Entertainment

Visionary VR premiered their Mindshow interactive storytelling platform at VRLA, and was quite a unique experience to be able to record an improv acting session within the body of a virtual character and then step outside of myself to then watch my...

People were waiting in lines for over an hour to see Pearl both at SIGGRAPH and VRLA, which is one of the best narrative VR experiences that I've seen so far. The central character in the story is a car named 'Pearl' who gives selfless service to...

When the recession hit in 2008, book publisher Charlie Melcher looked to reinvent how Melcher Media told stories using the latest smart phone technologies. They developed an iOS app for Al Gore's Our Choice, and started having a lot of conversations...

Catherine Rehwinkel is working on creating a conceptual framework that enables storytellers to storyboard linear stories in VR. She's a filmmaker who recently finished a master's degree computational & systems thinking at NYU. She's been inspired by...

Back in 2014, the CLOUDS interactive documentary premiered at Sundance New Frontier where it debuted a VR interface to navigate over 40 oral history interviews with creative coding pioneers. Movies have typically been pretty linear, but how could a...

Brett Leonard's journey into VR all started when he moved to Santa Cruz and started partying and smoking pot with some of the elite visionaries from the Silicon Valley technology scene. He was an aspiring writer and film director who got inspired by...

Sony's The London Heist is one of the best fusions of narrative VR storytelling with interactive game components. It's structured as a flashback sequence starting with you being confronted within an interrogation room, and there are branching...

Christine Heller is the co-founder and CEO of VR Playhouse, and she gave a talk with her co-founder Ian Forester at SVVR 2016 titled 'How Fantasy Becomes Form' about the process of starting up a 360-degree video production studio. I had a chance to...

KonceptVR has produced a couple of 360 videos for Broadway Theater productions that includes a promo with the cast of Hamilton as well as a music video with the cast of School of Rock. I had a chance to catch up with KonceptVR's Max Bolotov at SVVR...

Brad Herman & Shiraz Akmal recently left DreamWorks Animation to raise $3 million to start SPACES Inc., which is a virtual reality and mixed reality company focusing on storytelling for different brands including Microsoft, NBCUniversal, and The...

Otherworld Interactive recently announced that their horror experience Sisters just surpassed one million downloads for Google Cardboard. To celebrate, they released a compilation of reaction videos of people screaming and slamming VR headsets into...

Kevin Cornish is a LA-based VR filmmaker who teamed up with AMD to do some interactive narrative experiments using gazed-based content in Believe VR. Depending on which character you look at different moments will triggered up to 32 different...

Milica Zec grew up in war-torn Serbia, but this was a part of her life that she preferred to just forget about and leave behind. After telling screenwriter Lizzie Donahue her story, she was encouraged to tell her story in a short film. Milica...

Rob Morgan is the writer of The Assembly, and he spoke last year at GDC about narrative design in VR and the importance of accurate body language in NPCs to maintain a sense of presence. He returned to GDC this year to talk about some of his lessons...

One of the most compelling applications of VR will be the educational experiences that will be possible, and David Whelan's Immersive VR Education has been making some big innovations in this space. They've created the VR documentary about the...

Michel Reilhac is a French filmmaker who wanted to explore intimacy and polyamory within an immersive 360 video called Viens! (Come!). His Sundance New Frontier piece featured 3 women and four men exploring sensual touch and sexual intimacy with...

Adi Robertson is a senior reporter for The Verge, and she was at Sundance covering the latest developments of VR storytelling. I caught up with her to unpack some of her New Frontier highlights including narrative innovations, how empathy pieces...

One of the most inspiring keynotes at Unity's AR/VR Vision Summit was by Alex McDowell on world building and storytelling. Alex was production designer for Minority Report, Fight Club, & Lawnmower Man, and so he's been creating imaginal worlds for...

For the past year, Tony Davidson and his 17-year old son Kai have been tucked away in the hills of Oregon collaborating on a VR experience that was inspired from one of Kai's dreams. Thunderbird is a puzzle adventure game that surprised everyone at...

One of the most popular VR experiences at Sundance New Frontier this year was Across the Line, which is a piece that simulated what it feels like to walk through an abortion clinic protest line. It was produced by Nonny de la Peña's Emblematic Group...

The VOID started when Curtis Hickman brought on James Jensen to do some pre-visualization of the Evermore theme park that he was developing with Ken Bretschneider. When Curtis asked James if he had any other cool ideas, he shared his long-time...

Chris Milk's TED talk last year popularized the idea that virtual reality has the potential to be the ultimate 'empathy machine.' Emblematic Group's Nonny de la Peña has been one of the original pioneers of exploring empathy in VR through a series...

There was a moment when Philipp Maas and Dominik Stockhausen realized that their sci-fi horror film would be a lot more intense and work better if was a virtual reality experience. So they took the opportunity to explore the language of virtual...

John Gaeta first got into virtual reality when he was approached by the Wachowski siblings to be the visual effects supervisor on The Matrix. Now he's Executive Creative Director of Industrial Light & Magic's Experience LAB (ILMxLAB) where he's...

For the past year, Devon Dolan has been trying to make sense of the interactive storytelling landscape that's possible within virtual reality. He comes from a world of story where he's currently an associate at Cinetic Media, which is a well-known...

Jessica Brillhart is the principle VR filmmaker at Google working with the Cardboard team to field test the latest 360-degree Jump camera technology. She was working at Google's Creative Lab as a filmmaker when she was invited to start doing test...

Eric Darnell got into animation in the 1980s and eventually landed at Dreamworks Animation where he co-directed Antz, and then co-directed and co-write four Madagascar movies. He's a storyteller at heart, and now he's diving deep into writing and...

The Sundance New Frontier program had 37 different virtual reality experiences showing on two different floors on Main Street in Park City during the Sundance Film Festival. Bechir Sylvain is an independent filmmaker who got his first taste of VR at...

Samsung had a huge presence at Sundance this year as the mobile sponsor of the festival. They were evangelizing Gear VR to independent filmmakers with their Gear VR theater as well as collaborating with Sundance's New Frontier program to provide...

One of the best narrative VR experiences that I had at Sundance New Frontier was 6x9, an immersive experience of solitary confinement. You might ask, 'Why would you ever want to do that?' Well, it was less about having a direct experience of...

Rose Troche knows that the first-person perspective is flawed, and she wanted to show people just how vulnerable it can by telling a single story between four different points of view. She teamed up with Specular Theory's Morris May again for...

Reggie Watts was at Sundance showing off his first 360-degree video VR experience called Waves, which is a surreal trip into his imagination. It's one of the most quirky and entertaining 360 videos I've sen, and could be described as a dream within...

On my way out to cover the VR at Sundance, I had a chance to try out one of the most advanced Digital Out of Home Entertainment systems today in an industrial park in the middle of Utah. The VOID goes beyond room-scale with their minimum 60'x60'...

Matt Henderson is a visual artist from Portland, OR who has been creating art installations of abstracted Christmas nativity scenes for the past six years. Matt has been inspired to use virtual reality in order to document and preserve his 'NTVTY'...

The Virtual Reality Company is a 360-degree video production studio in Hollywood that has Steven Spielberg as an advisor. I had a chance to catch up with Joshua Watson, Emily Cooper, & Chris Edwards at Oculus Connect 2 to get a sneak peak of some of...

Maureen Fan is the former vice president of gaming at Zynga, but she's always had a passion for animation. Maureen's mind was blown open the first time she experienced VR because she saw that the future of animation was going to be within Virtual...

Specular Theory CMO Ryan Pulliam and founder Morris May talk about some of the 360-degree video experiences that they've produced over the last year including an edgy Sundance film called Perspective: The Party, which tells the story of a sexual...

There are a number of different 3D audio plug-ins available for game engines like Unity, but there have not been any solutions for mixing 3D audio for cinematic VR productions. Two Big Ears just released the 3DCeption Spatial Workstation, which is a...

Timoni West is a principle designer for Unity Labs, and she's working on creating professional tools for creating VR scenes in Unity while being in VR. These tools are still in the prototype phase of development, but it's something that Unity is...

Alex Tenyotkin is a senior design lead at Hulu, and he talks about how virtual reality went from being a passion project to being announced as part of the keynote at Oculus Connect 2. Alex talks about some of the design challenges for designing a VR...

Arthur van Hoff is the CTO of Jaunt, and I had a chance to catch up with him at Oculus Connect 2 to go over some of the most important specifications for their Jaunt ONE 360-degree camera,formerly known as 'Neo.' Arthur talks about how they're using...