Beat Saber was launched on May 1, 2018, and has since sold over 1 million copies making it the most successful VR game ever. My first interview with the Beat Saber co-founders Jan Ilavsky and Jaroslav Beck was at GDC in March 2018, and I reached out...
The Collider is an immersive experience that uses your memories and your body as a platform to explore asymmetrical power dynamics with another person. It's a profound experience that pushes the limits of what it means to have you as the protagonist...
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...
Owlchemy Labs have been pioneering VR experiences exploring hand presence and embodied gameplay in VR since the release of Job Simulator and Rick & Morty VR, and they're releasing their next experience in this sequence called Vacation Simulator...
The Bose AR House at SXSW 2019 featured the first round of interactive audio experiences that are integrated with the Bose AR Frames and Quick Connect 35 noise-cancelling headphones. Devices on the Bose AR platform have an accelerometer, gyroscope...
Torkom Ji tells the story of how he used Resident Evil 7 VR as a form of fear resistance training, and transformational shadow work to overcome his fears. He’s also a co-founder of Visual Reality, which is bringing psychedelic culture and visionary...
There's a lot of intensity in the world right now, and it reminded me of a short excerpt about VR shooters from a longer conversation that I had with Danny Bittman back at Oculus Connect 4 in 2017. I think it speaks to some of what's happening in...
Colum Slevin is Facebook/Oculus' Head of Experiences, and I had a chance to talk about how they're supporting independent storytellers in a quest of trying to discover some of the fundamental components of an immersive story. Slevin says that the...
Tenderclaws debuted The Under experience at Sundance that features live immersive actors from the Piehole theater troupe. Actors embody different characters within a storyworld that has free roaming, non-verbal participants, who need to use their...
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...
Immersive theater is on a collision course with virtual reality. There are so many best practices for interactive storytelling that are easily translatable into VR. Immersive Theater troupe Third Rail Projects produced the acclaimed Then She Fell...
Human Interact's Starship Commander uses AI-enabled, voice-activated commands in order to participate within an interactive story. It was recently was released as a location-based entertainment arcade game, and I first talked to Alexander Mejia...
Frankenstein AI from the Columbia Digital Storytelling Lab debuted at Sundance 2018. It was a cross-displinary collaboration that used machine learning, immersive theater, dance, and prompts for social interactions. I talk with choreographer Brandon...
Rust LTD is composed of four avant-garde artists who are experimenting with political philosophy as game design through surrealist narratives and open world sandboxes of resolving paradox through play. I spoke with Rust's CTO Anton Hand about Hot...
Indiecade is the International Festival of Play, and Festival Director Sam Roberts curates innovations in game play and interaction paradigms that explore the questions of: What do I do? What happens when I do it? And how do I do it? Roberts sees an...
In this podcast episode, I share some of my take aways from Magic Leap's LEAPcon as well as talk with the creators behind the Sigur Ros interactive music experience called Tónandi, which is the best interactive AR experience that I've had so far. I...
Gabo Arora's ZIKR: A Sufi Revival premiered at Sundance this year. It's a 360-degree video capture of a number of different Sufi rituals, songs, and dances, but it had a real-time, social VR experience overlaid on top of the live action footage...
Pixel Ripped 1989 is one of the most ambitious and innovative VR experiences I've seen. It's a multi-dimensional experience with 2D game within a VR game within an immersive story. You're in a VR world set in 1989 while also playing a Game Boy-like...
Electronauts is a cross between a simplified DJ simulator and improvisational music tool from Survios that is launching today. It's releasing with over 40 electronic songs that allows you to step into the DJ booth and control the flow of the music...
Hotdogs, Horseshoes, and Hand Grenades (aka H3) is an open-ended sandbox VR experience where you can play with a variety of exotic firearms. It's a puzzle game where you have to figure out how to activate, load, and fire a huge range of different...
The Nordic Trolls is a VR development company based in Beijing, China. I had a chance to catch up with the CEO Thorbjørn Olsen (originally from Norway) and co-founder Lin Chen at CES 2017 to talk about the VR ecosystem in China, the different ways...
Sound Self developer Robin Arnott is starting a publishing label named Orpheus Technodelics to curate and distribute consciousness hacking VR experiences. 'Technodelics' are digital psychedelics that provide peak experiences, and Arnott hopes till...
Here's a bit more information on the game mechanics of Light Strike Array:
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.
I talked with Cix Liv, the CEO of Liv, about their mixed reality hardware and software solutions. Mixed reality shows what it feels like to be in VR better than any other depiction, and Cix is really interested to see how mixed reality is going to...
Beat Saber is a rhythm game that is like an embodied puzzle game that creates a visceral connection to 10 custom music tracks. It's similar to Soundboxing and Audio Shield, but you use extended light sabers rather than your fists, which makes you...
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...
The VR Unicorns use a rapid iteration, game jamming approach to VR development, and co-founder Julie Heyde does daily playtesting and quality assurance gathering feedback and guidance for the development team. Heyde has also been experiencing a...
The full release of CloudGate Studios' VR survival game Island 359 is now available, and there's some special embodiment features for anyone who has 1-3 of HTC's Vive Trackers. They've developed an adaptive system that uses 1 tracking puck on your...
Tender Claws' Virtual Virtual Reality is a Daydream-exclusive interactive story that won the best VR experience at the 2017 Google Play Awards VR, and it's one of my personal favorite interactive narratives within VR. Virtual Virtual Reality (aka...
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...
VRChat is becoming one of the top streamed VR game as different Twitch personalities like pokelawls, dyrus, greekgodx, and LIRIK and YouTube personalities Jameskii & Nagzz21 start to role play in virtual worlds, and then capture clips of candid and...
OSSIC's Jason Riggs told me at CES last year that the future of music is going to be immersive and interactive. Interactive sound design where user agency is considered a part of the experience is a key ingredient to creating fully immersive audio...
Emilie Joly says that the rules of interaction are the stories within interactive narratives, and Apelab is creating the Spatial Stories plug-in and toolset in order to make it easier to define those rules. Unity uses an object-oriented approach for...
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...
Ravé Mehta talks about how he was able to deal with recovering from a health condition through achieving progressively deeper, longer, and more consistent levels of flow states. He talks about his holistic philosophy of flow, what he learned from...
ARQUA! was one of the ARKit launch applications that was designed by VR veteran Isaac 'Cabbibo' Cohen, and it has the same indie charm and shader art aesthetic as his previous VR experiences of Blarp! and L U N E. ARQUA's gameplay involves you...
Killing Floor: Incursion is a horror game featuring lots of gore that is sure to evoke visceral reactions in players. I had a chance to play a demo at GDC, and I can say that it's definitely an experience has stuck with me. The mechanics of beating...
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...
Oculus premiered about a dozen games ahead of GDC this year, and one that stood out to me was Mage's Tale dungeon crawler for it's distinct art style and passion in using VR to fulfill childhood fantasies of becoming a spell-casting magician. Mage's...
Sprint Vector is an 'adrenaline platformer' racing game that relies upon a unique locomotion technique of swinging your arms in order to run through an obstacle course. It's the latest game from Raw Data developer Survios, but with a much more light...
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...
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...
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...
One of the most immersive flying experiences that I've had a chance to have so far was Mindride Airflow. I had a chance to try it out last fall at VRLA, and the weightless harness combined with a variety of different wind speeds gave me a deep sense...
Shooting a bow and arrow in VR is a satisfying game mechanic. It uses both hands in a 6-DoF interaction that can only happen in VR. VR Unicorns' #Archery takes this bow and arrow shooting mechanic to the logical extreme in a quirky fashion that's...
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...
The developers at Harmonix didn't set out to create an open-ended music creativity tool with Rock Band VR, but once they realized how compelling it was to simulate the feeling of being a rock star on stage in VR, then they completely pivoted the...
Using language to translate an experience into words is one of the highest levels of abstraction that you can have. Using the power of visual metaphor through poetry is able to get to deeper levels of emotion, and virtual reality is able to remove...
Last week BigscreenVR announced that they raised $3 million dollars for their 'social utility' VR application. BigscreenVR gives you access to your computer screen in VR, which is a deceptively simple idea but one that is unlocking new ways of...