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.)
Marshmallow Laser Feast is one of my favorite studios with projects like Into the Eyes of an Animal, Treehugger, Sweet Dreams, & We Live in An Ocean of Air. Most of their work has only shown at Film Festivals like Sundance or Tribeca, but last year...
#864 VR for Good: Kaleidoscope VR is Connecting XR Artists with Funders at the Impact Reality Summit
René Pinnell originally created Kaleidoscope VR in order to show immersive art and stories around the world. After talking with creators, he realized that the biggest blocker for creating immersive art was securing funding and resources to make the...
Note: This is a sponsored content post from the University University of North Carolina School of the ArtsThe Media + Emerging Technology Lab (METL) is situated within the film school of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, and they...
Michaela French has been making large-scale immersive, full dome experiences since 1999, and at IDFA DocLab she was showing her Climate Crimes piece, which explores the complex relationship between global air pollution, climate change and human...
Caspar Sonnen founded the DocLab as a part of the International Documentary Festival in Amsterdam (IDFA) in 2007 after a period of being really skeptical about some of the early overstated and inflated claims of the transformative power of...
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...
Professor Mandy Rose of the University of the West of England, Bristol is one of the three principle investigators of the Virtual Reality: Immersive Documentary Encounters project that's funded by the UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research...
For two years, the BBC VR Hub was producing VR content to test out the potential for immersive technologies to help fulfill the BBC's mission to inform, educate, and entertain the public. The BBC was able to produce at least 10 projects with half of...
ARTE is a French German television network that promotes cultural programming that was started in 1992, and they've been pioneers in the digital space for a long time. They've also funded over 60 VR projects over the past 5 years including many...
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...
Through the Wardrobe was an augmented reality experience by Rob Eagle about gender identity that took place in a pop-up shop in the hallways of Amsterdam's Central Station. The IDFA DocLab had three storefronts in Central Station this year during...
Last Whispers is a virtual reality experience that visualizes the extinction of languages around the world. Director Lena Herzog says that there are about 7,000 active languages on the planet, but that we're loosing one to two languages a week due...
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...
Ali Eslami is an Iranian VR creator whose livelong project is an ever-expanding virtual city called False Mirror, and he was showing off the latest edition at IDFA DocLab called Nerd_Funk. Nerd_Funk is a surrealistic, guided tour through an...
On July 17th, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was a scheduled passenger flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur that was shot down while flying over eastern Ukraine killing all 298 on board. This has been huge news in the Netherlands, and when...
Duncan Speakman's Only Expansion was an augmented audio tour showing at the IDFA DocLab that was doing real-time modulation of the surrounding soundscape mixed with produced sounds in order to create a unique experience. The headphones had...
In the Event of a Moon Disaster uses AI deep fake and speech synthesis technology to produce a Nixon speech that never happened. Bill Safire wrote a contingency speech on July 18, 1969 for President Richard Nixon to read in the event that something...
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...
Punchdrunk is a 20 year-old immersive theater company who likes to blur the line between what's real and what's an imaginal dream-like storyworld. They collaborated with Samsung in 2016 to create a blend of immersive theater and virtual reality in...
7 Lives aims to explore the underlying structure of fluidity and interdependence by taking a non-narrative, symbolic, and embodied poetic approach. You witness an experience, and then time freezes as you're able to explore how that event is related...
Bodyless was one of my favorite VR experiences that I saw at the Venice International Film Festival. The experience was the most like walking into someone else's dream that I've ever had in VR. The experience alternated between an on-rails guided...
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...
Maciek Szczerbowski & Chris Lavis of Clyde Henry Productions are stop motion artists at Clyde behind who wanted to deliver a dream while you're awake. They collaborated with Félix & Paul Studios and the National Film Board Interactive of Canada on...
Richard Lemarchand directed a minimalist VR experience with the USC Game Innovation Lab
Architects Anna Mill & Luke Jones spent eight years creating a graphic novel called Square Eyes that explores the speculative design of augmented reality technologies and interfaces. They see this project as an in-depth paper architecture...
Amelia Winger-Bearskin is a VR director & performance artist who is building communities for artists, creators, and technologies working in emerging technology. She uses metaphor as her primary method for exploring emerging technologies like virtual...
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...
Wesley Allsbrook is an artist, art director, and writer who started as editorial illustrator and comic book creator before working at Oculus Story Studio as the lead artist on Dear Angelica. Allsbrook has been working with Quill since 2015, and she...
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...
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...
Graham Sack says that dream analysis and the language have film have co-evolved together as visual forms of symbolic communication, and he wanted to further that exploration in an experimental narrative series funded by Samsung VR. Sack and...
Jessica Brillhart's Vrai Pictures & Superbright launched a spatial audio platform at SXSW called Traverse, and they premiered a spatialized audio experience that turned your body into a mixer. As you walked around a space, then your movements...
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...
Disclosure: Mozilla is financially sponsoring the Voices of VR podcast to collaborate on four different events in 2019, and our first collaboration was this conversation featuring the work of seven women within the XR space. Mozilla curated these...
I moderated this 90-minute Sundance New Frontier panel discussion about immersive storytelling in AR and the role of virtual characters and conversational interfaces. It included Alice Wroe, who is the creative director of Magic Leaps digital human...
Disney Animation was showing Cycles, which is their first narrative VR short film that they produced during private screenings in Park City during Sundance. It's a beautifully-produced piece that explores the connection to place, memories and...
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...
Interlooped allows you to record real-time, volumetric capture segments of yourself where you layer these loops while interacting with recorded and real-time interactions of other people. It's a trippy experience that shows the power of real-time...
#736: Integrating Taste into Narrative & Navigating an Unconscious Matrix of Memories & Associations
One of the most visceral experiences I had at Sundance New Frontier this year was Marshmallow Laser Feast's Sweet Dreams, which incorporated taste as part of the narrative in a surrealist virtual reality story world called Luscious Delicious Land...
Embody was an experience at the Sundance New Frontier that started to blend Yoga movement practices into virtual reality. VR artist and MAP Design Lab founder Melissa Painter collaborated with Lululemon's Whitespace Innovation team in order to...
Your brain can fuse together so many different layers of reality so seamlessly that it's quite flexible and capable of blending the digital and the real in a way that will soon be completely indistinguishable. The Dial at Sundance New Frontier...
Wolves in the Walls is a narrative VR piece based upon a Neil Gaiman novel that explores object interactions and cultivating a connection to a virtual character. It's a project that originally started as a project within Oculus Story Studio, but was...
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...
I interviewed the co-founders of Innerspace VR Hadrien Lanvin and Balthazar Auxietre about Firebird - La Peri at the inaugural VR on the Lot in 2016. This is where I first got a sneak peak at their A Fisherman's Tale puzzle game, which just released...
Filip Kostic is an artist and educator at the ArtCenter College of Design, and he had a piece called Landgrab: The Musical that was featured in the Sptial Realities Art Show curated by Jesse Damiani. Landgrab is a post-modern musical that is trying...
Robert Hernandez is a Digital Journalism Professor at USC, and he serves a sort of innovation lab to see how journalists can use emerging technologies to tell stories. I talk with him about some of his projects including 'The Deported: Life Beyond...
Ali Eslami is an award-winning Iranian virtual reality developer who has recently taken an artist residency in Amsterdam in order to continue his speculative design of a virtual city. Eslami's premiered False Mirror at the International Documentary...
Pilgrim is an AR audio documentary that I experienced at the IDFA DocLab premiere as I was walking through the streets of Amsterdam. Co-director Lauren Hutchinson captured audio stories of people as they were walking the Camino de Santiago trail in...