Google discontinued their Daydream VR headset and support for Pixel 4 in October 2019, but they still have a number of different initiatives within virtual reality including Tilt Brush, Google Earth VR, games from Owlchemy Labs, WebXR integrations...
In the final interview of this VR for Good series, I'm featuring the WebXR Device API and how this represents a new open standard that allows for the easy creation and distribution of immersive content.
Amy Zimmerman is a senior producer on the innovation group for media & entertainment at Unity Technologies, and she helped to start the Unity for Humanity contest there. We talk about her inspiration for the project, and what type of projects that...
Vulcan Productions has been producing social impact films and XR experiences since 1997, when it was founded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who passed away in October 2018. Their four main topics they're focused on are climate change, ocean...
Vince Kadlubek is one of the co-founders of Meow Wolf, and at the time of this interview on March 24, 2019 he was the CEO (but he recently resigned in October 2019.)
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...
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...
For two years, the BBC VR Hub was producing VR content to test out the potential for immersive technologies to help fulfill the BBC's mission to inform, educate, and entertain the public. The BBC was able to produce at least 10 projects with half of...
ARTE is a French German television network that promotes cultural programming that was started in 1992, and they've been pioneers in the digital space for a long time. They've also funded over 60 VR projects over the past 5 years including many...
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...
Tony Parisi is the Head of AR/VR Ad Strategy at Unity Technologies, and he's committing to taking an ethical approach to advertising. Much of the advertising at Unity is done within the context of a mobile game, and so there is less pressure to...
Ethics in Mixed Reality is a hot topic, and I moderated a panel discussion at SIGGRAPH. This panel was attended by a number of people in the immersive industry including HTC's Daniel Robbins, who works as a principal UX designer at HTC Creative Labs...
Jon Oakes is the Technology Labs Coordinator at the San Jose State University Library, and he's also been quite involved in helping to organize the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Meetup and Conference. He held a VR Connect gathering at SJSU the day...
Nathaniel de Jong is a VR content creator on YouTube as 'Nathie' who is focusing on Virtual Reality games. I had a chance to talk with him at the Oculus Connect about the VR content ecosystem for games, the curation policies of Oculus and the...
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...
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...
Walter Greenleaf has been involved with the intersection of virtual reality and medicine for 35 years, and I had a chance to catch up with him at Oculus Connect in order to get some of his impressions from the keynote announcements. He was at the...
Jakob Kudsk Steensen is a Danish artist who has been creating virtual landscapes for 15 years, and has recently been creating virtual reality environments. Steensen comes from the fine arts world, and he's been working as a VR artist with different...
Goro Fujita is an artist in residence at Facebook, and he's been creating virtual reality art and animations since 2015 when he started working at Oculus Story Studio as an art director. I had a chance to talk to him at F8 in 2018 where he told me...
Mozilla Hubs is an open source social VR platform built using open web technologies. You can create your own 3D scenes using their Spoke platform, or launch your own private Hubs server using the open sourced infrastructure code for Hubs. Mozilla...
The Valve Index officially launches today, and it provides a strong vision for the future of high-end PC VR with solid tracking, fidelity, and hand-tracked Index controllers that provide a deep sense of hand presence. Valve sent me hardware to...
The Open AR Cloud is a volunteer organization whose mission statement is to 'drive the development of open and interoperable spatial computing technology, data, and standards to connect the physical and digital worlds for the benefit of all.'...
The Venture Reality Fund general partner & co-founder Tipatat Chennavasin travels around the world tracking the progress of virtual and augmented reality, and I had a chance to catch up with him at Microsoft Build 2019 in order to get his...
French journalist Julien Bergounhoux has been covering the business applications for spatial computing for L'Usine Digitale over the past 6-7 years, and I had a chance to catch up with him following the Microsoft Build opening keynote. We talked...
I got to do a hands-on demo with the HoloLens 2 at Microsoft Build, and then talk about my impressions with Microsoft Developer Relations Program Manager Jesse McCulloch. We talked about where HoloLens is at, more details on the 4th generation Azure...
Facebook announced new information about Oculus for Business at their F8 Developer conference last week, and I had a chance to sit down with Facebook's Head of AR/VR Maria Fernandez Guajardo to go over some of the the details that have been released...
Back at Microsoft Build 2018, I had a chance to talk to two of the lead programmers of Babylon.js, which is a JavaScript framework for building 3D immersive environments with HTML5 and WebGL. It's a framework that's similar to three.js or React 360...
The Oculus Quest is a gamechanger for the VR industry as the inside-out tracking is an engineering marvel, & the untethered experience lowers the friction for being to easy jump into VR. My biggest hesitations with the Quest have more to do with my...
The Bose AR platform with the Bose AR Frames and the QuietComfort 35 headphones was one of the most exciting announcements that happened at SXSW. These Bose AR Frames wearables feature spatialized audio and serve as a bluetooth headset that has an...
The History of the Future' book was published on February 19th, and it's a storified non-fiction account of the modern resurgence of virtual reality through the eyes of the founders of Oculus. Author Blake Harris was able to cultivate some...
Disney Animation was showing Cycles, which is their first narrative VR short film that they produced during private screenings in Park City during Sundance. It's a beautifully-produced piece that explores the connection to place, memories and...
Colum Slevin is Facebook/Oculus' Head of Experiences, and I had a chance to talk about how they're supporting independent storytellers in a quest of trying to discover some of the fundamental components of an immersive story. Slevin says that the...
Embody was an experience at the Sundance New Frontier that started to blend Yoga movement practices into virtual reality. VR artist and MAP Design Lab founder Melissa Painter collaborated with Lululemon's Whitespace Innovation team in order to...
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...
VRLA co-founder Cosmo Scharf talks about some of the deepest levels of our current socio-political and economic context, and how VR & AR can teach us that our beliefs and perception of reality is malleable. Cosmo says that we're suffering form a...
Qualcomm believes that the future of XR is mobile. TechCrunch published rumors published that the Oculus Rift 2 headset was being cancelled, which catalyzed a larger discussion about the degree to which Facebook/Oculus is committed to VR on the...
Immersive advertising campaigns on phone-based AR platforms like AR Kit and AR Core are currently subsidizing a lot of development within the larger XR ecosystem of developers. I heard of many AR developers at Magic Leap who were doing phone-based...
In this podcast episode, I share some of my take aways from Magic Leap's LEAPcon as well as talk with the creators behind the Sigur Ros interactive music experience called Tónandi, which is the best interactive AR experience that I've had so far. I...
Oculus employees Yelena Rachitsky and Isabel Tewes gave a great talk at Oculus Connect 5 titled 'The Hierarchy of Being.' It's a great melding of theory and practice of the impacts of embodiment on the phenomenological experience of a VR experience...
Brands are looking to cause-based marketing & creating interactive experiences in order to provide customers an opportunity to participate in the story of brand that has a deeper purpose and mission that they're trying to achieve. Immersive...
I facilitated a panel discussion at the Decentralized Web Summit that brought together some of the leading virtual reality creators who have been integrating blockchain technologies and creating the foundations of the decentralized metaverse.We...
Jules Urbach wants to create a photorealistic metaverse. He's been working on rending technologies to render digital lightfields, and Otoy's Octane renderer is used everywhere from baking scenes in Unity's real-time game engine to rendering the...
Janus VR has been implementing an IPFS distributed file system option for creators for the past couple of years. I talk to 'Taco Dog' who was the catalyst behind helping to architect the protocol foundations of the decentralized metaverse.He has...
Decentraland is a grand experiment of bringing together decentralized blockchain technologies and virtual worlds. Decentraland ICO raised over 26 million dollars, but it wasn't without controversy where 5-9 whales came in to buy up all of the tokens...
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...
The threat of forking a blockchain project is a catalyst for cooperation, which means that there are many parallels between the blockchain and open source development dynamics. It also means that the value of a blockchain project comes more from a...
High Fidelity and Janus VR announced in March that they were creating a Virtual Reality Blockchain Alliance in order to determine the protocols for the global interoperability of VR.I had a chance to talk to the co-founders of Janus VR and High...
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...
The YouTube VR application just released some social viewing features as well as finally released a version for Gear VR, although there isn't any specific updates on if or when there will be an Oculus Go or Oculus Rift version released. When I asked...