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...
Dream was a series of 10 live performances over 8 days that used motion captured actors who had virtual embodiments set within an immersive storyworld of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream powered by the Unreal Engine. This project was a research...
Kiira Benzing's Loveseat was an ambitious fusion of live theater performance with VR technologies that premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2019. They performed live for the audience in Venice while wearing VR headets as their performances were...
SXSW Online is happening March 16-20, and I had a chance to get a sneak peak of the SXSW Online XR world in VRChat and talk with the chief curator of the SXSW Virtual Cinema program Blake Kammerdiener about the program and special events that he's...
One of my favorite pieces at Sundance New Frontier 2021 this year was a series of four open web experiences created as a part of the piece Traveling the Interstitium with Octavia Butler. Born out of The Guild of Future Architects' Futurist Writer...
Nightss is an sensual experience that's structured around an erotic Polish-language poem by Weronika Lewandowska that uses dance and spatial metaphors in VR to create an immersive poem. She collaborated with co-director and co-screenwriter Sandra...
The Changing Same is one of the most ambitious pieces of volumetric filmmaking yet since it combines all sorts of volumetric capture techniques with Scatter's new Depthkit Studio multi-depth sensor set up, photogrammetry, and a fusion of rigged...
After watching the 14 immersive experiences at Sundance New Frontier 2021, I invited three other immersive critics for a roundtable discussion unpacking each of the experiences inlucing CNET's Joan Solsman, Forbes contributor Jesse Damiani, and...
Sundance New Frontier 2021 features 14 immersive experiences that will be accessible via the $25 Sundance Explorer pass starting on Friday, January 29th until Wednesday, February 3, 2021. The New Frontier site will also be hosting virtual premiere...
Note: This is a sponsored content post from the University University of North Carolina School of the ArtsI was a mentor for the UNCSA's Media + Emerging Technology Lab's Immersive Storytelling Residency program in 2020, which was a 6-month program...
Note: This is a sponsored content post from the University University of North Carolina School of the Arts
Inside COVID-19 is a new 360 video series that premiered on Oculus TV on Friday, November 20, 2020, and it features Dr. Josiah Child who manages emergency departments at five different hospitals. Dr. Child contracted COVID-19, and this film takes us...
The new Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy's Edge VR experience releases today, and I had a chance to play through it and talk to a couple of the creators from ILMxLab about their latest steps towards their vision of 'storyliving.' It represents a lot...
I talk with the founder of the FIVARS VR & AR story festival Keram Malicki-Sánchez & WebXR developer James Baicoianu to talk about how the repurposed the open source JanusXR code in order to create a platform to deliver 360 video. It's a pioneering...
Human Interact's Alexander Mejia has a hard time describing what exactly Starship Commander: Arcade is. For movie lovers, he says it's a choose-your-adventure narrative where your the main character of your own movie. For gamers, he calls it a...
Darkfield Radio have released a couple of binaural audio performances that transform your home into a immersive audio stage. Their experiences are intended to be experienced with another person, each of their own mobile phones at a specific time so...
The full release of Gnomes & Goblins was released on September 23, 2020, and it has some of the most sophisticated worldbuilding that I've seen in VR so far. Hollywood director Jon Favreau started to collaborate with Wevr's Jake Rowell and Neville...
The creators of Agence call it a 'dynamic film,' but it's part immersive story with game-like interactions and puzzles where you engage with either traditional heuristic game AI bots or bots trained through reinforcement learning processes. There's...
I'm joined by Pola Weiß (Founder, VR Stories / VR Geschichten) & Kathryn Yu (Executive Editor, No Proscenium) to talk about nearly all of the 44 experiences that were a part of the Venice VR Expanded 2020 edition running from September 2 to 12. We...
Cannes XR is a part of the Cannes Marché du Film, which is the business side of the Cannes Film Festival. For the past two years, they've collaborated with Kaleidoscope VR to curate a development showcase featuring the creators of immersive stories...
Tender Claws continues to be one of the most innovative studios pushing forward what's possible for immersive storytelling in VR by launching a Tempest, which is a live, immersive theater show within The Under Presents. It's a show that blends the...
Shola Amoo's Violence is a provocative virtual reality experience that 're-contextualizes the notions of violence by examining it through the lens of state oppression against marginalized groups.' It's difficult to say too much about my experience...
Raqi Syed and Areito Echevarria's Minimum Mass is an emotional, immersive narrative that explores grief of miscarriage. They apply their visual effects knowledge gained from working at WETA Digital in New Zealand to push the real-time game engine to...
The CannesXR Showcase features over 50 different immersive narrative experiences in the Museum of Other Realities from June 24 to July 3rd, with showcases featuring 12 experiences from Tribeca Film Festival, 12 360 video curated by VeeR, 6...
The Line was just released on the Oculus Quest today, and it is a really sweet, immersive story that won the Best VR Immersive Experience for Interactive Content award at The Venice Film Festival 2019. The original version I saw in Venice used...
The Tribeca Film Festival is releasing fifteen 360 videos that were programmed within their Cinema360 program for free via the Oculus TV platform, and they'll be available to watch until April 26th. This is a great opportunity to see a portion of...
In my final episode of my coverage from Sundance New Frontier 2020, I speak with chief curator Shari Frilot about some of the themes of the line-up of XR experiences that were programmed this year. There were a number of themes the embodiment...
Milo Talwani (pronouns they/them) is a curator, and creative technologist who oversees the selection process for New Frontier at the Sundance Film Festival. They're also the technical coordinator for Tribeca Immersive, and they also help curate...
One of the most powerful explorations of embodiment at Sundance New Frontier 2020 was Metamorphic. The creators describe it as exploring the 'ephemeral nature of the self by allowing participants to redefine their relationships to their own bodies...
ANIMALIA SUM is an animated short VR 360 video / application hybrid with some light, embodied, 3 degree-of-freedom interactions on the Oculus Go. It's a mockumentary exploring the potential of whether or not humans should consider moving from...
Anti-Gone is a mixed reality play that features two actors performing in front of a wall that has an open, virtual world projected on it. One of the actors spends the majority of the time in VR navigating this world and interacting with the other...
A Machine for Viewing was a series of three film essays that were shown to someone in virtual reality, whose first-person perspective was then projected onto the Egyptian movie theater screen at Sundance with a crowd who was watching the film essays...
Chomsky vs Chomsky: First Encounter is a virtual reality experience where you get to interact with a virtual representation of Noam Chomsky, and essentially ask him any question that you want to. Trained on a corpus of 60 years worth of Chomsky...
Solastalgia is a site-specific augmented reality experience on the HoloLens 2 where you explore the surface of a depopulated planet in ruin, and colonized by a number of human ghost holograms. 'Solastalgia' is a neologism coined by philosopher Glenn...
All Kinds of Limbo featured the ability to show a volumetric-captured, virtual reality performance to 20 users within the Oculus Quest. Nubiya Brandon narrates her experience of being a mixed-race woman in the United Kingdom, and takes a tour...
The Book of Distance is one of the best VR narratives or immersive stories I've ever seen. Director Randall Okita tells the story of his grandfather Yonezo Okita's journey from Hiroshima, Japan to Canada in 1935 to begin a new life. It has some...
Living Distance is a contemporary piece of immersive art from China that casts the audience in the role of a tooth that takes a celestial journey into space. Director Xin Liu 刘昕 is an artist and mechanical engineer, who built a physical, crystalline...
Hypha is a VR experience that premiered at Sundance New Frontier 2020 that allos you to embody the full life cycle of a mushroom. You start as a spore in space that comes to Earth, you find enough water, and the go underground to grow into a hypha...
There have been a number of documentaries at Sundance over the past three years that have taken a critical lens the social impacts of technology including The Cleaners (2018), The Great Hack (2019), The Social Dilemma (2020), and Coded Bias (2020)...
Disney premiered the VR short Myth: A Frozen Tale at the November 7th, 2019 world premiere of Frozen II at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, and the creative team came to Park City during Sundance 2020 to privately screen it to industry professionals...