The VOID was a location-based entertainment company that shut down during the pandemic and maybe coming back at some point. The VOID Co-founder & Chief Creative Officer Curtis Hickman convinced his partners to allow him to reflect upon and share...
Owlchemy Labs has been on the leading edge of accessible VR game design since 2016. starting with Job Simulator, and then following up with key accessibility features for Vacation Simulator, and Cosmonious High. They were at XR Access Symposium...
Engage XR produced a 45-minute “Eat Sleep VR Repeat” – Immersive Metaverse Concert in collaboration with Fatboy Slim’s Norman Cook that showed in a limited screening on March 30, 2023. It was an incredibly, mind-bending and groundbreaking VR concert...
Eggscape is a mixed reality, table top platformer game similar to Lucky’s Tale, but since it’s mixed reality then there’s a lot more of moving your body through space as a control dynamic. I previously got the whole backstory about Eggscape from...
I dig into my interview backlog archive from April 2019 at F8 (a month before the Quest launch) to publish this conversation with Sonya Haskins, who shares her journey into VR through eSports and the Echo VR community. Haskins is a writer who...
Taylor McCue’s He Fucked the Girl Out of Me (play for free on itch.io) won the IDFA DocLab Digital Storytelling Award at DocLab 2022. It is a deeply personal story and powerful exploration of shame and trauma that uses a unique blend of retro 2D...
The seeds of Golf+ VR started with founder Ryan Engle creating an iOS ARKit app to help read the golf putting green topology to give a suggested path to help improve his puts, but the lack of demand caused a pivot into moving into a professional...
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...
Fight Back is an interactive narrative that is aiming to help teach the broad movements of self-defense to women. There were five different levels showing at Venice Immersive where you learn a new hand motion that’s detected via hand tracking. The...
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...
Eggscape is a mixed reality gaming prototype from the Argentinean 3Dar VR, film, & animation studio behind Gloomy Eyes and Paper Birds that leverages the black & white, mixed reality passthrough mode of the Meta Quest 2. It's a has a really...
Virtual Virtual Reality 2 has so many innovations in immersive storytelling structure through a very unique experience of nested contexts allowing for character persistence while the feeling of open world exploration. I talk with the co-founders of...
Vincent Morisset is the founder of the studio AATOAA, and has been doing interactive projects for the past 2 decades. He's worked with folks like Arcade Fire and the National Film Board of Canada on projects spanning mediums from screens, XR...
Roel Wouters is a founding partner of Moniker, which is a small tight-nit studio doing projects on how people relate to technologies, social impact of technologies, and the side effects to our lives. We talked about many of their social experiments...
May Abdalla & Amy Rose are co-founders of Anagram, which has been exploring ways of telling non-fiction stories experientially using technology. There some of my favorite creators in this space, and they also think very deeply about the medium. We...
The MetaMovie Presents: Alien Rescue is one of the most immersive experiences I've had in VR. It's part Cinematic Adventure, part Immersive Theater, and part game that's fusing the affordances of each of these different mediums in a unique way...
One of the most magical AR demos I've ever had a chance to see was Tilt Five at Augmented World Expo 2021. Jeri Ellsworth stumbled upon a complete paradigm shift towards AR while she was at Valve and accidentally had a beam splitter turned around...
#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...
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...
Mária Rakušanová got her start in the VR industry in 2014 when she was a product marketer for the Gear VR at Samsung. Her job meant that she would watch a lot of immersive content that she would use to market this stand-alone, mobile VR headset. In...
Human Interact's Alexander Mejia has a hard time describing what exactly Starship Commander: Arcade is. For movie lovers, he says it's a choose-your-adventure narrative where your the main character of your own movie. For gamers, he calls it a...
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 full release of Gnomes & Goblins was released on September 23, 2020, and it has some of the most sophisticated worldbuilding that I've seen in VR so far. Hollywood director Jon Favreau started to collaborate with Wevr's Jake Rowell and Neville...
The creators of Agence call it a 'dynamic film,' but it's part immersive story with game-like interactions and puzzles where you engage with either traditional heuristic game AI bots or bots trained through reinforcement learning processes. There's...
Tender Claws continues to be one of the most innovative studios pushing forward what's possible for immersive storytelling in VR by launching a Tempest, which is a live, immersive theater show within The Under Presents. It's a show that blends the...
Tetris Effect is one of the most surprising VR games I've played in so far. It's taken a classic 2D puzzler, and re-imagined it into a multi-modal experience in VR with dynamic difficulty synchronized to music, three layers of haptics, and immersive...
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...
The Book of Distance is one of the best VR narratives or immersive stories I've ever seen. Director Randall Okita tells the story of his grandfather Yonezo Okita's journey from Hiroshima, Japan to Canada in 1935 to begin a new life. It has some...
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...
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...
Rec Room is one of the most successful social VR platforms, and they're also on the most platforms including PC VR, Quest, PSVR, PC 2D, PS4 2D, and most recently iOS phones and tablets. There aren't a lot of other casual social mobile app...
Queerskins VR is an embodied story that explores the range of experiences from love to loss, and the shame, regret, and fears around sexual identity. It's got a magical realism aesthetic that transports you back to the 80s AIDS crisis as two devout...
One of the most intense interactive storytelling experiences I've ever had was the Accenture AVEnueS training application for child welfare caseworkers.
Tripp is a VR toolkit to gamify meditation in order to help you self-regulate and perform better. They had a really interesting strategy of bootstrapping the company by targeting corporate wellness clients, which allowed them to create a production...
At the Games for Change 2019 conference, Sharang Biswas gave a presentation on 'Promoting Sex-Positivity Through Analog Games.' He won a grant from The Effing Foundation for Sex Positivity to curate an Erotic Art Games Anthology to be published by...
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.)
Julia Scott-Stevenson got her practice-based Ph.D. on interactive and immersive documentaries (aka 'i-docs') and social impact with her i-doc Giving Time. She's now a research fellow of interactive factual media at the Digital Cultures Research...
Look Inside is an immersive experience the premiered at IDFA DocLab 2019 where you get to take an audio tour of a complete stranger's home. This was one of the hottest tickets in all of IDFA DocLab selling out quickly, and being one of the hardest...
Alexander Devriendt is an immersive theater creator with the company Ontroerend Goed, and he was presenting an interactive piece about artificial intelligence called Artificial: Room One. It was an early-iteration prototype that is starting to...
Tender Claws' The Under Presents is a landmark experience in the evolution of immersive storytelling. It packs in so many narrative innovations, novel game mechanics, experimental VR interactions, and even includes live immersive theater actors in a...
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...
The Key is an immersive narrative that won the Tribeca Storyscapes and the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival. It uses embodied metaphors and dream logic as a mode of storytelling, and these innovations are extremely effective and powerful...
Neurable is building a brain-computer interface that integrates directly into the virtual reality headset. Neurable uses dry EEG sensors from Wearable Sensing, which means that it doesn't require gel in order to get a good signal from the EEG making...
Noah Falstein started as a game design pioneer back in 1980, and lately he's been collaborating a lot with virtual reality companies like MindMaze, Akili Interactive Labs, StoryUp, and AppliedVR on different immersive medical applications and...
Richard Lemarchand directed a minimalist VR experience with the USC Game Innovation Lab
Yasmin Yesilipek is an architecture student at the Architectural Association who has been primarily focusing on virtual reality. She's been creating spaces for online gatherings, and trying to recreate a campfire digitally through experimenting with...
Kevin Mack is a VR artist who has created a series of surrealistic immersive experiences including Zen Parade, Blortasia, and Anandala. Mack starts with mathematically-inspired geometric forms that are generated by collapsing a 5-dimensional...
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...