Testimony is one of the most profound and powerful applications of virtual reality that I've seen so far. It's an experimental documentary that captures the stories of sexual assault from five women broken up into five segments. You're completely...
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...
The Tribeca Film Festival featured over 30 different VR experiences within their Storyscapes and Immersive Virtual Arcade, and I had a chance to catch up with curator Loren Hammonds about some of the highlights of the festival program with genres...
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...
Shari Frilot started the New Frontier at Sundance in 2007, and programmed the festival's first VR experience in 2012 with Nonny de la Peña's Hunger in LA using an early Oculus Rift prototype made by Palmer Luckey. Frilot has since programmed around...
Labs is a immersive design collective made up of women of color, and they had a sci-fi VR experience at Sundance this year called Neurospeculative Afrofeminism. Their VR experience features black women as some of the pioneers of brain optimization...
Within premiered their first real-time rendered, interactive experience at Sundance New Frontier this year with Life of Us, which is the story of life on the planet as told through embodying a series of characters who are evolving into humans. The...
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...
Jessica Brillhart is the principle filmmaker for virtual reality at Google, and she been exploring the cross section of artificial intelligence and storytelling in VR. I had a chance to catch up with her at Sundance again this year where we did a...
Last year, Baobab Studios' Eric Darnell was skeptical about adding interactivity to virtual reality stories because he felt like there was a tradeoff between empathy and interactivity. But after watching people experience their first VR short...
There are a number of immersive storytelling innovations Sundance 2017 in a number of experiences including Dear Angelica, Zero Day VR, Miyubi, and Life of Us, but Mindshow VR's collaborative storytelling platform was the most significant long-term...
Gabo Arora founded the United Nations VR, and directed some for the more well-known VR empathy experiences starting with Clouds Over Sidra in December 2014 in collaboration with Chris Milk and Here Be Dragons. Milk first showed Clouds Over Sidra...
Felix & Paul Studios have been innovating on their own immersive VR camera technology since they pioneered the first-ever stereoscopic VR video with Strangers with Patrick Watson. They went on to sign a deal with Oculus Studios to produce a number...
I had a chance to talk about storytelling in VR with three of the co-founders of Oculus Story Studio during Oculus Connect 3. Saschka Unseld, Maxwell Planck, and Edward Saatchi were showing off a preview of their third VR experience Dear Angelica as...
On October 28-31, there was a virtual & augmented reality art show in San Francisco called 'The Art of Dying.' It featured 15 VR experiences and another dozen artists exploring death and grieving using immersive technologies. The show was produced...
Oculus Story Studio has been exploring VR storytelling through a series of short narrative experiences starting with Lost and Henry, but they wanted to push the envelope of immersive storytelling with their next short titled Dear Angelica. They...
Joel Breton is the Vice President VR Content at HTC, and I had a chance to catch up with him at the Casual Connect conference in July to talk about the different industry verticals that they've identified. These include commerce, games, healthcare...
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...
Alexander Porter & James George want to democratize volumetric capture with Depthkit. Depthkit combines depth sensor devices like the Kinect or RealSense cameras with high-end digital SLR cameras. They're able to create a 3D mesh from the captured...
At VRLA, I had a chance to catch up with Sarah Hill, who is the CEO and Chief Storyteller for StoryUp VR. She's been doing some VR for Good projects including giving virtual Honor Flights for WWII veterans as a part of Honor Everywhere as well as...
Anshel Sag is an analyst for Moore Insights and Strategies where he has focused on mobile computing platforms. I had a chance to catch up with him at VRLA where talked about his content highlights there as well as why he thinks that 2017 is going to...
When I was at SIGGRAPH this year, one of the hottest topics was figuring out the workflows for how to deal with the complexity of capturing, processing, and distributing volumetric digital light fields. Otoy's Jules Urbach had a lot of insights, and...
Dungeons & Dragons is a form of collaborative storytelling that isn't constrained by time or budget. Because it's all happening within the theater of the mind, then if you can imagine it, then it can be constructed instantaneously within everyone's...
HBO premiered a VR experience for their new Westworld series at TechCrunch Disrupt, and they used Spherica's camera stabilization technology in order to pull off an extended live-action tracking shot in VR. Common advice given to new VR filmmakers...
When Ted Schilowitz was looking for what to do after traveling the world as the first RED Camera employee, he happened upon an opportunity to serve as a futurist for 20th Century Fox for looking at how to use emerging technologies for storytelling...
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 Owlchemy Labs' Alex Schwartz saw that Rick and Morty creator Justin Roiland was a fan of their Job Simulator VR experience, then he reached out and met up with Justin in Los Angeles. They came up with the idea of creating an interactive Rick...
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...
Visionary VR premiered their Mindshow interactive storytelling platform at VRLA, and was quite a unique experience to be able to record an improv acting session within the body of a virtual character and then step outside of myself to then watch my...
People were waiting in lines for over an hour to see Pearl both at SIGGRAPH and VRLA, which is one of the best narrative VR experiences that I've seen so far. The central character in the story is a car named 'Pearl' who gives selfless service to...
When the recession hit in 2008, book publisher Charlie Melcher looked to reinvent how Melcher Media told stories using the latest smart phone technologies. They developed an iOS app for Al Gore's Our Choice, and started having a lot of conversations...
Wizard of Oz' VR experiences use improv actors to drive either a single or multiple virtual characters. This technique is commonly used within VR training applications where it's cheaper to have a single actor puppeting multiple virtual characters...
Catherine Rehwinkel is working on creating a conceptual framework that enables storytellers to storyboard linear stories in VR. She's a filmmaker who recently finished a master's degree computational & systems thinking at NYU. She's been inspired by...
Back in 2014, the CLOUDS interactive documentary premiered at Sundance New Frontier where it debuted a VR interface to navigate over 40 oral history interviews with creative coding pioneers. Movies have typically been pretty linear, but how could a...
Brett Leonard's journey into VR all started when he moved to Santa Cruz and started partying and smoking pot with some of the elite visionaries from the Silicon Valley technology scene. He was an aspiring writer and film director who got inspired by...
Sony's The London Heist is one of the best fusions of narrative VR storytelling with interactive game components. It's structured as a flashback sequence starting with you being confronted within an interrogation room, and there are branching...
Christine Heller is the co-founder and CEO of VR Playhouse, and she gave a talk with her co-founder Ian Forester at SVVR 2016 titled 'How Fantasy Becomes Form' about the process of starting up a 360-degree video production studio. I had a chance to...
KonceptVR has produced a couple of 360 videos for Broadway Theater productions that includes a promo with the cast of Hamilton as well as a music video with the cast of School of Rock. I had a chance to catch up with KonceptVR's Max Bolotov at SVVR...
Brad Herman & Shiraz Akmal recently left DreamWorks Animation to raise $3 million to start SPACES Inc., which is a virtual reality and mixed reality company focusing on storytelling for different brands including Microsoft, NBCUniversal, and The...
Otherworld Interactive recently announced that their horror experience Sisters just surpassed one million downloads for Google Cardboard. To celebrate, they released a compilation of reaction videos of people screaming and slamming VR headsets into...
Kevin Cornish is a LA-based VR filmmaker who teamed up with AMD to do some interactive narrative experiments using gazed-based content in Believe VR. Depending on which character you look at different moments will triggered up to 32 different...
Milica Zec grew up in war-torn Serbia, but this was a part of her life that she preferred to just forget about and leave behind. After telling screenwriter Lizzie Donahue her story, she was encouraged to tell her story in a short film. Milica...
Rob Morgan is the writer of The Assembly, and he spoke last year at GDC about narrative design in VR and the importance of accurate body language in NPCs to maintain a sense of presence. He returned to GDC this year to talk about some of his lessons...
One of the most compelling applications of VR will be the educational experiences that will be possible, and David Whelan's Immersive VR Education has been making some big innovations in this space. They've created the VR documentary about the...
Michel Reilhac is a French filmmaker who wanted to explore intimacy and polyamory within an immersive 360 video called Viens! (Come!). His Sundance New Frontier piece featured 3 women and four men exploring sensual touch and sexual intimacy with...
Adi Robertson is a senior reporter for The Verge, and she was at Sundance covering the latest developments of VR storytelling. I caught up with her to unpack some of her New Frontier highlights including narrative innovations, how empathy pieces...
One of the most inspiring keynotes at Unity's AR/VR Vision Summit was by Alex McDowell on world building and storytelling. Alex was production designer for Minority Report, Fight Club, & Lawnmower Man, and so he's been creating imaginal worlds for...
For the past year, Tony Davidson and his 17-year old son Kai have been tucked away in the hills of Oregon collaborating on a VR experience that was inspired from one of Kai's dreams. Thunderbird is a puzzle adventure game that surprised everyone at...
One of the most popular VR experiences at Sundance New Frontier this year was Across the Line, which is a piece that simulated what it feels like to walk through an abortion clinic protest line. It was produced by Nonny de la Peña's Emblematic Group...
The VOID started when Curtis Hickman brought on James Jensen to do some pre-visualization of the Evermore theme park that he was developing with Ken Bretschneider. When Curtis asked James if he had any other cool ideas, he shared his long-time...