Liv Erickson is the ecosystem development lead at Mozilla focusing on innovation in spatial computing and AI technologies, and they are the former director of the Mozilla Hubs team. They gave a presentation at the XR Access Symposium that they...
Mark Steelman is a XR Access Working Group Member and Senior Unity Engineer at Transfr, which uses virtual reality to “train people for well-paying careers available now in high-demand fields.” Steelman was at XR Access showing off some...
Christian Vogler leads the Technical Access Program at Gallaudet University, and has been looking into captions for VR and 3D spatial environments for folks who are deaf and hard of hearing. I had a chance to catch up with him at the XR Access...
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...
The immersive documentary Reeducated won a Peabody Award as well as the Outstanding Interactive Media winner of the New Approaches category of the New & Documentary Emmy in 2022. I had a chance to record this interview with the co-directors Ben Mauk...
Jessie Cohen started representing immersive stories back at Sundance 2013 when she was working for the Sundance Film Festival for the New Frontier section. She eventually transitioned from trying to represent every New Frontier project through the...
This is the 26th & last episode of my Venice Immersive 2022 coverage, and I wanted to end with this discussion amongst film and immersive critics about the various challenges for reviewing and critiquing immersive art and entertainment. This is a...
Time Detectives AR by Picture This Productions is a site-specific AR trail experience meant to be seen at the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth, UK, but you can also experience it remotely as a table-top experience at home. Time Detectives AR asks...
The LGBTQ+ VR Museum won the inaugural Tribeca Immersive New Voices Award as it curated a number of really touching virtual objects, art, and stories from LGBTQ+ people. Antonia Forester started the project after discovering that there was not a...
The Extended Reality (XR) Ethics in Education is the next paper in the series of the IEEE Global Initiative on the Ethics of Extended Reality.
Eric Kohn has been a professional film critic for 15 years, and he’s currently the Executive Editor at Indiewire, the Vice President of Editorial Strategy, as well as the co-host of IndieWire’s Screen Talk podcast. IndieWire first...
Nonny de la Peña was one of the 16 Legacy Peabody Award recipients honoring historical work as a part of their new Digital & Interactive Storytelling Award. Specifically, de la Peña is receiving a Field Building honor for her body of work that has...
(Hi)story of a Painting: The Light in the Shadow won a special jury prize at SXSW for Immersive Storytelling as it uses the medium of VR to take us back into history to explain the deeper historical context of the work of Artemisia Gentileschi, a...
Francesca Panetta is a freelance immersive artist, director, journalist who worked at The Guardian experimenting with new forms of storytelling, then as a creative director at MIT experimenting with new forms of storytelling using AI, and now is an...
I talk with Joey J. Lee & Elliot Hu-Au about a paper they published in Frontiers of Virtual Reality called 'E3XR: An Analytical Framework for Ethical, Educational and Eudaimonic XR Design,' which looks at the intersection of XR ethics, best practice...
Kusunda is a spatial documentary about a indigenous language in Nepal that is on the brink of going dormant and falling asleep. It's an incredibly powerful story that uses photogrammetry, Tilt Brush interpretations of oral history, and interactive...
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...
Note: This is a sponsored content post from the University University of North Carolina School of the Arts
Pluto VR is a general-purpose VR, telepresence application that hopes to provide the social presence glue for a standards-driven, multiple-application ecosystem using SteamVR on the PC. I had some new conceptual breakthroughs about the potential...
Inside COVID-19 is a new 360 video series that premiered on Oculus TV on Friday, November 20, 2020, and it features Dr. Josiah Child who manages emergency departments at five different hospitals. Dr. Child contracted COVID-19, and this film takes us...
Erica Southgate released a book titled Virtual Reality in Curriculum and Pedagogy: Evidence from Secondary on Classrooms May 19, 2020, which covers the theory and practice of using VR in classrooms. Southgate is an Associate Professor of Emerging...
Back in November 2018, Daniel Dyboski-Bryant and Lorelle VanFossen started a regular meetup of Educators in VR within AltSpaceVR. They've been meeting consistently for the past year and a half, and they're currently hosting 5-8 gatherings per week...
Al Jazeera Contrast is an immersive storytelling and media innovation studio that is interested in telling the stories of the Global South and communities of color. They premiered a multi-media experience at Sundance New Frontier called Still Here...
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...
Kai Frazier is a history teacher who decided to make a complete pivot into creating accessible and diverse educational content and kits for education. She curates 360 videos and produces content aimed for underrepresented minorities to be able to...
One of the most intense interactive storytelling experiences I've ever had was the Accenture AVEnueS training application for child welfare caseworkers.
Note: This is a sponsored content post from the University University of North Carolina School of the ArtsThe Media + Emerging Technology Lab (METL) is situated within the film school of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, and they...
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...
Last Whispers is a virtual reality experience that visualizes the extinction of languages around the world. Director Lena Herzog says that there are about 7,000 active languages on the planet, but that we're loosing one to two languages a week due...
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...
Bodyless was one of my favorite VR experiences that I saw at the Venice International Film Festival. The experience was the most like walking into someone else's dream that I've ever had in VR. The experience alternated between an on-rails guided...
There's been a virtual reality training revolution that's been slowly brewing over the last five years, and STRIVR has been at the forefront of innovation working with everyone from elite athletes in the NFL to thousands of Walmart employees. STRIVR...
Space Popular is a multidisciplinary design and research practice led by Lara Lesmes & Fredrik Hellberg, and they've been architecture students for the last eight years about spatial design as well as the latest immersive technologies. They've been...
The RLab is a publicly-Funded XR center for research, entrepreneurship, and education located in Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York. It's being managed under NYU's Tandon School of Engineering in collaboration with Columbia, CUNY, & New School. The RLab...
Radix Motion is creating a trippy, asynchronous communication platform called MEU that starts to play with our experience of embodiment. CEO Sarah Hashkes is a cognitive neuroscientist who previously studied psychedelics through the lens of a...
Spatial XR creative collaboration platform has been featured in that past two Microsoft presentations at the Microsoft Build Keynote on Monday, May 6th as well as in the HoloLens 2 announcement at Mobile World Congress on Sunday, February 24, 2019...
BehaviorMe is using virtual reality to enhance behavior therapy for children and young adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). It's started by four people including two therapy practioners with fifteen years of experience working with clients...
Helixaeon's Time Helix has a unique way of visualizing time-based data as a fractal-nested helix. Helixaeon was recently awarded US Patent #10,185,933 for their interactive, multi-dimensional data visualization that's able to 'generate a...
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...
Zero Latency just announced a free-roaming, player vs. player experience called Sol Raiders that will be available to play starting February 9th at one of there 20+ locations around the world. Most location-based VR experiences are co-op where you...
Robert Hernandez is a Digital Journalism Professor at USC, and he serves a sort of innovation lab to see how journalists can use emerging technologies to tell stories. I talk with him about some of his projects including 'The Deported: Life Beyond...
Clorama Dorvilias' Debias VR is using virtual reality to make diversity training more immersive, interactive, and fun. There are various controversies around the Implicit Association Tests (IAT) that are related towards how far the abstractions of...
Morgan Mercer's Vantage Point is creating virtual reality training experiences in order to cultivate the skills to break the stigma around sexual assault and and to overcome the bystander effect. They're using the affordances of VR & 360 video in...
Lawnmower Man director Brett Leonard is working on a project called Hollywood Rooftop, which is going to be shot both as an immersive 360 video as well as a 2D film. It's an experiment to discover some of the unique cinematic storytelling...
Each of the founders of TribeXR wanted to learn how to become a DJ, but they never got around to it. So they all went to DJ school, and they've been building virtual reality technologies to alleviate many of the pain points that slowed down their...
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...
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...
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...
Jeremy Bailenson founding director of Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, and his latest book Experience on Demand traces his academic journey through virtual reality. It's an intellectual memoir that focuses on his personal work in...
Punchdrunk's immersive theater piece of Sleep No More opened in March 2011, and it's inspired countless experiential designers of immersive theater, and virtual and augmented reality experiences. It was a paradigm shift that broke the fourth wall...