Visbit is a B2B, 360-video streaming distribution company based out of Silicon Valley, and co-founder and CEO CY Zhou is originally from China. I caught up with CY at CES 2017 to talk about some of the basic streaming services and application SDK...
I talk with flow artist Swan about the story of behind the Beat Saber viral videos, and what it means to add style to VR with embodiment and VR.
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...
Google's mission statement is to 'organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful,' and so it's a natural fit that they'd be a leader in creating educational experiences for AR & VR. Google Expeditions continues to...
The Oculus Go was released on Tuesday, May 1st at the Facebook F8 developer conference, and it is a self-contained, 3-DoF mobile VR HMD with a price of $199 that is optimized for media consumption and social VR interactions. Facebook showed off four...
Matt Miesnieks is creating an AR cloud with 6D.AI, which aims to 'synchronize 3D computer vision data across devices, time and space' in order to enable 'persistent content, occlusion, and real-time shared experiences.' Miesnieks has founded a...
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...
Keiichi Matsuda went from being a dystopian filmmaker to becoming the vice president of design at hand-tracking company Leap Motion. Matsuda is probably the most famous for his HYPER-REALITY dystopian filmthat imagined an commodified & gamified AR...
The future of VR storytelling will be immersive and interactive. Yelena Rachitsky is an executive producer of experiences at Oculus, and she's been inspired by how interactive narratives have allowed her to feel like a participant who is more...
What is happening with the VR industry? Is the adoption and growth still on target to support a vibrant and diverse ecosystem of independent VR developers? Leading headset manufacturers have not been transparent in sharing any specific information...
Tony Parisi is the Head of AR & VR strategy at Unity so he has an insider's perspective of not only where the VR and AR industry is today, but some hints as to what xR is going to look like by 2025. Parisi had a fireside chat with HTC Viveport...
At SIGGRAPH 2017, NVIDIA was showing off their Isaac Robot that had been trained to play dominos within a virtual world environment of NVIDIA's Project Holodeck. They're using Unreal Engine to simulate interactions with people in VR to train a robot...
Soundboxing is a VR rhythm game that has found a community of people who use it for exercising in VR, with some people reporting that they've lost up to 50 pounds from playing it. Soundboxing is similar to Audioshield in that you punch orbs set to...
After talking to a lot of independent VR storytellers, Kaleidoscope VR's René Pinnell identified that funding was one of the biggest blockers for continued experimentation. Cinematic VR pieces do not have many established distribution channels yet...
The Dark Corner app is creating a new distribution channel for immersive horror experiences and 360-degree videos. Guy Shelmerdine and Teal Greyhavens are hoping that fans of the horror genre will be enthusiastic enough about the potential of VR to...
Without explicitly announcing a new specific product, Samsung quietly implied that they may be developing a new standalone mobile VR HMD during a session during their developer conference last week. While there were no big VR announcements during...
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...
At Google's 10/4 press conference, they announced a new Pixel 2 phone and a range of new ambient computing devices powered by AI-enabled conversational interfaces including new Google Mini and Max speakers, Google Clips camera, and wireless Pixel...
Brian Blau is the vice president of research for personal technologies at Gartner Research where he's in the business of making predictions about the consumer adoption of virtual reality and augmented reality technologies. I last interviewed Blau in...
Intel is investing in the future of immersive computing through their Virtual Reality Center for Excellence. They're pushing the boundaries of high-end of VR gaming experiences, pursuing initiatives to help VR reach critical mass, and exploring how...
Anyland is a social VR experience focusing on worldbuilding and avatar creation tools that allow you to create interactive experiences while in VR. They've also implemented an open sharing feature that makes it easy to collect objects from the world...
Decentraland is a virtual world that is using the Ethereum Blockchain to sell plots of virtual real estate. They're having an initial coin offering for the ERC-20 token MANA from August 8 to August 16, 2017, and they'll have up to 2 million plots of...
Virtual Reality Headsets have not sold as many units as some of the more optimistic analysts have predicted, and VR Fund's Tipatat Chennavasin says that the relatively quick adoption of smart phone technologies have spoiled a lot of people within...
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...
VR World NYC is a new VR arcade that opened on June 24th in New York City right next to the Empire State Building. They have three floors with 55 different VR experiences, and they're using an all-you-eat buffet business model of paying $39-$49 to...
Augmented Reality has played a huge role at the developer conferences for Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Google, which is a great sign that the industry is moving towards spatially-aware computing. Microsoft is the only company to start with head...
Kyle Russell is on the deal & research team for Andreessen Horowitz (aka A16z) where he's focusing on investing in technologies ranging from virtual & augmented reality, artificial intelligence, drones, and other exponential technologies like...
Google's mission to organize all of the world's information, and so it's a natural fit for Google to be one of the leading innovators for using VR for immersive education. Google Expeditions was born out of a hackathon soon after the Google Carboard...
Mozilla's mission statement is to ensure that the Internet remains a global public resource, open and accessible to all, and they've been helping bring VR to the web for the past three years. A-Frame is an open source framework that has gained a lot...
Google's mission is to organize the world's information, and so they've been long-time advocates for the open web. At Google I/O last week, they announced that they'll soon be shipping Google Chrome for Android with WebVR, and that they're going to...
Cory Doctorow's new sci-fi book 'Walkaway' is a optimistic disaster novel that imagines what society might look like if people walked away from competitive market-driven laws, norms, and technological infrastructure and into an open-source inspired...
The HoloLens is the most impressive augmented reality HMD on the market today, and their developer kit is already being deployed into production in industries ranging from architecture, engineering, design, sales, medicine, and education. Microsoft...
The Microsoft Build conference starts this week, and I expect that we'll be learning more about the HoloLens as well as Microsoft's Windows Mixed Reality operating system. Microsoft has been evangelizing about virtual reality the past couple of...
The keynote from Unity's Vision VR/AR Summit yesterday showcased just how far Unity is reaching into non-gaming content when it comes to augmented and virtual reality. The person who is in charge of Unity's xR strategy is Tony Parisi, who is a co...
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...
At Sundance this year, I had a chance to catch up with a couple of representatives from Google to talk about what's happening on the YouTube VR platform with 360 videos. I talked with Jamie Byrne, YouTube's Director of Global Creator & Enterprise...
April 4th was the one-year anniversary of the HTC Vive, and HTC released the subscription service for Viveport for $6.99 to try out five new VR applications per month. I had a chance to catch up with Viveport president Rikard Steiber at GDC to talk...
I had a chance to catch up with Oculus' Nate Mitchell at GDC where I asked him about privacy in VR. Oculus has delegated the design and maintenance of their privacy policy to their parent company of Facebook so that Oculus can focus on providing the...
Valve's Joe Ludwig talks about the latest updates on the Khronos Group's VR standardization process that is now being called 'OpenXR.' Ludwig says that OpenXR is still primarily creating an open and royalty-free open standard for virtual reality...
Tilt Brush launched on the Oculus Rift today, and I had a chance to catch up with Tilt Brush product manager Elisabeth Morant, launching. We have a broad discussion about adapting Tilt Brush for the Touch controllers, the Tilt Brush Artist in...
Alvin Wang Graylin is the China President of Vive at HTC, and I had a chance to talk with him at CES this year about what's happening in China. He provided me with a lot of cultural context, which includes support from the highest levels of Chinese...
Virtual Reality has the potential to enable so many amazing utopian futures, but it also has the potential to become one of the most intimate surveillance technologies that could create a Big Brother dystopia of political and economic control. But...
The most significant VR announcement from CES 2017 was the Vive Tracker, which is a modular lighthouse tracked 'puck' attachment that will enable users to track additional objects within VR experiences. It has the potential to drive a lot of new...
The Oculus Touch motion-tracked controllers are launching on December 6th after eight months of the Rift solely supporting gamepad experiences. I wanted to take a moment to dig into some of the more subtle technical nuances when comparing the Oculus...
I had a chance to talk about storytelling in VR with three of the co-founders of Oculus Story Studio during Oculus Connect 3. Saschka Unseld, Maxwell Planck, and Edward Saatchi were showing off a preview of their third VR experience Dear Angelica as...
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...
Oculus Story Studio has been exploring VR storytelling through a series of short narrative experiences starting with Lost and Henry, but they wanted to push the envelope of immersive storytelling with their next short titled Dear Angelica. They...
Cognitive VR is an VR analytics platform that has an impressive system for visualizing a player's movements and gaze within a 3D representation of a VR experience. Their SceneExplorer tool translates the 3D geometry from a Unity or Unreal experience...
Joel Breton is the Vice President VR Content at HTC, and I had a chance to catch up with him at the Casual Connect conference in July to talk about the different industry verticals that they've identified. These include commerce, games, healthcare...
Valve premiered a prototype of a new type of VR input controller at Steam Dev Days in order to get some preliminary feedback from developers. They've created a capacitive-touch controller that is attached to your hand so that you can open and close...