Engage XR produced a 45-minute “Eat Sleep VR Repeat” – Immersive Metaverse Concert in collaboration with Fatboy Slim’s Norman Cook that showed in a limited screening on March 30, 2023. It was an incredibly, mind-bending and groundbreaking VR concert...
The Engage XR platform holds a mix of different types of gatherings in VR ranging from educational meetings, corporate communications, and virtual events and conferences. With the onset of the pandemic in 2020, then HTC started holding a number of...
Immers Space implements the ActivityPub open standard in order to add a federated social graph to the open Metaverse. I had a chance to try a prototype back in December 2022 where I went from a modified Mozilla Hubs WebXR space (that had the Immers...
Another World VR developers Ioulia Isserlis and Max Sacker thought it was a prank when German Hip Hop legend Dennis Lisk (aka Denyo) reached out via email to collaborate on developing a social VR and a completely virtualized live DJ performance...
The Ferryman Collective were back at SXSW presenting another immersive theatre piece in virtual reality, but this time they were translating an adapted a piece called Find WiiLii that was originally produced in South Korea by GiiÖii Immersive Studio...
AltSpaceVR closed it’s doors for the second time on March 10th, 2023 at 10:08pm, and Athena Demos was there to bear witness to it all until the very last moments. She shared an eulogy again that she had first shared during The Polys livestream, and...
I had a chance to catch up with Eddie Lou, who is the Founder of Sandman Studios and Director of Sandbox Immersive Festival that’s based in China. I get an update as to what’s happening with the Chinese ecosystem for immersive stories...
Noah Robinson’s Inner World launches today on the Quest Store after slowly cultivating an engaged peer-to-peer counseling community that is providing affordable mental health interventions across multiple social VR and 2D platforms on Mac, PC & iOS...
VRChat world builder Fins had 3 experiences in Venice Immersive 2022 with one in competition (Treasure Heist), and two in the Worlds Gallery (Magic Heist and District Roboto). Fins comes from an illustration and concept artist background, and so...
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...
Mandala: A Brief Moment in Time is an immersive theater experience for 3-6 people that uses group discussions to tell different stories from Buddhism around the themes of suffering, happiness, hungry ghosts, & living the good life. There's a moral...
Kevin Mack is a virtual reality artist who creates abstract and surreal art, and his first VRChat world called NAMUANKI has been selected as one of the 30 projects in competition at Venice Immersive. You take a tour through some of his organic...
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 got a demo of RP1's single shard with 4000 users in mid-July, and then chatted with 3 team members in August to unpack their journey towards creating a scalable network architecture for the Metaverse. Their demo was built on WebXR, but it could be...
Virtual land speculation within cryptocurrency-based Metaverse platforms has gone from boom to bust over the past couple of years. I sat down to do a deep dive with the Voxels platform (formerly Cryptovoxels) founder Ben Nolan to interrogate the...
Living Cities is a digital twin XR startup announced on May 26th, 2022 with an article titled 'Reality is Scarce...and The Metaverse is infinitely abundant.' that shares a list of '9 principles for connecting the real & virtual.' The founders of...
Exhibition A is 'A love letter to women of color written in virtual reality... showcases talent from the POC, immigrant, non-binary, LGBTQ, and Black communities in Portland, Maine.' I had a chance to speak with project creator and producer Janay...
The Infinite is a location-based VR experience that allows you to freely roam around an architectural abstraction of the International Space Station with friends and family, and it has 360 video photospheres that transport you to nearly 60 excerpts...
The IEEE Global Initiative on the Ethics of Extended Reality has published the first eight white papers investigating different ethical aspects of virtual and augmented reality. This has been a collaboration with dozens of XR industry professionals...
Croquet is an operating system within the context of a browser that serves as a virtual machine that enables bit-identical simulations across multiple computers synchronized via a dedicated network infrastructure of global reflectors. Croquet...
The Ristband music platform (formerly known as Overview Ark) launched an alpha version at SXSW during co-founder Roman Rappak's mixed reality show with his band Miro Shot that I previously covered in episode #1082. Ristband is described as 'your...
One of my favorite experiences from SXSW was Vincent Morisset's Composition, which is a physical installation of a table with blocks that serves as the interface of a interactive music piece that continually shifts the algorithm for how it generates...
Gumball Dreams is the latest immersive theatre production in VRChat by The Ferryman Collective, who previously produced Welcome to Respite: The Severance Theory. They just had their World Premiere last week participating in competition at SXSW, and...
There are a lot of unsupervised children in different social VR applications, and hopefully this interview with Lance G. Powell, Jr. about his article Parental Guide for the Metaverse can be a part of helping inform parents about some best practices...
We Met in Virtual Reality is feature-length documentary by Joe Hunting premiering today at the Sundance film festival. It follows five different protagonists (2 couples in long distance relationships and a sign language teacher) throughout the...
Roel Wouters is a founding partner of Moniker, which is a small tight-nit studio doing projects on how people relate to technologies, social impact of technologies, and the side effects to our lives. We talked about many of their social experiments...
On March 23, 2021, Rec Room announced that they raised $100M with a valuation of $1.25 billion, which makes them the first VR software company to achieve 'unicorn' status. Rec Room was launched for the Vive on June 1, 2016 after 99 days of...
Hope for Haiti is a Haitian-based, non-profit with the goal to improve the quality of life for Haitian people through education, medical, clean water initiatives, and economic development programs. After a visceral experience with a number of VR...
The Severance Theory: Welcome to Respite is a VR adaptation of an immersive theatre piece of the same name originally produced in 2019 by CoAct Productions founder Lyndsie Scoggin. Immersive theatre & VR performer Deirdre Lyons did some voice work...
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...
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...
Kiira Benzing's Loveseat was an ambitious fusion of live theater performance with VR technologies that premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2019. They performed live for the audience in Venice while wearing VR headets as their performances were...
Worldbuilding and speculative design was a big theme at Sundance New Frontier 2021, and I had a chance to participate in an experience that facilitated a collaborative & deliberative process of worldbuilding that was called Beyond the Breakdown...
The Devouring is an epic, 5-6 hour horror adventure game within VRChat that launched on August 14, 2020. It quickly went viral in the VRChat community because it was a unique, shared experience that had a vast world to explore, an evocative...
Virtual Market 5 opens today December 18th, 2020 at 6p PST (Dec 19th at 11a JST), and will run until January 10th at 6a PST (11p JST). It will feature over 1500 VR artists and creators in 30+ worlds in VRChat that features avatars, meshes, clothes...
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...
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...
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...
Dr. Jessica Stone is a licensed psychologist and registered play therapist who has been experimenting with integrating technologies into her therapeutic practice specializing in working with children. She and her husband developed a Virtual Sandtray...
Tender Claws continues to be one of the most innovative studios pushing forward what's possible for immersive storytelling in VR by launching a Tempest, which is a live, immersive theater show within The Under Presents. It's a show that blends the...
VRChat is one of the most popular social VR applications out there, and Chief Creator Officer Ron Millar recently told me that they had over 18,000 concurrent users this past weekend. I had a chance to catch up with the co-founders Jesse Joudrey &...
One of the most powerful explorations of embodiment at Sundance New Frontier 2020 was Metamorphic. The creators describe it as exploring the 'ephemeral nature of the self by allowing participants to redefine their relationships to their own bodies...
All Kinds of Limbo featured the ability to show a volumetric-captured, virtual reality performance to 20 users within the Oculus Quest. Nubiya Brandon narrates her experience of being a mixed-race woman in the United Kingdom, and takes a tour...
Breathe is a Magic Leap, mixed reality experience with four people in shared environment that uses a biometric sensor measuring chest movements in order to explore how our breathing connects us to each other and to the atmosphere. It's a powerful...
Atomu is a social VR experience that premiered at the Sundance New Frontier Biodigital Theater on Friday, January 24, 2020 by co-creators Shariffa Ali (half-Kenyan, half-Ethiopian) and Yetunde Dada (half-Zambian, half-Nigerian) who met growing up in...
Scarecrow is an one-on-one immersive theater piece where you engage with an actor in virtual reality. Every person gets the same structure of a story, but the interactions are customized based upon your actions within the piece. There are a number...
Rec Room is one of the most successful social VR platforms, and they're also on the most platforms including PC VR, Quest, PSVR, PC 2D, PS4 2D, and most recently iOS phones and tablets. There aren't a lot of other casual social mobile app...
Marshmallow Laser Feast is one of my favorite studios with projects like Into the Eyes of an Animal, Treehugger, Sweet Dreams, & We Live in An Ocean of Air. Most of their work has only shown at Film Festivals like Sundance or Tribeca, but last year...
Laurel Trainor is the Director of McMaster Institute for Music and the Mind, which has a LIVElab concert hall for 100 people that allows her to do a lot of studies in the relationship between musical performance and how it's received by an audience...