VRLA co-founder Cosmo Scharf talks about some of the deepest levels of our current socio-political and economic context, and how VR & AR can teach us that our beliefs and perception of reality is malleable. Cosmo says that we're suffering form a...
Qualcomm believes that the future of XR is mobile. TechCrunch published rumors published that the Oculus Rift 2 headset was being cancelled, which catalyzed a larger discussion about the degree to which Facebook/Oculus is committed to VR on the...
Indiecade is the International Festival of Play, and Festival Director Sam Roberts curates innovations in game play and interaction paradigms that explore the questions of: What do I do? What happens when I do it? And how do I do it? Roberts sees an...
The Spatial Reality: Artists Explore the Future of XR show is running from October 12 to 28 at the Ayzenberg spce gallery in Pasenda, CA. I had a chance to see all of the pieces in the show, and then talk with the curator Jesse Damiani about my...
Robin Hunicke is the co-founder of Funomena, which recently released Luna. I had a chance to catch up with Hunicke at Oculus Connect 5 where she shared her insights into embodied game design, game design theory, experiential design, and some of the...
I had an opportunity to moderate a panel featuring six psychonauts who are exploring the intersection between Psychedelics, VR, and consciousness transformation at the VRTO conference in Toronto, Canada on June 16th, 2018. The participants from left...
Metaphors of Presence & Experiential Design keynote talk that I gave at the Symposium iX conference in Montreal covers provides some concrete metaphors for presence, explores the connections between the Yin and Yang concepts of Chinese Philosophy...
Ken Wilber is a philosopher known for his 'Integral Theory' framework that mapping of all dimensions of reality, consciousness, and stages of human development. He's synthesized maps and models from various Buddhist wisdom traditions, psychology...
Howard Rose is a pioneer in creating medical applications for Virtual Reality, and I had a chance to catch up with him about his company Firsthand Technology which is creating pain management applications for VR. He's also creating medical VR...
Brewster Kahle told me that the average of a web page on the Internet is 100 days before it either changes or disappears completely. Kahle realized that you can’t run a culture when you have no institutional memory, and so he started the Internet...
Kaliya Young (aka Identity Woman) has been working on digital identities for the past 15 years including helping facilitate the twice-a-year Internet Identity Workshop. These workshops lead to the Rebooting the Web of Trust workshops and the...
Vint Cerf is a co-inventor of the Internet, and he's currently working as a Vice President at Google at their Chief Internet Evangelist. With all of the ethical discussions about the dangers of centralization of power and influence for censorship...
Matt Miesnieks is creating an AR cloud with 6D.AI, which aims to 'synchronize 3D computer vision data across devices, time and space' in order to enable 'persistent content, occlusion, and real-time shared experiences.' Miesnieks has founded a...
Oculus will be releasing a new Privacy Policy and Terms of Service tomorrow that will go into effect on May 20th, just five days before the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) privacy law enforcement deadline of May 25th. I had a chance...
What is happening with the VR industry? Is the adoption and growth still on target to support a vibrant and diverse ecosystem of independent VR developers? Leading headset manufacturers have not been transparent in sharing any specific information...
Tony Parisi is the Head of AR & VR strategy at Unity so he has an insider's perspective of not only where the VR and AR industry is today, but some hints as to what xR is going to look like by 2025. Parisi had a fireside chat with HTC Viveport...
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...
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...
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...
Otoy is a rendering company that pushing the limits of digital light fields and physically-based rendering. Now that Otoy's Octane Renderer has shipped in Unity, they're pivoting from focusing on licensing their rendering engine to selling cloud...
Jaron Lanier is a pioneer of the first commercially-available virtual reality systems with his VPL Research Inc startup that was founded in 1984. He has written a memoir called Dawn of the New Everything about his life leading up to and during his...
I recently gave the keynote at the Immersive Technology Conference in Houston, TX where I talked about the many different maps that I use to understand reality & virtual reality. Because virtual reality is simulating reality, then a lot of these...
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...
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...
Brian Blau is the vice president of research for personal technologies at Gartner Research where he's in the business of making predictions about the consumer adoption of virtual reality and augmented reality technologies. I last interviewed Blau in...
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...
Dean Radin is the lead scientist of the Institute of Noetic Sciences where he's been working on cutting-edge consciousness research of showing measurable mind and matter interactions with quantum phenomena. He's published 17 papers showing...
Dr. Marilyn Schlitz is a social anthropologist, consciousness researcher, and co-author of the books Consciousness & Healing and Living Deeply. Her anthropological work has been at the frontier of researching how different cultures use various...
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...
Dustin Chertoff has pulled experiential design insights from the advertising world to come up with a more holistic theory of presence in virtual reality. In 2008, he was in graduate school and was dissatisfied with the major theories of VR presence...
Virtual Reality Headsets have not sold as many units as some of the more optimistic analysts have predicted, and VR Fund's Tipatat Chennavasin says that the relatively quick adoption of smart phone technologies have spoiled a lot of people within...
Kyle Russell is on the deal & research team for Andreessen Horowitz (aka A16z) where he's focusing on investing in technologies ranging from virtual & augmented reality, artificial intelligence, drones, and other exponential technologies like...
Cory Doctorow's new sci-fi book 'Walkaway' is a optimistic disaster novel that imagines what society might look like if people walked away from competitive market-driven laws, norms, and technological infrastructure and into an open-source inspired...
The keynote from Unity's Vision VR/AR Summit yesterday showcased just how far Unity is reaching into non-gaming content when it comes to augmented and virtual reality. The person who is in charge of Unity's xR strategy is Tony Parisi, who is a co...
The Tribeca Film Festival featured over 30 different VR experiences within their Storyscapes and Immersive Virtual Arcade, and I had a chance to catch up with curator Loren Hammonds about some of the highlights of the festival program with genres...
I had the chance to give the keynote at the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference where I provide some historical context for virtual reality tracing the evolution of communications mediums in order to contextualize my elemental theory of...
I had a chance to catch up with Oculus' Nate Mitchell at GDC where I asked him about privacy in VR. Oculus has delegated the design and maintenance of their privacy policy to their parent company of Facebook so that Oculus can focus on providing the...
I recently attended the Experiential Technology Conference where there were a lot of companies looking at how to use biometric data to get insights into health & wellness, education for cognitive enhancement, and market research. Over the next...
When I was at the GDC VR Mixer, Jim Preston struck up a conversation about his concerns about privacy in VR. He works at the VR eye tracking company of FOVE, but wanted to speak to me on his own behalf about some of the deeper philosophical...
I believe that the principle of Embodied Cognition is probably one of the most significant and important concepts to understand about virtual reality. Cognitive science researchers have been connecting the dots the importance of our bodies when it...
At Unity's Unite keynote in November, Otoy's Jules Urbach announced that their Octane Renderer was going to be built into Unity to bake light field scenes. But this is also setting up the potential for real-time ray tracing of light fields using...
Jessica Brillhart is the principle filmmaker for virtual reality at Google, and she been exploring the cross section of artificial intelligence and storytelling in VR. I had a chance to catch up with her at Sundance again this year where we did a...
Last year, Baobab Studios' Eric Darnell was skeptical about adding interactivity to virtual reality stories because he felt like there was a tradeoff between empathy and interactivity. But after watching people experience their first VR short...
Owlchemy Labs recently announced that Job Simulator has grossed over $3 million, and so it's worth reflecting on some of the design principles of agency and plausibility that have proven to be some of the key affordances of the virtual reality...
When I attended the Experiential Technology Conference in May 2016, I heard from a number of commercial off-the-shelf brain-control interface manufacturers that their systems would not natively work with VR headsets because there are some critical...
Dr. Mary Whitton has been working with interactive computer graphics since 1978 and virtual reality since 1994 in collaboration with Dr. Fred Brooks at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I had a chance to talk with Mary back in 2015 at...
The Oculus Touch motion-tracked controllers are launching on December 6th after eight months of the Rift solely supporting gamepad experiences. I wanted to take a moment to dig into some of the more subtle technical nuances when comparing the Oculus...
Hassan Karaouni is one of the 11 winners of an Oculus Launch Pad scholarship for his project My: home, which allows people to share 360 videos of locations that are meaningful to them. In my Voices of VR episode about Google Earth VR, I talked about...
Cultivating presence is one of the main goals for a lot of VR experiences, but our brains are like a black box of perceptual soup that makes it hard to know all of the right ingredients to achieve this. Kimberly Voll is a cognitive scientist...
The language and terminology around virtual reality is still evolving, but the VR community has been settling into using the phrase 'VR Experience' in order to describe the process of a going through a piece of virtual reality content. I had a...