MLK: Now is the Time was originally released on the Meta Quest platform on January 12, 2023, and was selected to show at SXSW as a part of the 2023 XR Experience Spotlight. It’s master class of immersive storytelling and a brilliant use of the...
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...
Mrs. Benz: Voyage of Discover combines escape room puzzle mechanics with environmental storytelling with exquisite attention to detail in order to tell the story of Bertha Benz, the the wife of the founder of Mercedes Benz, as she steals his car to...
From the Main Square tells the story of a polarized city by placing you in the middle of a hand-drawn and animated city as it goes through different waves of conflict and evolution. There are many individual characters who you can trace throughout...
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...
FRAMERATE is a timelapse LIDAR art installation by ScanLAB Projects that showed at SXSW. It encourages the audience to 'think and feel in another time scale: geological time, seasonal time, tidal time.' I had a chance to talk with director & ScanLAB...
Ioulia Isserlis' Komez Alef O translates the story of her father's refugee journey of escaping the Nazis during the Holocaust. Isserlis collaborated with her father in distilling his journey down to a dozen moments that were spatially reconstructed...
Diagnosia is an immersive, non-linear environmental storytelling piece that takes you inside of a Chinese Internet Addiction Camp. In the early 2000s in China, there was a moral panic around video game use as state-run Chinese media started to...
Gondwana VR simulates 100 years of climate change in the Daintree Rainforest within a 24-hour durational simulation that's running each day throughout the Sundance New Frontier 2022 selection. Lead artists Ben Joseph Andrews and Emma Roberts...
Exploring Home is a full-body tracked, dance performance in a VRChat world that premiered at Venice VR Expanded 2021. It explores issues around identity, avatar representations, being outcast and discriminated against, and it's a unique blend of...
#1004: ANANDALA is an Awe-Inspiring, Generative Art of Embodied AI that Cultivates Perpetual Novelty
Kevin Mack's Anandala is an awe-inspiring piece of VR-native, generative, abstract art with some really compelling experiments in interactive, embodied NPC entities he calls 'blorts.' There are 130 of these blorts spread out throughout a massive...
GOLIATH: PLAYING WITH REALITY is an interactive VR story that explores the experience of schizophrenia & psychosis through the story of a Twitch Streamer named GoliathGames. It's a really strong piece of immersive storytelling balancing...
Breonna's Garden is an augmented reality experience that premiered at the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival that was created by Lady PheOnix in collaboration with Ju'Niyah Palmer to honor the life of her sister, Breonna Taylor. I found it to be a...
Nightss is an sensual experience that's structured around an erotic Polish-language poem by Weronika Lewandowska that uses dance and spatial metaphors in VR to create an immersive poem. She collaborated with co-director and co-screenwriter Sandra...
The Changing Same is one of the most ambitious pieces of volumetric filmmaking yet since it combines all sorts of volumetric capture techniques with Scatter's new Depthkit Studio multi-depth sensor set up, photogrammetry, and a fusion of rigged...
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...
The new Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy's Edge VR experience releases today, and I had a chance to play through it and talk to a couple of the creators from ILMxLab about their latest steps towards their vision of 'storyliving.' It represents a lot...
My wife, Wonder Bright, has absolutely fallen in love with the VR experience Gnomes & Goblins. Her mindset and approach to the game was almost totally opposite from my own. While I focused trying to solve the scavenger hunt puzzles within their core...
The Line was just released on the Oculus Quest today, and it is a really sweet, immersive story that won the Best VR Immersive Experience for Interactive Content award at The Venice Film Festival 2019. The original version I saw in Venice used...
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...
Solastalgia is a site-specific augmented reality experience on the HoloLens 2 where you explore the surface of a depopulated planet in ruin, and colonized by a number of human ghost holograms. 'Solastalgia' is a neologism coined by philosopher Glenn...
Hypha is a VR experience that premiered at Sundance New Frontier 2020 that allos you to embody the full life cycle of a mushroom. You start as a spore in space that comes to Earth, you find enough water, and the go underground to grow into a hypha...
There have been a number of documentaries at Sundance over the past three years that have taken a critical lens the social impacts of technology including The Cleaners (2018), The Great Hack (2019), The Social Dilemma (2020), and Coded Bias (2020)...
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...
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...
Home After War is an Oculus VR for Good piece that focuses on the civilian causalities of mines and improvised explosive devices. It uses photogrammetry to recreate an Iraqi home, and features haptics and immerskve sound design to provide an...
I talk with Winslow Porter at Tribeca 2017 about Tree VR, which is an experience catalyzed by the Rainforest Alliance where you embody a tree and experience an accelerated life cycle that comes to a premature end as human activity is catalyzing the...
I got an update from Traveling While Black director Roger Ross Williams after he's been traveling around the world at different outreach & engagement screenings. I did a deep dive discussion with Williams in my interview with him at the debut at...
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...
Astrid Feringa had a video essay installation at the IDFA DocLab where she was critiquing how the British Institute of Digital Archaeology was using photogrammetry to reconstruct a piece of destroyed architecture. What are the ethics around...
Ali Eslami is an Iranian VR creator whose livelong project is an ever-expanding virtual city called False Mirror, and he was showing off the latest edition at IDFA DocLab called Nerd_Funk. Nerd_Funk is a surrealistic, guided tour through an...
On July 17th, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was a scheduled passenger flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur that was shot down while flying over eastern Ukraine killing all 298 on board. This has been huge news in the Netherlands, and when...
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...
Buffalo Vision's Ben Vance is the artist, designer, & director behind Irrational Exuberance: Prologue. He started developing this experience on the Oculus Rift DK1 in 2013, and it wasn't until he saw the Valve Room demo that he was convinced that...
Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun is an indigenous artist and painter who created his first VR experience called Inherent Rights, Vision Rights back in 1992. He collaborated with VR artist Paisley Smith in a piece called Unceded Territories that premiered...
Filip Kostic is an artist and educator at the ArtCenter College of Design, and he had a piece called Landgrab: The Musical that was featured in the Sptial Realities Art Show curated by Jesse Damiani. Landgrab is a post-modern musical that is trying...
I talk with Jason Edward Lewis about the Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace initiative, as well as the two 2167 Indigenous Storytelling in VR that he helped to produce. How do we reckon the past, present, and the future, and what types of...
The Immersive Design Summit brought together over 150 of the top experiential designers from around the world, mostly from the performance community of immersive theater productions and escape rooms, but also with a small number of people focusing...
The Columbia University School of the Arts' Digital Storytelling Lab has been conducting interactive storytelling experiments to create guidelines, rules, and structures for facilitating emergent and interactive stories through an open-ended...
Marshmallow Laser Feast is a collective of artists who are interested in using VR technologies to capture the aesthetic beauty of nature, and provide immersive experiences that inspire people to cultivate an even deeper with the reality that...
Dr. Skip Rizzo heads the Medical VR Research Group at USC's Institute for Creative Technologies, which has been exploring how to use VR for psychological treatments, cognitive assessment, motor rehabilitation therapy, as well as interactions with...
There's an invisible cyber war that's happening between major nation states, and Zero Days VR takes you inside of it in a completely new way using virtual reality. You go on a journey into a hyper-stylized cyberspace world where you embody the...
Funomena's Woorld won the best AR experience at the recent Google Play awards. You scan your room with a Google Tango-enabled phone, and then you're encouraged to decorate your space with extremely cute art and characters designed by Katamari's...
Human Interact announced this past week that they are collaborating with Microsoft's Cognitive Services in order to power the conversational interface behind their Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, interactive narrative title named Starship Commander...
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...
One of the best VR experiences I did at PAX West this year was Funomena's Luna, which is a unique blend of tactile puzzles, creative world building, musical improvisation within the context of an emotionally-charged narrative. Luna is designed by...
When Rand Miller was a kid, he played Dungeons & Dragons with his brother Robyn where they would go on adventures together exploring and creating imaginal worlds. They wanted to embed that same sense of wonder and awe of exploration and discovery...