The VOID was a location-based entertainment company that shut down during the pandemic and maybe coming back at some point. The VOID Co-founder & Chief Creative Officer Curtis Hickman convinced his partners to allow him to reflect upon and share...
Reginé Gilbert is the author of the book Inclusive Design for a Digital World: Designing with Accessibility in Mind, and teaches at the New York University in the Tandon School of Engineering. She has been teaching UX for nearly a decade now, and is...
Wagner James Au‘s latest book Making a Metaverse that Matters: From Snow Crash & Second Life to A Virtual World Worth Fighting For releases on June 27 after the 20th anniversary of Second Life is on June 23, 2023. Au started as an embedded...
I speak to CNET editor at large Scott Stein about his hands-on impression of the Apple Vision Pro that he had on Tuesday, June 6, 2023. Check out his full article: “Apple Vision Pro Hands-On: Far Better Than I Was Ready For.” Also see my...
I speak with UploadVR Editor Ian Hamilton about his hands-on impression of the Apple Vision Pro that he had on Tuesday, June 6, 2023. Check out his full article: “Apple Vision Pro Hands-On: Way Ahead of Meta In Critical Ways.” Also see...
I speak with Road to VR Editor Ben Lang about his hands-on impression of the Apple Vision Pro that he had on Monday, June 5, 2023. Check out his full article: “Hands-on: Apple Vision Pro isn’t for Gaming, But it Does Everything Else Better...
I speak with HTC’s Alvin Wang Graylin, who is the President of HTC China & Global VP of Corporate Development at HTC about HTC’s investment strategy and what’s happening in the enterprise XR space. We talk about how hardware subsidies have distorted...
President Joe Biden wrote an Wall Street Journal op-ed on January 11, 2023 calling for “serious federal protections for Americans’ privacy.” Digital Content Next CEO Jason Kint tweeted out that “I’ll sit down with anyone to explain why privacy...
I had a chance to talk with Oculus Founder Palmer Luckey about the past, present, & future of XR where he reveals to me that his defense contracting company Anduril has more people employed working on VR than Oculus did when it was bought out by...
There's a new book about the future potentials of challenges of the Metaverse called "Metaversed: See Beyond the Hype" by Luis Bravo Martins (CMO Kit AR) and Samantha G. Wolfe (Founder of PitchFWD) that is releasing today, February 7th, 2023. It's...
The book Collective Wisdom: Co-creating Media for Equity and Justice by the MIT Co-Creation Studio founder Kat Cizek & MIT Open DocLab founder William Uricchio was the named as the recommended book of 2022 by IDFA. They held a launch party during...
Brad Lynch has described his SadlyItsBradly YouTube channel as a speculation and prediction channel focusing on the next generation VR hardware, and it has been providing some of the most insightful and detailed VR hardware analysis in the XR...
Meta Connect happened this past week on October 11th where Meta announced the Meta Quest Pro, and also released quite a lot of interesting information about their future strategies. I participated in a panel discussion with 3 other immersive...
This is the 26th & last episode of my Venice Immersive 2022 coverage, and I wanted to end with this discussion amongst film and immersive critics about the various challenges for reviewing and critiquing immersive art and entertainment. This is a...
XRMust is part online magazine covering the immersive storytelling industry through news and interviews, but it’s in process of aggregating thousands of immersive stories into a database that have been showing on the festival circuit (with a...
Venice Immersive 2022 featured 30 immersive stories in competition with some of the fiercest competition yet. I’m joined by Pola Weiß to break down, analyze, & critique each one of the 30 experiences in competition starting with the three winners:...
Photo of The Beast Prototype courtesy of Rony AbovitzI had a chance to sit down with Magic Leap founder Rony Abovitz for two hours to unpack some of the many threads Magic Leap's behind origin story, including some of the underlying philosophical...
Matthew Ball's 'The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything' book (launching today) is the most comprehensive articulation of the Metaverse technology stack, as well as it's foundational principles catalyzing a paradigm shift from 2D...
I moderated a Tribeca Talks Panel discussion on 'Making a Difference with Immersive Non-Fiction Stories' that on Sunday, June 12, 2022 where we focused on the structure and forms of immersive storytelling, and then reflected on the challenges and...
#1087: IndieWire Editor Eric Kohn on Deepening Critical Discourse within VR & Immersive Storytelling
Eric Kohn has been a professional film critic for 15 years, and he’s currently the Executive Editor at Indiewire, the Vice President of Editorial Strategy, as well as the co-host of IndieWire’s Screen Talk podcast. IndieWire first...
Céline Tricart is an award-winning VR director who gave one of the main SXSW Keynotes about immersive storytelling, live action role play, and emotional bleed. She started as a writer, went to film school, made a cinematic VR documentary Sun Ladies...
Tom Ffiske publishes the Immersive Wire Newsletter, and on February 2, 2022 he announced the release of his latest book called The Metaverse: A Professional Guide, which is available on Amazon. The metaverse has certainly seen an increase of...
I was invited to participate on panel on Metaverse Ethics at Gamesbeat's Into the Metaverse 2 summit on January 26, 2022. Privacy in XR was the biggest theme and open question that each of the panelists focused on. This is a recording of the...
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...
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...
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...
Monika Bielskyte is a world designer, immersive artist, science fiction critic, and cultivator of Protopia Futures (@ProtopiaFutures on Instagram), which is a an intersectional design practice that was distilled down into a Protopia Futures...
The third annual Virtual Beings & Virtual Societies Summit happened on October 29-30, and I had a chance to attend and unpack it with the co-founder of Fable Studio and instigator of a new Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) called the The...
Connect 2021 happened on Thrusday October 28, 2021 where Facebook rebranded to Meta on their path towards becoming a Metaverse company, and they provided a lot of vague, speculative designs for some of the social experiences that they can imagine...
Tony Parisi published really great Metaverse manifesto on October 22nd titled The Seven Rules for the Metaverse, which attempts to rein in some of the more hyperbolic musings about what the Metaverse is or could be.
The WebXR Design Summit was a 9-hour series of talks about immersive design & experiential design that was organized by Ben Erwin and his WebXR Polys Awards team on October 12th. I was the host and moderator for the day, but also helped to curate a...
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...
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is a non-profit that has been defending civil liberties & digital rights for over 30 years since it was first announced on July 10, 1990. My first conversation with the EFF was with Dave Maass at the VR Privacy...
In her Contextual Integrity theory of privacy, Helen Nissembaum defines privacy as 'appropriate flows of information' where the appropriateness is defined by the context and its contextual informational norms. Contextual Integrity is a paradigm...
Ellysse Dick is a policy analyst who has written 10 technology policy publications over the last year about VR & AR for the The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation. The ITIF is a non-partisan, non-profit tech policy think tank, who says...
Neuroscientist researcher Rafael Yuste started the Columbia University's Neuro-Rights Initiative to promote an ethical framework to preserve a set of human rights within neuro-technologies. He co-authored a Nature paper titled 'Four ethical...
Facebook's Project Aria announcement in September at Facebook Connect raised a number of different ethical questions with anthropologists and technological ethicists. Journalist Lawrence Dodds described it on Twitter by saying, 'Facebook will send...
On April 22, 2020, Magic Leap announced layoffs of somewhere between 600 to 1000 employees, which amounted to around 1/3 to 1/2 of their total staff. On December 2019, The Information reported that Magic Leap had only sold 6,000 AR headsets against...
I've been an executive committee member of the IEEE Global Initiative of the Ethics of Extended Reality for the past six months, and we had our official kickoff meeting on Friday, February 5th. The goal of this effort is to produce a white paper...
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...
On January 14, 2021, VR developer Fox Buchele announced on Twitter that he was fired by Owlchemy Labs in 2020, and 'I'm sharing this now because I'm done with this industry. And I don't see myself coming back.' He described being a VR developer as...
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...
Mark Pesce's new book Augmented Reality: Unboxing Tech's Next Big Thing was released on Friday, January 8th, 2021. It's a lucidly-written look at the past, present, and future of augmented reality. He contextualizes AR within the history of...
On October 4th, YUR Fit co-founder Cix Liv spoke out on social media about his frustrations in collaborating with Facebook as an independent developer by saying, 'they will block you from the store without reason, break your application, try to...
Athena Demos is the Chief Cultural & Community Officer for Black Rock Creative and Black Rock City VR (BRCvr). I previously covered BRCvr's officially-sanctioned multiverse world in AltSpaceVR for Burning Man 2020 with my conversation with lead...
John Robb has a concept of Networked Tribalism, which is a result of the combination of filter bubbles, AI algorithms, and political polarization. Robb is a military analyst who looks at the impact of technology on culture, and he started his Global...
On October 6, 2020, Dr. Brennan Spiegel released his book titled 'VRx: How Virtual Therapeutics Will Revolutionize Medicine,' which is an amazing survey of different applications of what could be called virtual medicine, experiential medicine...
Virtual and Augmented Reality pose unique privacy challenges, and so it's worth going back to look at the evolution of privacy laws in the United States to see how we got to this point today. There's also a lot of current discussions for the need...
Oculus Connect has been rebranded Facebook Connect, and what would have been Oculus Connect 7 is now Facebook Connect 1. Facebook Connect happened on September 16, 2020, and I talked with Doug North Cook on the following day. North Cook is the...
On June 11, 2019, Guy Godin announced on Reddit and on Twitter that 'Oculus doesn't want the SteamVR streaming feature in their store' and that he had been asked by Oculus to remove this wireless streaming feature that he had recently added to his...