The Oculus Quest 2 was announced at Facebook Connect today, and I was able to get early access to it last week to try it out. I wanted to invite Road to VR co-founder Ben Lang to share his impressions, and to unpack some of my experiences as well...
Alex Heath reports on Facebook and their competitors for the subscription-only site The Information, and he's been able to get some exclusive interviews and do some in-depth reporting on some of Facebook's VR and AR hardware initiatives. As we're on...
I'm joined by Pola Weiß (Founder, VR Stories / VR Geschichten) & Kathryn Yu (Executive Editor, No Proscenium) to talk about nearly all of the 44 experiences that were a part of the Venice VR Expanded 2020 edition running from September 2 to 12. We...
Valve is a critical player in the modern resurgence of VR. They are known for their friendly competitions and cooperation they had with Oculus in the early days of virtual reality spanning from July 2012 to March 20113. Blake Harris' History of the...
I was invited to join the F Reality Podcast over the weekend with VR Oasis's Mike, Nathie, Rowdy Guy, and Zimtok5 to be able to talk about this past week's news about Facebook's new requirement that all new VR users and hardware will be required to...
BigScreenVR is in direct competition with some of the same services that Facebook wants to fully control, and their CEO Darshan Shankar has had to resort to posting an thread on Twitter expressing his frustrations in trying to negotiate with...
Anton Hand is an indie VR developer with RUST LTD, who is the project lead for Hotdogs, Horseshoes, & Hand Grenades. Hand made the decision sometime in 2016 to not explicitly support any Facebook APIs or hardware for his indie VR project beyond what...
The Oculus Quest launched on May 21, 2019. Nine days later I was at Augmented World Expo doing interviews and preparing a main stage talk about The Ethical & Moral Dilemmas of Mixed Reality.
On August 7, 2020, I participated in a panel discussion about Ethical Design in Immersive Media organized by the University of Oregon as a part of Design Week Portland. The panel featured Stanford University Virtual Human Interaction Lab's Jeremy...
On March 25, 2019, the IEEE Standards Association published Ethically-Aligned Design: A Vision for Prioritizing Human Well-being with Autonomous and Intelligent Systems (PDF) covering the ethical dimensions of artificial intelligence embedded into...
Ethics in XR is a vast topic, and I had a chance to moderate a panel discussion for Games for Change / XR for Change Talk and Play salon with four people including Tom Ffiske (Editor of VirtualPerceptions.com), Galit Ariel (TechnoFuturist), Kavya...
The IEEE VR 2020 Conference brought together the academic XR community to share their latest research, and to talk about topics that are of interest to the wider immersive technology industry. I participated on a panel discussion on Ethics and...
Erica Southgate released a book titled Virtual Reality in Curriculum and Pedagogy: Evidence from Secondary on Classrooms May 19, 2020, which covers the theory and practice of using VR in classrooms. Southgate is an Associate Professor of Emerging...
Carl H Smith's work is at the intersection of VR, psychedelics, and esoteric contemplative practices. He's the director of the Learning Technology Research Center at the Ravensbourne University London, co-founder of The Cyberdelic Society, co...
Cannes XR is a part of the Cannes Marché du Film, which is the business side of the Cannes Film Festival. For the past two years, they've collaborated with Kaleidoscope VR to curate a development showcase featuring the creators of immersive stories...
The CannesXR Showcase features over 50 different immersive narrative experiences in the Museum of Other Realities from June 24 to July 3rd, with showcases featuring 12 experiences from Tribeca Film Festival, 12 360 video curated by VeeR, 6...
The Ford Foundation’s JustFilms program with supplemental support from the Sundance Institute commissioned Kamal Sinclair to do an intensive research project called 'Making a New Reality.' She looked at a number of questions including: 'What is...
I had a conversation with philosopher Lewis Gordon at the American Philosophical Association Eastern Meeting in January 2019 that really stuck with me. He writes about the philosophy of racism, and takes a very holistic and systemic approach in...
David Nahon is a pioneer of the French XR industry who is currently working at Dassault Systèmes' 3D Experience Lab. I had a chance to talk with Nahon at Laval Virtual 2019 where we talk about how he's using VR for Open Innovation to include more...
Laval Virtual has a AR/VR Business Intelligence division that tracks the use cases and evolution of XR applications, and produces a number of VR/AR newsfeed email lists and reports (like this free magazine on Health Applications of XR). I had a...
In my final episode of my coverage from Sundance New Frontier 2020, I speak with chief curator Shari Frilot about some of the themes of the line-up of XR experiences that were programmed this year. There were a number of themes the embodiment...
Milo Talwani (pronouns they/them) is a curator, and creative technologist who oversees the selection process for New Frontier at the Sundance Film Festival. They're also the technical coordinator for Tribeca Immersive, and they also help curate...
A Machine for Viewing was a series of three film essays that were shown to someone in virtual reality, whose first-person perspective was then projected onto the Egyptian movie theater screen at Sundance with a crowd who was watching the film essays...
There have been a number of documentaries at Sundance over the past three years that have taken a critical lens the social impacts of technology including The Cleaners (2018), The Great Hack (2019), The Social Dilemma (2020), and Coded Bias (2020)...
Caspar Sonnen founded the DocLab as a part of the International Documentary Festival in Amsterdam (IDFA) in 2007 after a period of being really skeptical about some of the early overstated and inflated claims of the transformative power of...
Julia Scott-Stevenson got her practice-based Ph.D. on interactive and immersive documentaries (aka 'i-docs') and social impact with her i-doc Giving Time. She's now a research fellow of interactive factual media at the Digital Cultures Research...
Professor Mandy Rose of the University of the West of England, Bristol is one of the three principle investigators of the Virtual Reality: Immersive Documentary Encounters project that's funded by the UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research...
The MIT Open Documentary Lab held it's first official event back on Tuesday, March 20, 2012 a day-long summit called 'The New Arts of Documentary.' Part of the MIT Open Doc Lab's mission is to bring 'storytellers, technologists, and scholars...
This is an XR Ethics Manifesto that I presented at Greenlight's XR Strategy Conference on October 18, 2019. This is the culmination of seven focused months of panel discussions, interviews, and talks exploring many of the nuances of ethics and...
At the VR Privacy Summit in November 2018, I met a number of privacy engineers who were actively implementing privacy-first architectures. I wanted to bring together some a group of these forward-thinking privacy architects together for a more...
The Virtual World Society provided me an opportunity to give a main stage talk at Augmented World Expo on the Ethical and Moral Dilemmas of Mixed Reality. I tried to lay out as many of the ethical implications of XR as I could in this talk after...
Open AR Cloud held it's first symposium before the start of Augmented World Expo this year, and I participated on a panel discussion on XR Privacy & Security which included the following panelists:
For the past seven months, I've been investigating the topic of ethics in XR by participating on a number of panel discussions, conducting interviews, and presenting talks. At SXSW this year, I was invited by Rory DuBoff, who is Accenture...
Jon Oakes is the Technology Labs Coordinator at the San Jose State University Library, and he's also been quite involved in helping to organize the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Meetup and Conference. He held a VR Connect gathering at SJSU the day...
Nathaniel de Jong is a VR content creator on YouTube as 'Nathie' who is focusing on Virtual Reality games. I had a chance to talk with him at the Oculus Connect about the VR content ecosystem for games, the curation policies of Oculus and the...
Tested editor Norm Chan has been covering the evolution of Virtual Reality since seeing a early prototype of the Oculus Rift at CES 2013, which was after the initial debut at E3 2012 & the successful Kickstarter in August 2012. So Chan has been...
Doug North Cook is an assistant professor at Chatham University, and he holds an immersive design residency at Fallingwater architectural landmark in Pittsburg. North Cook is trying to synthesize the many different design frameworks and principles...
The Canadian Institute for Advanced Research invited me to moderate a panel discussion at GDC titled 'The Future of VR: Neuroscience and Biosensor Driven Development' featuring CIFAR scholars Craig Chapman and Alona Fyshe, as well as Jake Stauch...
The Valve Index officially launches today, and it provides a strong vision for the future of high-end PC VR with solid tracking, fidelity, and hand-tracked Index controllers that provide a deep sense of hand presence. Valve sent me hardware to...
Douglas Rushkoff is the host of the Team Human podcast and author of Team Human as well as a dozen other bestselling books on media, technology, and culture. He was invited to the VRTO conference in Toronto to record a live Team Human podcast about...
The Venture Reality Fund general partner & co-founder Tipatat Chennavasin travels around the world tracking the progress of virtual and augmented reality, and I had a chance to catch up with him at Microsoft Build 2019 in order to get his...
French journalist Julien Bergounhoux has been covering the business applications for spatial computing for L'Usine Digitale over the past 6-7 years, and I had a chance to catch up with him following the Microsoft Build opening keynote. We talked...
Lucid Dreaming is ability to become aware that you’re dreaming, and to potentially even start to interact and direct what happens within your dream. Arthur Gillard is a VR enthusiast who has been tracking the intersection between immersive...
There's a lot of intensity in the world right now, and it reminded me of a short excerpt about VR shooters from a longer conversation that I had with Danny Bittman back at Oculus Connect 4 in 2017. I think it speaks to some of what's happening in...
I moderated this 90-minute Sundance New Frontier panel discussion about immersive storytelling in AR and the role of virtual characters and conversational interfaces. It included Alice Wroe, who is the creative director of Magic Leaps digital human...
Filip Kostic is an artist and educator at the ArtCenter College of Design, and he had a piece called Landgrab: The Musical that was featured in the Sptial Realities Art Show curated by Jesse Damiani. Landgrab is a post-modern musical that is trying...
The DocLab at the International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam (IDFA) was started in 2007 by Caspar Sonnen, and it's very similar to the New Frontier programming at Sundance as it's looking at how what new forms of storytelling is emerging from...
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...
Monika Bielskyte is a futurist, science fiction worldbuilder, and a digital nomad who has been traveling around the world to over 80 different countries searching for where the future is headed. She's in conversation with the bleeding edge of...