Ohan Oda works at Google on an AR feature in Google Maps called Live View that he was showing off during the demo session at the XR Access Symposium. It adds some screenreader support for geospatial browsing where users can search for nearby...
Liz Hyman President and the CEO of the XR Association (XRA), which is a non-profit, industry trade association representing 47 XR companies including major players like Meta, Google, Microsoft, HTC, Sony Interactive Entertainment, Unity, and HTC...
I speak with Road to VR Editor Ben Lang about his hands-on impression of the Apple Vision Pro that he had on Monday, June 5, 2023. Check out his full article: “Hands-on: Apple Vision Pro isn’t for Gaming, But it Does Everything Else Better...
Apple finally announced their mixed reality headset called the Apple Vision Pro at Apple’s WWDC keynote on June 5, 2023. It’s a $3500 device that by accounts is the most advanced XR headset produced up to this point that’s largely...
I speak with HTC’s Alvin Wang Graylin, who is the President of HTC China & Global VP of Corporate Development at HTC about HTC’s investment strategy and what’s happening in the enterprise XR space. We talk about how hardware subsidies have distorted...
President Joe Biden wrote an Wall Street Journal op-ed on January 11, 2023 calling for “serious federal protections for Americans’ privacy.” Digital Content Next CEO Jason Kint tweeted out that “I’ll sit down with anyone to explain why privacy...
I had a chance to talk with Oculus Founder Palmer Luckey about the past, present, & future of XR where he reveals to me that his defense contracting company Anduril has more people employed working on VR than Oculus did when it was bought out by...
On November 1st, 2022 the XR Association (XRA) trade association for VR, AR, and Mixed Reality companies announced the formation of the XR for All Foundation at XRA’s Limitless Future Conference. The press release says, “The XR for All Foundation’s...
Niantic’s Lightship Augmented Reality Developer Kit celebrated it’s one-year anniversary in November 2022, and I had a chance to catch up Caitlin Lacey, a senior director of AR platform marketing at Niantic to talk about the evolution of...
Brad Lynch has described his SadlyItsBradly YouTube channel as a speculation and prediction channel focusing on the next generation VR hardware, and it has been providing some of the most insightful and detailed VR hardware analysis in the XR...
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...
Photo of The Beast Prototype courtesy of Rony AbovitzI had a chance to sit down with Magic Leap founder Rony Abovitz for two hours to unpack some of the many threads Magic Leap's behind origin story, including some of the underlying philosophical...
The new business models of the Metaverse have yet to be fully forged? Will the existing structures of surveillance capitalism be extended into the new frontiers of biometric & physiological data? Or will there be new emergent & disruptive models for...
I had a chance to do a demo of the Lynx R-1 standalone mixed reality headset at the Augmented World Expo, which was a really compelling experience that blended the virtual and real better than any other headset I've seen do before. Part of the magic...
On November 9th at the beginning of the Augmented World Expo (AWE),Qualcomm announced Snapdragon Spaces, which is a series of AR tools striving to cultivate an 'open, cross-device horizontal platform and ecosystem.' The Snapdragon Spaces tools...
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...
HTC is launching the Vive Flow today available for pre-order $499 and launching in early November. They're 6-DoF 'immersive glasses' weighing 189 grams that are meant to be the tablet of VR. You have to bring your own power supply, and so you'll...
HTC announced two new, enterprise-focused VR headsets at their Vivecon on Tuesday May 11th. The Vive Focus 3 is a standalone VR HMD with an impressive 2,448 x 2,448 per-eye resolution, 90Hz, 120° FoV, new controllers, swappable battery, and priced...
Facebook's Project Aria announcement in September at Facebook Connect raised a number of different ethical questions with anthropologists and technological ethicists. Journalist Lawrence Dodds described it on Twitter by saying, 'Facebook will send...
On April 22, 2020, Magic Leap announced layoffs of somewhere between 600 to 1000 employees, which amounted to around 1/3 to 1/2 of their total staff. On December 2019, The Information reported that Magic Leap had only sold 6,000 AR headsets against...
On March 18th, Facebook Reality Labs Research announced some of their research into next-generation neuromotor input devices for mixed reality applications. I paraphrased the most interesting insights from their press conferences announcement, but I...
I participated in a Facebook press event on Tuesday, March 16th that featuring some Facebook Human-Computer Interaction Research on AR Neural Inputs, Haptics, Contextually-Aware-AI, & Intelligent Clicks. It was an on-the-record event for print...
On October 4th, YUR Fit co-founder Cix Liv spoke out on social media about his frustrations in collaborating with Facebook as an independent developer by saying, 'they will block you from the store without reason, break your application, try to...
There is a lot of sensitive data that will captured by virtual reality devices that present a wide range of ethical and moral dilemmas that I've been covering on The Voices of VR podcast since 2016. During Facebook Connect, Facebook released their...
The XR Association is a non-profit 501(c)(6) trade association with members including Facebook/Oculus, Google, Microsoft, Sony, & HTC. They're focused on general awareness and education, lobbying Congress on XR policy issues, and promoting research...
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...
On June 11, 2019, Guy Godin announced on Reddit and on Twitter that 'Oculus doesn't want the SteamVR streaming feature in their store' and that he had been asked by Oculus to remove this wireless streaming feature that he had recently added to his...
Alex Heath reports on Facebook and their competitors for the subscription-only site The Information, and he's been able to get some exclusive interviews and do some in-depth reporting on some of Facebook's VR and AR hardware initiatives. As we're on...
Valve is a critical player in the modern resurgence of VR. They are known for their friendly competitions and cooperation they had with Oculus in the early days of virtual reality spanning from July 2012 to March 20113. Blake Harris' History of the...
I was invited to join the F Reality Podcast over the weekend with VR Oasis's Mike, Nathie, Rowdy Guy, and Zimtok5 to be able to talk about this past week's news about Facebook's new requirement that all new VR users and hardware will be required to...
BigScreenVR is in direct competition with some of the same services that Facebook wants to fully control, and their CEO Darshan Shankar has had to resort to posting an thread on Twitter expressing his frustrations in trying to negotiate with...
Anton Hand is an indie VR developer with RUST LTD, who is the project lead for Hotdogs, Horseshoes, & Hand Grenades. Hand made the decision sometime in 2016 to not explicitly support any Facebook APIs or hardware for his indie VR project beyond what...
HP, Microsoft, & Valve collaborated on the HP Reverb G2, which is opening for pre-orders today for $599 and will start shipping in the Fall. It has the same resolution as the G1 of 2160 x 2160 pixels per eye, but with improved optics. Road to VR's...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...