Entertainment

783 episodes

#627: VirtualSelf Full Body Tracking in Cloudgate Studios’ “Island 359”

by kentbyeFebruary 28, 2018

The full release of CloudGate Studios' VR survival game Island 359 is now available, and there's some special embodiment features for anyone who has 1-3 of HTC's Vive Trackers. They've developed an adaptive system that uses 1 tracking puck on your...

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#626: Exploring Space & Experiential Modulation of Time with Felix & Paul Studios

by kentbyeFebruary 24, 2018

Felix & Paul Studios had two experiences at Sundance this year. One featured the training of NASA astronauts in Space Explorers, and the other was a time-lapse VR story featuring characters from Wes Anderson's Ilse of Dogs film in front half with a...

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#624: Exploring Near-Future Moral Quandaries with INVAR Studios

by kentbyeFebruary 19, 2018

Rose Colored by INVAR Studios & Adam Cosco won the award for best live-acton VR experience at the Advanced Imaging Society's Lumiere Awards on February 12th. I previously interviewed Cosco at VRLA last year, and I had a chance to talk with INVAR's...

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#622: The Making of “Sun Ladies VR:” Former ISIS Sex Slaves Create an All-Female Fighting Unit

by kentbyeFebruary 9, 2018

The Sun Ladies VR is an amazing story about a group of Yazidi women from the Northern Iraq community of Sinjar, who escaped as sex slaves and started an all-female unit to fight ISIS. ISIS raided the Sinjar District in August 2014 and massacred over...

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#621: Balancing Player Control & Authorial Control with “Virtual Virtual Reality”

by kentbyeFebruary 6, 2018

Tender Claws' Virtual Virtual Reality is a Daydream-exclusive interactive story that won the best VR experience at the 2017 Google Play Awards VR, and it's one of my personal favorite interactive narratives within VR. Virtual Virtual Reality (aka...

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#620: AR & AI Storytelling Innovations from Tender Claws’ “TendAR”

by kentbyeFebruary 3, 2018

Tender Claws, the creators of the award-winning interactive VR narrative Virtual Virtual Reality, premiered a new, site-specific, interactive AR narrative experience at the Sundance New Frontier called TendAR. It was a social augmented reality...

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#618: “Dinner Party” is a Symbolic Exploration of Alien Abduction & Race in America

by kentbyeFebruary 1, 2018

Dinner Party is an immersive exploration of Betty and Barney Hill's alien abduction story that premiered at the Sundance New Frontier. Rather than using normal alien abduction tropes, writers Laura Wexler & Charlotte Stoudt chose to use the spatial...

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#617: Journey into a Black Hole with “SPHERES: Songs of Spacetime”

by kentbyeJanuary 31, 2018

Sundance New Frontier had a solid line-up of VR experiences this year with a number of immersive storytelling innovations including SPHERES: Songs of Spacetime, which takes you on a journey into the center of a black hole. It's a hero's journey that...

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#616: Jeremy Bailenson’s Academic Journey in VR with “Experience on Demand”

by kentbyeJanuary 30, 2018

Jeremy Bailenson founding director of Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, and his latest book Experience on Demand traces his academic journey through virtual reality. It's an intellectual memoir that focuses on his personal work in...

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#615: LARPing: The Future of Live-Action Role Playing in Immersive Entertainment

by kentbyeJanuary 26, 2018

Live Action Role Playing (LARPing) is something that emerged out of table top games like Dungeons & Dragons in the 1970s driven by a desire to be more immersed in living out fantasy scenarios. Boffer LARPs use foam weapons to simulate D&D-style...

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#614: Designing Around Disruptive Audience Members for Interactive Narratives

by kentbyeJanuary 24, 2018

Tommy Honton is an experiential designer in the immersive theater space, and he's helped to design interactive narratives that can handle a range of different disruptive responses that can ruin the experience for other people. One question for all...

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#613: Storytelling in VR from a Depth Psychological & Mythological Perspective

by kentbyeJanuary 18, 2018

John Bucher wrote a book titled 'Storytelling for Virtual Reality: Methods and Principles for Crafting Immersive Narratives' where he includes interviews with dozens of VR experience designers and the major insights into immersive storytelling...

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#612: Capturing Group Dynamics with Felix & Paul’s “Miyubi”

by kentbyeJanuary 16, 2018

Miyubi is Felix & Paul Studios' first scripted narrative piece that is 40 minutes in length, and it transports you to the early 1980s as you embody an imminently obsolete toy robot. Felix & Paul instructed the individual actors to unexpectedly try...

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#611: “Sleep No More” Creative Producer on Blurring the Lines of Reality with Punchdrunk’s Immersive Theater

by kentbyeJanuary 10, 2018

Punchdrunk's immersive theater piece of Sleep No More opened in March 2011, and it's inspired countless experiential designers of immersive theater, and virtual and augmented reality experiences. It was a paradigm shift that broke the fourth wall...

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#610: Designing Escape Rooms with Laura E Hall

by kentbyeJanuary 9, 2018

The Immersive Design Summit brought together over 150 of the top experiential designers from around the world, mostly from the performance community of immersive theater productions and escape rooms, but also with a small number of people focusing...

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#609: Collaborative Storytelling Guidelines from Columbia University’s Digital Storytelling Lab

by kentbyeJanuary 5, 2018

The Columbia University School of the Arts' Digital Storytelling Lab has been conducting interactive storytelling experiments to create guidelines, rules, and structures for facilitating emergent and interactive stories through an open-ended...

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#608: Live Streaming VR on Twitch with Zimtok5

by kentbyeJanuary 3, 2018

VRChat is becoming one of the top streamed VR game as different Twitch personalities like pokelawls, dyrus, greekgodx, and LIRIK and YouTube personalities Jameskii & Nagzz21 start to role play in virtual worlds, and then capture clips of candid and...

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#607: Principles of Immersive Sound Design with Sally Kellaway

by kentbyeDecember 30, 2017

OSSIC's Jason Riggs told me at CES last year that the future of music is going to be immersive and interactive. Interactive sound design where user agency is considered a part of the experience is a key ingredient to creating fully immersive audio...

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#606: Workflow for Interactive Narratives with Spatial Stories Toolset

by kentbyeDecember 21, 2017

Emilie Joly says that the rules of interaction are the stories within interactive narratives, and Apelab is creating the Spatial Stories plug-in and toolset in order to make it easier to define those rules. Unity uses an object-oriented approach for...

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#604: A Journey to Full-Time VR Artist

by kentbyeDecember 16, 2017

Over the past couple of years, Dani Bittman has logged over 1800 hours in programs like Tiltbrush & Google Blocks on her way to becoming a full-time VR artist. Bittman started studying film, but realized that she had a lot to catch up with of over...

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#603: Soundboxing: VR Exercise, Capturing Embodiment, & Virtual Economy Architecture

by kentbyeDecember 14, 2017

Soundboxing is a VR rhythm game that has found a community of people who use it for exercising in VR, with some people reporting that they've lost up to 50 pounds from playing it. Soundboxing is similar to Audioshield in that you punch orbs set to...

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#602: Funding Landscape for Cinematic VR with Kaleidoscope VR

by kentbyeDecember 12, 2017

After talking to a lot of independent VR storytellers, Kaleidoscope VR's René Pinnell identified that funding was one of the biggest blockers for continued experimentation. Cinematic VR pieces do not have many established distribution channels yet...

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#599: Visualizing Bardo States from the Tibetan Book of the Dead in VR

by kentbyeDecember 1, 2017

Every culture around the world has their own beliefs around what happens to us after we die, and virtual reality may be a great medium to explore all of these different rituals and mythologies. The Tibetan Book of the Dead contains descriptions of...

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#597: ‘Becoming Homeless’: Stanford’s Empathy Experiment in Embodied Perspective-Taking

by kentbyeNovember 23, 2017

Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL) premiered an experience called Becoming Homeless: A Human Experience at the Tribeca Film Festival in April. It was an experiment researching whether it's possible to cultivate empathy through emboding...

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#593: AUTO: A Future Realistic 360-video on the Human Impact of Technology

by kentbyeNovember 10, 2017

Auto is a 360-video and morality tale available on Jaunt that takes a near-future look at the human impact of automation and emerging technology. It's not a grotesque satire in the vein of Black Mirror, but it's done in a more of a future realistic...

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#591: Flow: Unlocking Peak Performance

by kentbyeNovember 7, 2017

Ravé Mehta talks about how he was able to deal with recovering from a health condition through achieving progressively deeper, longer, and more consistent levels of flow states. He talks about his holistic philosophy of flow, what he learned from...

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#590: Designing The Future through Sci-Fi World Building with Monika Bielskyte

by kentbyeNovember 3, 2017

VR represents a shift from telling stories to building story worlds that people experience and interact with. There is a process of world building and experiential design that first creates the conditions of the environment, and then the full...

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#589: Dark Corner Creates New Distribution Channel for Immersive Horror

by kentbyeOctober 31, 2017

The Dark Corner app is creating a new distribution channel for immersive horror experiences and 360-degree videos. Guy Shelmerdine and Teal Greyhavens are hoping that fans of the horror genre will be enthusiastic enough about the potential of VR to...

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#588: Being in Two Worlds at Once with ‘UTURN’: Parallel Stories & Quad Binaural Audio Mix

by kentbyeOctober 31, 2017

UTURN is a 360-degree video that seamlessly blends together two 180-degree hemisphere worlds containing parallel storylines of two different perspectives at a tech start up. One perspective is from a male founder's point of view and the other...

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#584: Google’s Clay Bavor on Ambient Computing, Conversational Interfaces, & AR & VR Strategy

by kentbyeOctober 5, 2017

At Google's 10/4 press conference, they announced a new Pixel 2 phone and a range of new ambient computing devices powered by AI-enabled conversational interfaces including new Google Mini and Max speakers, Google Clips camera, and wireless Pixel...

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#582: The Future of Invasive Neural Interfaces & Uploading Consciousness with Ramez Naam

by kentbyeSeptember 30, 2017

Ramez Naam is the author of The Nexus Trilogy sci-fi novels, which explores the moral and sociological implications of technology that can directly interface with the brain. He gave the keynote at the Experiential Technology Conference in March...

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#581: Using Abstract VR Art for Neural Entrainment & Brain Research + Can Creative AI Become Conscious?

by kentbyeSeptember 28, 2017

Kevin Mack is an Oscar-winning visual effects artist and abstract artist who creates digital spaces with fluidly moving textures that are awe-inspiring in it's ability to create a novel experience unique to VR. In Blortasia you float weightlessly...

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#579: Using AR to Recontextualize Our Relationship to Reality with Cabbibo’s ‘ARQUA!’

by kentbyeSeptember 20, 2017

ARQUA! was one of the ARKit launch applications that was designed by VR veteran Isaac 'Cabbibo' Cohen, and it has the same indie charm and shader art aesthetic as his previous VR experiences of Blarp! and L U N E. ARQUA's gameplay involves you...

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#575: Using VR to Connect with the Beauty of Nature with Marshmallow Laser Feast

by kentbyeSeptember 12, 2017

Marshmallow Laser Feast is a collective of artists who are interested in using VR technologies to capture the aesthetic beauty of nature, and provide immersive experiences that inspire people to cultivate an even deeper with the reality that...

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#574: Blending Immersive Theater & VR with ‘Draw Me Close’ by NFB & National Theatre

by kentbyeSeptember 7, 2017

The National Theatre has created an Immersive Storytelling Studio to better understand the practices, protocols, opportunities of how virtual and augmented reality technologies are creating new storytelling possibilities. They collaborated with the...

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#573: Capturing Holocaust Testimony in VR: A Behind the Scenes Look at ‘The Last Goodbye’

by kentbyeAugust 31, 2017

One of the most emotionally-moving VR experiences that I've had in VR was bearing witness to Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter share his experiences at Majdanek Concentration Camp in The Last Goodbye. Gutter not provides a guided tour, but he is...

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#572: Bioflight VR for Medical Training, Patient Behavior Modification, & Diagnosis

by kentbyeAugust 29, 2017

The design team behind Bioflight VR has worked on television shows such as CSI and ER, and they've been able to translate their VFX visualization skills into a virtual reality medical education venture. Their original plans were to use virtual...

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#571: PTSD Exposure Therapy in VR: Importance of Storytelling & Emotional Presence in Healing from Trauma

by kentbyeAugust 26, 2017

Dr. Skip Rizzo heads the Medical VR Research Group at USC's Institute for Creative Technologies, which has been exploring how to use VR for psychological treatments, cognitive assessment, motor rehabilitation therapy, as well as interactions with...

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#568: Horror & Gore in VR: Designing ‘Killing Floor: Incursion’

by kentbyeAugust 16, 2017

Killing Floor: Incursion is a horror game featuring lots of gore that is sure to evoke visceral reactions in players. I had a chance to play a demo at GDC, and I can say that it's definitely an experience has stuck with me. The mechanics of beating...

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#562: Using Dance as Embodied Communication & Pushing the Boundaries of Editing & Movement with ‘Through You’

by kentbyeAugust 2, 2017

Dance is all about bodies moving through space, and it's something that shows the strength of the VR medium since there's something that's lost when it's translated onto a 2D screen. Lily Baldwin observed how audience members heard the music...

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#558: Sex, Death, & Survival: Experiential Design Patterns for Transformation

by kentbyeJuly 21, 2017

Ida Benedetto is an experiential designer who has developed a framework she calls 'Patterns of Transformation: Designing Sex, Death, and Survival in the 21st Century. She started curating Trespass Adventures, which were private & exclusive one-off...

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#554: Magik Gallery Show Featured Art Created Entirely in VR

by kentbyeJuly 7, 2017

Nick Ochoa curated some of the top artists producing work entirely in VR for the Magik Gallery show that happened in San Francisco, CA on May 20th. It was an ambitious effort to introduce VR creation tools for artists within a fine arts context in...

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#551: Projection Mapped Immersive Theater by Heartcorps Shows Future of Live AR Performances

by kentbyeJune 29, 2017

There was an amazing projection mapped, immersive theater piece at Sundance this year by Heartcorps called 'Riders of the Storyboard.' Trained street performers interacted with a virtual projection-mapped 2D objects, and through the slight of hand...

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#550: VR World NYC Has an Open Buffet of 50+ VR Experiences

by kentbyeJune 29, 2017

VR World NYC is a new VR arcade that opened on June 24th in New York City right next to the Empire State Building. They have three floors with 55 different VR experiences, and they're using an all-you-eat buffet business model of paying $39-$49 to...

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#548: ‘Mage’s Tale’ Lead Designer on RPG Character Progression & Gameplay Mechanics

by kentbyeJune 21, 2017

Oculus premiered about a dozen games ahead of GDC this year, and one that stood out to me was Mage's Tale dungeon crawler for it's distinct art style and passion in using VR to fulfill childhood fantasies of becoming a spell-casting magician. Mage's...

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#547: ‘Rose Colored’ is a Sci-Fi Morality Tale in the Vein of ‘Black Mirror’

by kentbyeJune 20, 2017

My favorite narrative VR piece that I've seen so far this year is Rose Colored by Adam Cosco that premiered at VRLA. It's a science fiction morality tale that is asking us to look at a potential future of immersive technology. I'm cautious to say...

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#546: Racing Game “Sprint Vector” is an Intense Workout with VR Locomotion that Just Works

by kentbyeJune 16, 2017

Sprint Vector is an 'adrenaline platformer' racing game that relies upon a unique locomotion technique of swinging your arms in order to run through an obstacle course. It's the latest game from Raw Data developer Survios, but with a much more light...

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#543: Visualizing An Invisible Cyber War with Zero Days VR

by kentbyeJune 9, 2017

There's an invisible cyber war that's happening between major nation states, and Zero Days VR takes you inside of it in a completely new way using virtual reality. You go on a journey into a hyper-stylized cyberspace world where you embody the...

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#542: Bringing Otherworldliness, Fun, & Whimsey into Your Home with AR game “Woorld”

by kentbyeJune 6, 2017

Funomena's Woorld won the best AR experience at the recent Google Play awards. You scan your room with a Google Tango-enabled phone, and then you're encouraged to decorate your space with extremely cute art and characters designed by Katamari's...

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#541: Bearing Witness to Sexual Assault Stories & Healing from Trauma with “Testimony”

by kentbyeJune 1, 2017

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...

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