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#629: Embodied Storytelling Innovations from Sundance 2018 with Shari Frilot

by kentbyeMarch 7, 2018

The Sundance Film Festival's New Frontier Program featured over 20 different VR, AR, and AI experiences that were pushing the boundaries of immersive storytelling. After seeing all of the experiences, I had a chance to unpack and analyze the larger...

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#618: “Dinner Party” is a Symbolic Exploration of Alien Abduction & Race in America

by kentbyeFebruary 1, 2018

Dinner Party is an immersive exploration of Betty and Barney Hill's alien abduction story that premiered at the Sundance New Frontier. Rather than using normal alien abduction tropes, writers Laura Wexler & Charlotte Stoudt chose to use the spatial...

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#610: Designing Escape Rooms with Laura E Hall

by kentbyeJanuary 9, 2018

The Immersive Design Summit brought together over 150 of the top experiential designers from around the world, mostly from the performance community of immersive theater productions and escape rooms, but also with a small number of people focusing...

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#588: Being in Two Worlds at Once with ‘UTURN’: Parallel Stories & Quad Binaural Audio Mix

by kentbyeOctober 31, 2017

UTURN is a 360-degree video that seamlessly blends together two 180-degree hemisphere worlds containing parallel storylines of two different perspectives at a tech start up. One perspective is from a male founder's point of view and the other...

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#586: Oculus Connect 4 Highlights & BigScreenVR Raises $11 Million

by kentbyeOctober 17, 2017

Facebook's Oculus Connect 4 developer conference happened last week, and I share some of the highlights including my hands-on impression of the standalone Santa Cruz headset, the latest updates from Facebook Spaces, and a number of updates to be...

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#580: Community Fallout from UploadVR’s Harassment Settlement & Bearing Witness to Testimony

by kentbyeSeptember 23, 2017

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...

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#567: Navigating Paradox, Reality Bubbles, & Multiple Worldviews with VR

by kentbyeAugust 14, 2017

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...

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#554: Magik Gallery Show Featured Art Created Entirely in VR

by kentbyeJuly 7, 2017

Nick Ochoa curated some of the top artists producing work entirely in VR for the Magik Gallery show that happened in San Francisco, CA on May 20th. It was an ambitious effort to introduce VR creation tools for artists within a fine arts context in...

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#552: Promoting Diversity in VR: Lessons from the Oculus Launchpad Program

by kentbyeJuly 5, 2017

In March 2016, Oculus announced their Oculus Launchpad program with the idea that in order for VR to be successful, then there needs to be a diverse range of content created from diverse set of creators who are informed by different ethnicities...

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#533: High Fidelity is Architecting for VR Privacy with Self-Sovereign Identity

by kentbyeMay 6, 2017

Philip Rosedale has been thinking deeply about how to architect large-scale, distributed virtual worlds after experiencing many bottlenecks in running Second Life. High Fidelity is taking a much more distributed approach with how it's being...

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#530: Upload LA Opening Represents a Focus Shift From VR Tech to VR Content

by kentbyeApril 28, 2017

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...

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#529: VR Storytelling Highlights from Tribeca Film Festival

by kentbyeApril 27, 2017

The Tribeca Film Festival featured over 30 different VR experiences within their Storyscapes and Immersive Virtual Arcade, and I had a chance to catch up with curator Loren Hammonds about some of the highlights of the festival program with genres...

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#522: Sundance’s Shari Frilot on the Power of VR Storytelling to See Ourselves in a New Way

by kentbyeApril 4, 2017

Shari Frilot started the New Frontier at Sundance in 2007, and programmed the festival's first VR experience in 2012 with Nonny de la Peña's Hunger in LA using an early Oculus Rift prototype made by Palmer Luckey. Frilot has since programmed around...

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#513: Deepening Social Presence with SMI Eye Tracking

by kentbyeMarch 10, 2017

At GDC this year, SensoMotoric Instruments (SMI) showed a couple of new eye tracking demos at Valve's booth. They added eye tracking to avatars in the social VR experiences of Pluto VR and Rec Room, which provided an amazing boost to the social...

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#511: Neurospeculative Afrofeminism: Building the Future You Want to Live Into

by kentbyeMarch 3, 2017

Labs is a immersive design collective made up of women of color, and they had a sci-fi VR experience at Sundance this year called Neurospeculative Afrofeminism. Their VR experience features black women as some of the pioneers of brain optimization...

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#510: Bigscreen VR’s Social Utility May Be VR’s First Killer App

by kentbyeFebruary 28, 2017

Last week BigscreenVR announced that they raised $3 million dollars for their 'social utility' VR application. BigscreenVR gives you access to your computer screen in VR, which is a deceptively simple idea but one that is unlocking new ways of...

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#508: Using VR as a Tool to Cultivate Compassion with Condition One

by kentbyeFebruary 25, 2017

Danfung Dennis has an ambitious vision for the potential of virtual reality, and it's one of the most radical ones that I've come across. He believes that VR can be used as a tool to cultivate compassion through having an embodied experience of...

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#473: Can VR Bridge the Culture Gap & Counter Cultural Indoctrination?

by kentbyeNovember 10, 2016

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...

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#471: Mozilla on Enabling the Open Metaverse with WebVR, A-Frame, and Servo

by kentbyeNovember 4, 2016

Some of the earliest experiments of making VR a first-class citizen on the web originated at Mozilla in 2014. Then the WebVR spec was drafted in a collaboration between Mozilla and Google's implementations. There's been a lot of excitement and...

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#470: The Art of Dying VR Art Show

by kentbyeNovember 1, 2016

On October 28-31, there was a virtual & augmented reality art show in San Francisco called 'The Art of Dying.' It featured 15 VR experiences and another dozen artists exploring death and grieving using immersive technologies. The show was produced...

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#469: Embodied Cognition & Using Social Structures for Collaborative Learning

by kentbyeOctober 30, 2016

The concept of embodied cognition is a hot topic within immersive education circles, and was a featured topic at during the Embodied Learning educational workshop that happened at the IEEE VR academic conference. Embodied Learning could help...

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#468: Using for Virtual Humans with Personality for Medical Training

by kentbyeOctober 28, 2016

On today's episode, I talk with Dr. Benjamin Lok from the University of Florida about how they're using Virtual Humans as patients to train medical students. He talks about the key components for creating a plausible training scenario which include...

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#465: An Inflection Point for WebVR and the Open Metaverse

by kentbyeOctober 22, 2016

There's been a couple of key developments in the evolution of WebVR during the month of October. First, Nate Mitchell announced during his Oculus Connect 3 keynote that Oculus will be supporting the WebVR ecosystem with the React VR framework and a...

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#459: Oculus Connect Highlights + Questions about Min Spec & Room-Scale

by kentbyeOctober 11, 2016

In this episode of the Voices of VR podcast, I recap some of my highlights from Oculus Connect 3, but also dive into some of my biggest concerns and questions coming out of this year’s big developer conference. My two biggest concerns were the...

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#457: Day 1 Recap of Oculus Connect 3

by kentbyeOctober 6, 2016

Reverend Kyle and I recorded a recap of the first day of Oculus Connect 3 as a part of the Oculus Livestream sponsored by Intel. We went around Oculus Connect 3 trying out a number of multiplayer VR experiences with the Oculus Touch and the gamepad...

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#450: Giving Virtual Honor Flights to WWII Veterans with StoryUP VR

by kentbyeSeptember 28, 2016

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...

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#447: VRLA Highlights + 2017 as the Year of Mobile VR

by kentbyeSeptember 25, 2016

Anshel Sag is an analyst for Moore Insights and Strategies where he has focused on mobile computing platforms. I had a chance to catch up with him at VRLA where talked about his content highlights there as well as why he thinks that 2017 is going to...

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#441: What Dungeons & Dragons Can Teach Storytelling in VR

by kentbyeSeptember 19, 2016

Dungeons & Dragons is a form of collaborative storytelling that isn't constrained by time or budget. Because it's all happening within the theater of the mind, then if you can imagine it, then it can be constructed instantaneously within everyone's...

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#435: Simulating Crowds of Virtual Humans in Immersive Environments

by kentbyeSeptember 11, 2016

The IEEE VR held a new pre-conference workshop this year on Virtual Humans and Crowds for Immersive Environments. Movies like Lord of the Rings and video games like Assassin's Creed use this research in order to create convincing group behaviors...

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