I interviewed A Vocal Landscape co-directors Omid Zarei and Anne Jeppesen at Venice Immersive 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality : Play in new...
I interviewed Empereur (Emperor) co-directors Marion Burger and Ilan Cohen after Venice Immersive 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality : Play in...
I interviewed Syuhasuu (Frequency) director Ellie Omiya at Venice Immersive 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
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I interviewed Queer Utopia: Act I Cruising director Lui Avallos at Venice Immersive 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality : Play in new window |...
I interviewed Finalmente Eu (Finally Me) director Marcio Sal at Venice Immersive 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality : Play in new window |...
This is the kickoff of my Venice Immersive 2023 coverage that totals 35 episodes and over 30 hours worth of deep dive interviews with leading experiential designers who are breaking down their latest insights and innovations with the grammar of...
The latest Festival of International Virtual and Augmented Reality Stories (FIVARS) starts today in a hybrid exhibition of 65 immersive stories until September 19 in Toronto and until October 3 with an online exhibition of spherical video and...
The Venice Immersive 2023 edition is set to take place from August 30 to September 9th featuring 43 immersive storytelling projects from 25 countries and 24 works in the Worlds Gallery section. There are 28 projects in competition this year, and...
Sandra Rodriguez is a director and creative director of immersive experiences that use AI to create spaces where you interact with sentient-like entities. I had a chance to catch up with her during Tribeca Immersive 2023 to unpack three of her...
Matthew Niederhauser and John Fitzgerald are both co-founders Sensorium as well technical directors at ONX Studio. They both have been working on a number of different immersive XR projects that are including the latest generative AI and large...
Brandon Powers is a creative director and choreographer who is creating experiences across physical and virtual space at the intersection of performance and technology. He was showing a dance performance at ONX Studios during Tribeca Immersive that...
Brendan Bradley is an actor and storyteller who got into real-time animation systems and social VR during the pandemic, and then starting putting on live theatre shows in Virtual Reality both onsite, hybrid, and in-venue, and fully virtual. He co...
Keiichi Matsuda is one of the deepest thinkers in the field of XR. He is trained as an architect, and he’s currently the director of Liquid City, a small design studio based in London that is engaged developing cutting-edge AR applications and...
Christina Kinne (aka XaosPrincess) wanted to seed social VR worlds with AI chatbots in order to help catalyze larger social VR gatherings, and so she created the The Quantum Bar in Neos VR, which features a robot bartender that does speech to text...
Violeta Ayala is a filmmaker, film futurist, and creative technologist who using semantics to create immersive art with ChatGPT and generative AI programs. I had a chance to catch up with her at NewImages France where she talked about how AI has...
The intersection of XR and Artificial Intelligence is a hot topic, and this is the start of a 17-part Voices of VR podcast series where I’ve interviewed different immersive artists and XR developers over the past four months about how...
Kinfolk: Black Lands is described by co-founder Idris Brewster as “an Augmented Reality Archive of Black, Brown, LGBTQ, and underrepresented history in general using the power of immersive storytelling and immersive media to uplift stories...
Colored is a HoloLens 2-based, augmented reality immersive story installation for 3-10 people that talks about the forgotten history of Claudette Colvin. “This experience plunges the audience into the Deep South during segregation. In the...
Over The Rainbow is the second episode of a 360 video trilogy by Craig Quintero (see my interview about All That Remains from Venice 2022). Quintero is the artistic director of Riverbed Theatre, a Taipei-based performance group that has been doing 1...
Reimagined Vol II: Mahal is the second edition of the Reimagined VR series that premiered at Tribeca Immersive 2023 (see my interview about Volume I from Venice 2022). It’s a Quill animation piece that has lots of stylized cinematography...
The Expanse: A Telltale Series is a 5-part, 2D narrative game series that’s a prequel to the Amazon TV and book series. I had a chance to play through the first 90-minute episode at Tribeca Games, and then unpack it with game director Stephan...
Emojiii is an immersive social experience for 20 – 200 people by the Smartphone Orchestra where people use their phone web browsers to be guided through a number of interactive games and quizzes exploring how we make meaning and communicate with...
The Pirate Queen: A Forgotten Legend is a narrative VR game with lots of exquisite environmental storytelling with embodied puzzles and escape room mechanics. You play as a 19th-century Chinese woman named Cheng Shih as she becomes one of the most...
Maya: The Birth (Chapter 1) is an animated Quill piece that explores menstrual taboos by juxtaposing lots of mythic and archetypal symbols with more mundane scenes of shame and exile within the context of family, schools, and the broader culture...
Pixel Ripped 1978 is the third in a trilogy of game-within-a-game series from indie development shop ARVORE based in São Paulo, Brazil. It taps into some deep nostalgia by recreating the environmental and contextual aspects of computing through the...
In Search of Time is a 2D film that premiered at Tribeca Immersive, and it uses a lot of generative AI style transfer techniques on top of footage of Pierre Zandrowicz’s children. Atlas V co-founder Zandrowicz’s co-directed this piece...
MONSTRORAMA is a mixed reality narrative game from Atlas V that transforms your living room into a monster museum. There is a lot of environmental storytelling that’s used to modulate your home, and you end up using your hands to draw mixed...
Meneath: The Mirrors of Ethics uses the Pepper’s Ghost Technique from theme parks and theatre to represent hidden indigenous ancestors within her animation film. This technique uses two perpendicular monitors with a piece of glass at a 45...
Fortune is a series of 8 Snapchat and Instagram AR filters that explore the topic of money and our relationship to money. Each project is around 90-seconds in length and uses a variety of immersive storytelling techniques from tabletop-scale...
The Fury is a two-channel video installation in combination with a 360 video that “explores sexual exploitation of female political prisoners, referencing the Islamic Republic of Iran’s brutal treatment of political prisoners.” Director...
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...
I had a chance to speak with Tribeca Immersive curator Ana Brzezińska to break down each one of this year’s selection of 13 immersive stories. I’ll be in NYC from June 7-16th covering the festival, and so stay tuned for more coverage...
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...
In my final SXSW interview, I had a chance to catch up with SXSW Immersive Programmer Blake Kammerdiener to do a retrospective look at this year’s program, some of the challenges for VR exhibition, his design intentions for how to intermingle the...
Chloé Lee’s immersive art piece Temporal World: A Haptisonic Virtual Reality Memory World uses a custom-made haptic vest that is intimately integrated into the ambient sound design of this point-cloud, spatial exploration around memory. Lee wanted...
The Ferryman Collective were back at SXSW presenting another immersive theatre piece in virtual reality, but this time they were translating an adapted a piece called Find WiiLii that was originally produced in South Korea by GiiÖii Immersive Studio...
Body of Mine VR won a special jury prize for the SXSW Immersive Competition for it’s potent use of virtual embodiment to explore gender dysphoria and testimonies from a number of different transgender folks. Director Cameron Kostopoulos leaned upon...
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...
Myriam Achard is the Chief of New Media Partnership as well as PR Officer at Montreal’s Phi Centre. Part of Achard’s job is to travel around the work searching for the best immersive storytelling, art, music at festivals and gatherings...
Jailbirds is a really well-told, three-part episodic animated VR piece that uses the spatial affordances of VR to tell a compelling metaphoric story about the escapist qualities of virtual reality. It’s a character-driven story set within a prison...
Consensus Gentium is took him the Grand Jury prize for SXSW Immersive 2023, and it’s the most immersive phone-based experience that I’ve ever had. The Latin title translated means that “If everyone believes it, it must be true,” and it’s a near-term...
Astrea is the publishing arm of Atlas V that aims to close the current gap in distribution for immersive stories that debut on the film festival circuit, but then often don’t make it wider distribution. There’s a lot of optimization, porting, and...
Targo Stories continues to innovate with novel spatial storytelling techniques in both of the projects that were submitted and selected to SXSW. The Behind the Dish series uses micro lenses to give a uniquely fresh and giant look at food being...
Forager is a short immersive story that shows the four stages of development of a mushroom through a groundbreaking volumetric timelapse that takes place within a game engine. They had to innovate on automating their photogrammetry timelapse...
Fresh Memories: The Look is a 360-video about the war in Ukraine that takes the deceptively simple idea of having Ukrainian citizens gaze into a 360-degree camera within the context of a bombed out home, workplace, or school that's juxtaposed...
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...
In my final interview from IDFA DocLab 2022, I had a chance to catch up with DocLab founder Caspar Sonnen to reflect on the 2022 program and the ecological points made by the piece Okawari, to comment on the “Nervous System” in this...
After suffering a paralyzing viral infection, XR Director Naima Karim started to notice the natural world around her in a more visceral way, She “experienced the monsoon even more intensely than usual: the initial gusts of wind, the rapidly...
Missing 10 Hours VR is an interactive immersive narrative designed to counter the bystander effect by recreating different social dynamics and peer pressure as your virtual friend attempts to spike a woman’s drink with a date rape drug GHB and then...
Sarah Wolozin is the director of the MIT Open Documentary Lab, and I had a chance to catch up with her at the IDFA DocLab 2022 in order to record her journey from being a storytelling to working at MIT’s Open DocLab. Here’s the mission statement of...