Liminal Lands is an environmental VR piece commissioned by Luma Arles to document and volumetrically capture different objects and organisms within 'overlooked wetlands at the edge of the Mediterranean.' It's a piece where the sound design adapts to...
The Peabody Awards have expanded beyond the traditional categories of Entertainment, News, Podcast & Radio, Documentary, Arts, & Public Service, and into new formats of Digital and Interactive Storytelling that include Transmedia Storytelling...
On the Morning You Wake (To the End of the World) is now available for free on Oculus, and it's a must-watch immersive story that won the best XR Experience at SXSW. It's a three-part series that dives into the broader implications of a false...
Forensic Architecture is an innovative interdisciplinary, non-profit research group that uses the tools & techniques of architecture to tell spatial stories of state-sponsored violence and human rights. Their 79 investigations since 2010 have be...
The immersive story of Notes on Blindness: Into the Darkness (2016) VR experience (Quest, Rift) was awarded with a Legacy Peabody Award for Digital & Interactive Storytelling along with 15 other projects on Thursday, March 24th. This experience has...
Nonny de la Peña was one of the 16 Legacy Peabody Award recipients honoring historical work as a part of their new Digital & Interactive Storytelling Award. Specifically, de la Peña is receiving a Field Building honor for her body of work that has...
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...
(Hi)story of a Painting: The Light in the Shadow won a special jury prize at SXSW for Immersive Storytelling as it uses the medium of VR to take us back into history to explain the deeper historical context of the work of Artemisia Gentileschi, a...
On the Morning You Wake (To the End of the World) won the best XR Experience at SXSW, and is set to be released this week on March 24th, 2022. (UPDATE 3/24: It's now been released and can be found here.) It's an amazingly well-told story about how...
Weird Times is an 5-part, VR episodic series that explores issues of teenage mental health that's produced by the teach at Flight School and executive produced by Meta's VR for Good. The first two episodes premiered at SXSW, and focus on Depression...
Gumball Dreams is the latest immersive theatre production in VRChat by The Ferryman Collective, who previously produced Welcome to Respite: The Severance Theory. They just had their World Premiere last week participating in competition at SXSW, and...
I talk with the creators of Choctaw Code Talkers 1918, Kilma Lattin, Founder & CEO of OurWorlds as well as Catherine Eng, Co-founder & CTO of OurWorlds, who are bringing Native American Stories to VR with their platform. OurWorlds won the SXSW EDU...
There are nearly 40 XR experiences and special events programmed as a part of the physical SXSW festival in Austin, and I spoke with lead programmer Blake Kammerdiener to get the full run down of the 12 pieces in the XR Experience Competition, 21...
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...
Flat Earth VR started as a thought experiment by Lucas Rizzotto who was skewering the idea that VR is an empathy machine by creating an immersive experience that allowed you identify with delusional perspectives. After invoking some emotional...
The Child of Empire is an immersive story that tells the story of the India-Pakistan Partition of 1947, which is one of the largest forced migrations in human history. It uses puppet theatre-styled motion graphics in the beginning to provide a crash...
The State of Global Peace is an immersive experience that debuted at the Sundance Festival New Frontier 2022, which was produced by the Innovation Cell within the UN Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (UNDPPA) as a translation of a UN...
Suga': A Live Virtual Dance Performance was a live performance in Mozilla Hubs that premiered at SIGGRAPH 2021 and also screened at the Sundance New Frontier 2022. This project tells the story of rebellion, resistance, and resilience of the...
This is Not a Ceremony is a cinematic VR piece that asks us to 'collectively bear witness to tragic events in the lives of two Indigenous men — Adam North Peigan and Brian Sinclair — and entrusts us to share what we've seen and heard.' It uses 360...
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...
On the Morning You Wake (to the End of the World) is one of the most powerful experiences I've seen in VR, and is also one of my favorite piece in the Sundance New Frontier 2022 selection. It tells the story of a errant emergency alert text message...
We Met in Virtual Reality is feature-length documentary by Joe Hunting premiering today at the Sundance film festival. It follows five different protagonists (2 couples in long distance relationships and a sign language teacher) throughout the...
The Sundance New Frontier 2022 selection of 15 immersive stories is available starting today until January 30th, and I had a chance to speak with chief curator Shari Frilot an overview of this year's selection. Access to New Frontier Spaceship and...
William Uricchio is a Professor of Comparitive Media Studies at MIT, who started Open Documentary Lab in 2012 as a research initiative to look at implications of emerging technologies & the implications for the work of documentary. The MIT Co...
Michaela French is a visual artist working with moving image, primarily in immersive experiences in the context of a full dome space. She's been collaborating with DocLab since 2019 in creating dome content, supporting new artists, and promoting a...
Francesca Panetta is a freelance immersive artist, director, journalist who worked at The Guardian experimenting with new forms of storytelling, then as a creative director at MIT experimenting with new forms of storytelling using AI, and now is an...
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...
Ali Eslami is an Iranian artist who has been working with VR since 2014 & living in Amsterdam since 2018, and we talked about these projects that have been featured at DocLab since 2016:
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...
Victoria Mapplebeck has been a storyteller for more than 30 years across different platforms, genres, and technologies. She's a self-shooting director who shifted to smartphone filmmaking, & more recently immersive 360 video & immersive sound. We...
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...
Tamara Shogaolu is an interdisciplinary artist & director who works in film and as a creative technologist that mixes analog with digital including VR, AR, and mixed media forms. We discussed these following immersive projects that she has had at...
Rahima Gambo is a multimedia journalist based between Abuja, Nigeria & London, UK, and presented 'A Rest Guide for a Tired Nigerian Artist,' which is a both a podcast series, series of book, and an immersive experience that was presented at DocLab...
Polymorpf is small design collective & studio based in Holland that creates of all kinds of different immersive experiences that usually revolving around the senses and the human body. I spoke with Polymorf founder Marcel van Brakel as well as Mark...
The IDFA DocLab is celebrating it's 15th year anniversary, and I collaborated with DocLab to produce a series of a dozen interviews reflecting on the evolution of immersive storytelling and interactive documentaries since 2007. I'm kicking off the...
Felix & Paul Studios just released Episode #3 of their Space Explorers: ISS Experience, which features some absolutely stunning & breathtaking shots captured outside of the International Space Station. They gave a sneak peak of some of this footage...
The Oregon Shakespeare Festival in collaboration with Artizen producers Ana Brzezińska and René J. Pinnell commissioned & produced four VR pieces that premiered at the inaugural Quillsfest, which was a two-day event November 19-20 held within the...
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...
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...
The Severance Theory: Welcome to Respite is a VR adaptation of an immersive theatre piece of the same name originally produced in 2019 by CoAct Productions founder Lyndsie Scoggin. Immersive theatre & VR performer Deirdre Lyons did some voice work...
The Festival of International Virtual and Augmented Reality Stories (FIVARS) is holding a hybrid event where the IRL component in LA starts today October 15th, and the virtual festival starts on October 22nd. FIVARS has been curating independent and...
The London Film Festival Expanded runs from October 6-17 with a total of 18 pieces of immersive stories and art, with 9 of those pieces available remotely via their LFF Expanse art gallery that is available for free on Viveport (with nine...
Container is a hyperreal 180-degree spatial art installation that explores modern day slavery. Visual artist/visual anthropologist Meghna Singh and documentary filmmaker Simon Wood utilize the shipping container as consistent piece of architecture...
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...
Kusunda is a spatial documentary about a indigenous language in Nepal that is on the brink of going dormant and falling asleep. It's an incredibly powerful story that uses photogrammetry, Tilt Brush interpretations of oral history, and interactive...
The Venice VR Expanded portion of the Venice Film Festival opens today, and runs from September 1-19, 2021. I had a chance to talk to the co-creators Liz Rosenthal and Michel Reilhac to get a sneak peak of the 37 immersive storytelling projects with...
Episode #1000 of the Voices of VR podcast is a special, three-hour retrospective featuring over 100 of the best answers I've received about the ultimate potential of VR over the past 7 years. I hope that it serves as a primer on the scope and...
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...
The second volume of the Immersive Arcade Showcase featuring four immersive stories from the United Kingdom launches today as DLC within the Museum of Other Realities. The theme of the second volume is Memories & Dreams and features Vestige, Limbo...
The 29 immersive experiences that are a part of the Tribeca Immersive 2021 line-up were announced on Tuesday, April 29. There will be 11 Virtual Arcade experiences available starting on June 9 within the Museum of Other Realities, 5 Storyscape...