I had a chance to do six brief interviews during the poster session of XR Access Symposium 2023 that I’ve compiled into this single podcast episode. This gives a great overview of some of the emerging topics for XR accessibility including XR...
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...
This is the first of fifteen in a Voices of VR podcast series on XR Accessibility based upon my coverage from the XR Access Symposium 2023 that happened in New York City on June 15th and 16th. I’m kicking off my 8 hours of coverage with an...
After I gave my Ultimate Potential of VR: Promises and Perils talk at SXSW, I met a third-year Ph.D. student in the field of Media Geography named Claire Fitch who wanted to follow up with me about the representation of virtual natures within...
Figural Bodies is a research project out of Goldsmiths college that uses motion captured dance with disabled, non-disabled, and neurodivergent dancers in order to explore non-normative avatar representations as well as the accessibility challenges...
Nita Farahany argues that we need to establish a new human right of Cognitive Liberty in order to address the threats of Neurotech like VR, AR, BCIs, & non-invasive neural interfaces in her new book Battle for the Brain: Defending the Right to Think...
Andrew Kissel has been recreating moral dilemmas like the Trolley Problem in VR at his Virginia Philosophy Reality Lab at Old Dominion University. I had a chance to talk about his work in moral philosophy around catalyzed by Morgan Luck’s paper “The...
Moral philosopher Erick J. Ramirez writes that we "we are now in the beginning stages of a methodological VR renaissance in moral psychology" in his book "The Ethics of Virtual and Augmented Worlds: Building Worlds." He argues that our imagination...
On September 8, 2020, the XR Safety Initiative launched their XR Privacy Framework 1.0 which is a set of self-directed, privacy guidelines aimed to empower “individuals and organizations with a common language and a practical tool that is flexible...
There was an Existing Law and Extended Reality: A Research Symposium held at Stanford Law School on Friday, January 6th, 2023, that brought together legal scholars, industry experts, civil society researchers, and academics to look at how immersive...
Sarah Wolozin is the director of the MIT Open Documentary Lab, and I had a chance to catch up with her at the IDFA DocLab 2022 in order to record her journey from being a storytelling to working at MIT’s Open DocLab. Here’s the mission statement of...
#1163: Live XR Performance Experiments with ONX Studios and DocLab Motion Capture Stage at IDFA 2022
The ONX + DocLab MoCap Stage at IDFA DocLab 2022 featured a number of experimental XR performances using a high-end OptiTrack – Motion Capture System within a theatrical stage with a screen that was projecting the virtual representations. Each of...
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...
This episode kicks off my 18-episode coverage from International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam (IDFA) DocLab, which features the latest innovations of immersive storytelling from the documentary community. Okawari VR is an immersive experience...
I had a chance to drop by the Brooklyn office of Brain Control Interface start-up OpenBCI in order to get a hands-on demo of Project Galea, which includes a range of different biometric and physiological sensors such as EOC, EMG, EDA, PPG sensors in...
The Metaverse and Its Governance is the final paper in the series of the IEEE Global Initiative on the Ethics of Extended Reality.
The Extended Reality (XR) Ethics in Education is the next paper in the series of the IEEE Global Initiative on the Ethics of Extended Reality.
The Extended Reality (XR) Ethics in Medicine is the next paper in the series of the IEEE Global Initiative on the Ethics of Extended Reality. This paper explores the applications of medical XR, trends of telemedicine, AI assistant bots, and some...
The new business models of the Metaverse have yet to be fully forged? Will the existing structures of surveillance capitalism be extended into the new frontiers of biometric & physiological data? Or will there be new emergent & disruptive models for...
The next series in the IEEE XR Ethics series is deconstructing the paper title 'Who Owns Our Second Lives: Virtual Clones and the Right to Your Identity' featuring the lead author Thommy Eriksson - Researcher and Teacher Chalmers University in...
The ethical questions around privacy in virtual and augmented reality are some of the most pervasive, unanswered questions in XR with the top two questions being: What new types of intimate biometric & physiological data are available through XR...
Continuing on my series on XR Ethics in collaboration with the IEEE Global Initiative on the Ethics of Extended Reality, this episode dives into the White Paper on Diversity, Inclusion, & Accessibility featuring Isabel Guenette Thornton (Ph.D...
The IEEE Global Initiative on the Ethics of Extended Reality has published the first eight white papers investigating different ethical aspects of virtual and augmented reality. This has been a collaboration with dozens of XR industry professionals...
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...
I talk with Joey J. Lee & Elliot Hu-Au about a paper they published in Frontiers of Virtual Reality called 'E3XR: An Analytical Framework for Ethical, Educational and Eudaimonic XR Design,' which looks at the intersection of XR ethics, best practice...
Brittan Heller is a human rights lawyer who recently published a paper pointing out that there are some significant gaps in privacy laws that do not cover the types of physiological and biometric data that will be available from virtual and...
Stanford University has just published an important research paper that hows how motion tracked data in VR can be identifiable of specific users. The paper titled Personal identifiability of user tracking data during observation of 360-degree VR...
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...
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...
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...
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...
On March 6th, 2020, the IEEE VR announced a venue change on their website from Atlanta, Georgia to online in virtual reality for the academic conference set to happen between 22-26 March, 2020. The organizers of the IEEE VR conference had two weeks...
Akihiko Shirai has been doing research and development in VR live entertainment since 1995, and he's been a key liaison between the XR communities in Japan and France going back to 2004. Since June 2018 he's been researching vTuber (Virtual...
The first Laval Virtual Conference happened on 3-4 June, 1999 in Laval France, and had a chance to talk with the founder Simon Richir about the 20+ year history of Laval Virtual when I attended in 2019. It's an amazing history of the evolution of...
Chomsky vs Chomsky: First Encounter is a virtual reality experience where you get to interact with a virtual representation of Noam Chomsky, and essentially ask him any question that you want to. Trained on a corpus of 60 years worth of Chomsky...
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...
There's been a virtual reality training revolution that's been slowly brewing over the last five years, and STRIVR has been at the forefront of innovation working with everyone from elite athletes in the NFL to thousands of Walmart employees. STRIVR...
Joel Zylberberg has a background in physics and cosmology, but then he got interested in theoretical neuroscience and he's been researching the nature of perception in humans and in machines through the lens of computational neuroscience. He's the...
Laurel Trainor is the Director of McMaster Institute for Music and the Mind, which has a LIVElab concert hall for 100 people that allows her to do a lot of studies in the relationship between musical performance and how it's received by an audience...
Dr. Sook-Lei Liew is an assistant professor at the University of Southern California, and the director of the Neural Plasticity & Neurorehabilitation Labatory at USC. At IEEE VR 2017, she was showing off a DIY Brain Computer Interface called...
Neurable is building a brain-computer interface that integrates directly into the virtual reality headset. Neurable uses dry EEG sensors from Wearable Sensing, which means that it doesn't require gel in order to get a good signal from the EEG making...
UCSF professor Adam Gazzaley is a pioneer in the realm of experiential medicine as he's getting a video game approved by the FDA for ADHD treatment. He's a co-founder of Akili Interactive and the chief scientist at JAZZ Venture partners, where he's...
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 RLab is a publicly-Funded XR center for research, entrepreneurship, and education located in Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York. It's being managed under NYU's Tandon School of Engineering in collaboration with Columbia, CUNY, & New School. The RLab...
Dr. Cassandra Vieten is the president of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, who's current tagline is 'Informed by Science. Transformed by Experience.' Dr. Vieten gave an opening keynote at the Consciousness Hacking's Awakened Futures Summit where she...
Dr. Jeff Tarrant founded the NeuroMeditation Institute in order to research the neuroscience principles of different meditation states. He came up with a taxonomy of four different types of NeuroMeditation that include Focus, Mindfulness, Quiet...