I moderated a discussion with VR pioneers Fred Brooks & Henry Fuchs at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts' Future of Reality Summit (original video is here). We talk about the evolution of immersive technologies since the mid 1960s...
Aaron Stanton says that VR is the most effective piece of exercise equipment he's ever purchased. He's spent over 100 hours playing an exercise mod of Audioshield, which is more than he's used his exercise bike, treadmill, or elliptical machine...
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...
One of the recurring themes that was coming up at the IEEE VR academic conference was how VR is starting to catalyze interdisciplinary collaborations between different academic fields including computer science, social science, neuroscience, and...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
SynTouch has created a system that can quantify the sense of touch on fifteen different dimensions called the SynTouch Standard, and they're one of the most impressive haptic start-ups that I've seen so far. SynTouch isn't creating haptic displays...
Deep in the basement of the Sands Expo Hall at CES was an area of emerging technologies called Eureka Park, which had a number of VR start-ups hoping to connect with suppliers, manufacturers, investors, or media in order to launch a product or idea...
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...
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...
Cognitive VR is an VR analytics platform that has an impressive system for visualizing a player's movements and gaze within a 3D representation of a VR experience. Their SceneExplorer tool translates the 3D geometry from a Unity or Unreal experience...
Ken Perlin is a professor of computer science at NYU, and is researching how to use VR to enhance social interactions. I had a chance to talk with him about that as well as how he's combined his passions for math and art with his procedural textures.
In 1968, Douglas Engelbart gave 'The Mother of All Demos' where he gave the first public demonstration of a mouse as a computer control device. For the last 48 years, the mouse and keyboard have remained the primary input devices for Human Computer...
The IEEE VR held a new pre-conference workshop this year on Virtual Humans and Crowds for Immersive Environments. Movies like Lord of the Rings and video games like Assassin's Creed use this research in order to create convincing group behaviors...
One of the gold standards of a VR experience is being able to achieve presence, but presence is an elusive concept to precisely define. Mel Slater is one of the leading researchers into presence and Mel says that it's a combination of the Place...
Xárene Eskandar is an artist who has been exploring representations of time through the mediums of film and photography for many years, and she's has been starting to design VR experiences that alter the user's perception of time based upon insights...
At Oculus Connect 2, SVVR's Karl Krantz told me that he accidentally spent 12 straight hours in VR and only thought that 3 hours had passed. I then started hearing a lot more time dilation stories from Owlchemy Labs' Alex Schwartz and Devin Reimer...
Mel Slater is an ICREA Research Professor at the University of Barcelona, Spain, where he leads the Event Lab. Mel and his fellow Event Lab researchers have been doing some pioneering work in defining the key components of presence as well as the...