Ideas

386 episodes

#609: Collaborative Storytelling Guidelines from Columbia University’s Digital Storytelling Lab

by kentbyeJanuary 5, 2018

The Columbia University School of the Arts' Digital Storytelling Lab has been conducting interactive storytelling experiments to create guidelines, rules, and structures for facilitating emergent and interactive stories through an open-ended...

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#608: Live Streaming VR on Twitch with Zimtok5

by kentbyeJanuary 3, 2018

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...

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#607: Principles of Immersive Sound Design with Sally Kellaway

by kentbyeDecember 30, 2017

OSSIC's Jason Riggs told me at CES last year that the future of music is going to be immersive and interactive. Interactive sound design where user agency is considered a part of the experience is a key ingredient to creating fully immersive audio...

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#605: Future of Mixed Reality Lightfields with Otoy

by kentbyeDecember 19, 2017

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...

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#600: Jaron Lanier’s Journey into VR: “Dawn of the New Everything”

by kentbyeDecember 5, 2017

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...

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#599: Visualizing Bardo States from the Tibetan Book of the Dead in VR

by kentbyeDecember 1, 2017

Every culture around the world has their own beliefs around what happens to us after we die, and virtual reality may be a great medium to explore all of these different rituals and mythologies. The Tibetan Book of the Dead contains descriptions of...

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#598: Cinema of Attractions: What VR Can Learn from the Early Days of Film

by kentbyeNovember 28, 2017

In 1978, a number of film scholars gathered at a conference in Brighton to re-evaluate the early days of film in terms of a developing new medium on it's own terms rather than though the lens of a mature narrative and storytelling communications...

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#597: ‘Becoming Homeless’: Stanford’s Empathy Experiment in Embodied Perspective-Taking

by kentbyeNovember 23, 2017

Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL) premiered an experience called Becoming Homeless: A Human Experience at the Tribeca Film Festival in April. It was an experiment researching whether it's possible to cultivate empathy through emboding...

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#596: Researching Empathy in VR with Cognitive Science & Phenomenology

by kentbyeNovember 20, 2017

Cognitive scientist and phenomenologist Lynda Joy Gerry got into virtual reality after seeing the body swap experiments by Machine to Be Another as well as Shawn Gallager's A Neurophenomenology of Awe and Wonder research. Gerry's master's thesis was...

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#594: Maps for Understanding VR & Reality: Kent Bye’s ITC Keynote

by kentbyeNovember 16, 2017

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...

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#593: AUTO: A Future Realistic 360-video on the Human Impact of Technology

by kentbyeNovember 10, 2017

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...

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#591: Flow: Unlocking Peak Performance

by kentbyeNovember 7, 2017

Ravé Mehta talks about how he was able to deal with recovering from a health condition through achieving progressively deeper, longer, and more consistent levels of flow states. He talks about his holistic philosophy of flow, what he learned from...

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#590: Designing The Future through Sci-Fi World Building with Monika Bielskyte

by kentbyeNovember 3, 2017

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...

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#585: Consciousness Hacking & VR: Will immersive tech drive addictions or help us transcend compulsions?

by kentbyeOctober 11, 2017

There is a growing backlash against technology being catalyzed by some of the architects of the persuasive habit-forming techniques. The Guardian does a survey of user experience designers and engineers who are taking drastic actions to curtail...

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#584: Google’s Clay Bavor on Ambient Computing, Conversational Interfaces, & AR & VR Strategy

by kentbyeOctober 5, 2017

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...

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#583: Gartner’s Brian Blau on the State of the VR & AR Industries

by kentbyeOctober 4, 2017

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...

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#582: The Future of Invasive Neural Interfaces & Uploading Consciousness with Ramez Naam

by kentbyeSeptember 30, 2017

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...

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#579: Using AR to Recontextualize Our Relationship to Reality with Cabbibo’s ‘ARQUA!’

by kentbyeSeptember 20, 2017

ARQUA! was one of the ARKit launch applications that was designed by VR veteran Isaac 'Cabbibo' Cohen, and it has the same indie charm and shader art aesthetic as his previous VR experiences of Blarp! and L U N E. ARQUA's gameplay involves you...

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#576: Studying Anorexia Nervosa with VR Self-Avatars: Is Body Image a Matter of Perception or Attitude?

by kentbyeSeptember 13, 2017

Do patients with anorexia nervosa suffer from body image distortion due to how they perceive their body or is it due to attitudinal beliefs? Betty Mohler has been using VR technologies to study whether body representation is more perceptual or...

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#570: VR as a Reality Turing Test, Supernormal Siddhis, & Mind/Matter Consciousness Research

by kentbyeAugust 21, 2017

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...

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#569: Merleau-Ponty’s ‘Phenomenology of Perception’ & Embodied Metaphors

by kentbyeAugust 18, 2017

The hard problem of the mind/body split and the ultimate nature consciousness is an open question in the science community, and there are a range of philosophies that try to handle this split. Cartesian dualists explicitly acknowledge this split as...

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#567: Navigating Paradox, Reality Bubbles, & Multiple Worldviews with VR

by kentbyeAugust 14, 2017

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...

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#560: Models of Consciousness Transformation + Unlocking Latent Human Potentials

by kentbyeJuly 27, 2017

The Institute of Noetic Sciences was founded by Apollo 14 Astronaut Edgar Mitchell after he had a mystical experience on the way back from being the sixth man to walk on the moon. After finding a description of his spiritual awakening experience as...

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#559: Researching Awe with Google Earth VR: Towards a Virtual Overview Effect

by kentbyeJuly 24, 2017

One of the unique affordances of virtual reality is it's power to convey the vastness of scale, which can invoke feelings of awe. Denise Quesnel is a graduate student at Simon Frasier University's iSpace Lab, and she has been studying the process of...

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#558: Sex, Death, & Survival: Experiential Design Patterns for Transformation

by kentbyeJuly 21, 2017

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...

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#557: Using Experiential Design to Expand VR Presence Theory

by kentbyeJuly 19, 2017

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...

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#556: Mel Slater’s Theory of VR Presence vs an Elemental Theory of Presence

by kentbyeJuly 14, 2017

VR Presence researcher Mel Slater is fascinated by what makes the medium of virtual reality unique and different from other communications mediums. He says that VR activates our sensorimotor contingencies in a way that fools our brain that we're...

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#555: VR Presence Researcher Finds Full Embodiment to be Key Component in Plausibility

by kentbyeJuly 11, 2017

Mel Slater's Theory of Presence includes two major components including the Place Illusion (the degree to which you're transported to another world), and the Plausibility Illusion (the degree to which you believe what's happening in that world is...

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#553: State of VR with Tipatat Chennavasin: Why He’s Continuing to Invest in VR

by kentbyeJuly 6, 2017

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...

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#547: ‘Rose Colored’ is a Sci-Fi Morality Tale in the Vein of ‘Black Mirror’

by kentbyeJune 20, 2017

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...

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#540: Investing in Exponential Technologies in VR, AI & Drones with a16z’s Kyle Russell

by kentbyeMay 31, 2017

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...

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#536: “Walkaway” Author Cory Doctorow on Gift Economies & Privacy

by kentbyeMay 17, 2017

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...

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#534: Microsoft Technical Evangelist on Presence in VR Game Design

by kentbyeMay 9, 2017

The Microsoft Build conference starts this week, and I expect that we'll be learning more about the HoloLens as well as Microsoft's Windows Mixed Reality operating system. Microsoft has been evangelizing about virtual reality the past couple of...

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#531: Tony Parisi is Leading Unity’s VR & AR Strategy beyond Gaming

by kentbyeMay 2, 2017

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...

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#529: VR Storytelling Highlights from Tribeca Film Festival

by kentbyeApril 27, 2017

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...

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#528: Geospatial AR Permissions with the Mixed Reality Service Spec

by kentbyeApril 20, 2017

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...

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#527: Turning Your Torso Into an Ear: Sensory Substitution & Addition with Neosensory

by kentbyeApril 18, 2017

Back in 2015, Neuroscientist David Eagleman gave a TED talk about the potential to expand and create new senses. He showed off a haptic vest prototype that could translate audio input into an array of 32 vibrating motors that could be fed directly...

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#521: SVVR Keynote: Historical Context of VR + Elemental Theory of Presence

by kentbyeMarch 31, 2017

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...

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#520: Oculus’ VR Privacy Policy Serves the Needs of Facebook, Not Users

by kentbyeMarch 29, 2017

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...

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#517: Biometric Data Streams & the Unknown Ethical Threshold of Predicting & Controlling Behavior

by kentbyeMarch 20, 2017

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...

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#516: Privacy in VR is Complicated & It’ll Take the Entire VR Community to Figure it Out

by kentbyeMarch 17, 2017

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...

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#515: Embodied Cognition Experiments with EleVR’s Math Museums & Hyperbolic Space

by kentbyeMarch 14, 2017

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...

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#514: Tobii Recommends Explicit Consent for Recording Eye Tracking Data

by kentbyeMarch 11, 2017

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...

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#512: Experiential Poems: Exploring Emotions & Embodied Vulnerability with Cabbibo

by kentbyeMarch 8, 2017

Using language to translate an experience into words is one of the highest levels of abstraction that you can have. Using the power of visual metaphor through poetry is able to get to deeper levels of emotion, and virtual reality is able to remove...

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#511: Neurospeculative Afrofeminism: Building the Future You Want to Live Into

by kentbyeMarch 3, 2017

Labs is a immersive design collective made up of women of color, and they had a sci-fi VR experience at Sundance this year called Neurospeculative Afrofeminism. Their VR experience features black women as some of the pioneers of brain optimization...

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#505: Beaming the Matrix into your Eyes: Otoy CEO on Future of Real-Time Lightfield Rendering

by kentbyeFebruary 17, 2017

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...

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#503: Conversational Gameplay & Interactive Narrative in Human Interact’s ‘Starship Commander’

by kentbyeFebruary 10, 2017

Human Interact announced this past week that they are collaborating with Microsoft's Cognitive Services in order to power the conversational interface behind their Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, interactive narrative title named Starship Commander...

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#502: An Elemental Theory of Presence + Future of AI & Interactive Storytelling

by kentbyeFebruary 8, 2017

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...

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#501: Emotional Branching VR Stories: Combining Empathy & Interactivity for Compassion Acts

by kentbyeFebruary 4, 2017

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...

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#498: Keys of Owlchemy Labs’ Success: Agency & Plausibility + What is Real?

by kentbyeJanuary 25, 2017

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...

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