The VR Privacy Summit happened on November 8th, and brought together representatives from the top XR companies, start-up companies, VR experts, medical academics, and legal experts to talk about the potential risks and benefits of having access to...
The medical professionals at the VR Privacy summit has a lot of interesting insights into how they navigate issues around informed consent in medical research through Institutional Review Boards, and perhaps how privacy policies for companies need a...
Dinner Party is a short VR story that premiered at Sundance, and it uses the story of the alien abduction of Barney and Betty Hill to metaphorically explore the racial tension of interracial marriage in the early 1960s. I spoke to writers Laura...
On April 4th, Jessica Outlaw released a survey of 600 regular virtual reality users about harassment experiences in VR, which was funded by Pluto VR.
Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, a co-editor for Boing Boing, and consultant to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He’s been closely tracking the relationship between Tech, Law, Culture, & Markets, and he is seeing a concerning pattern...
There’s a tension on the web today between creating a safe space to be online versions the costs to censorship and free speech. Spam, bots, trolls, harassment, hate speech, and terrorism are on the frontlines of making the web an unpleasant place to...
Hotdogs, Horseshoes, and Hand Grenades (aka H3) is an open-ended sandbox VR experience where you can play with a variety of exotic firearms. It's a puzzle game where you have to figure out how to activate, load, and fire a huge range of different...
Google announced some new features for ARCore at Google I/O last week including Sceneform to help Java developers integrated 3D content into apps, augmented images to trigger immersive AR experiences off of trained images, and cloud anchors to...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Mark Pesce is a VR pioneer who has been thinking about networked virtual and augmented reality for over 20 years now. He developed the Ono-Sendai Sega VR helmet prototype, co-created VRML, and presented his Cyberspace Protocol spec at the first Web...
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...
The eye tracking company Tobii had some VR demos that they were showing on the GDC Expo Hall floor as well as within Valve's booth. They were primarily focusing on the new user interaction paradigms that are made available by using eye gazing to...
Virtual Reality has the potential to enable so many amazing utopian futures, but it also has the potential to become one of the most intimate surveillance technologies that could create a Big Brother dystopia of political and economic control. But...