Consensus Gentium is took him the Grand Jury prize for SXSW Immersive 2023, and it’s the most immersive phone-based experience that I’ve ever had. The Latin title translated means that “If everyone believes it, it must be true,” and it’s a near-term...
VRChat world builder Fins had 3 experiences in Venice Immersive 2022 with one in competition (Treasure Heist), and two in the Worlds Gallery (Magic Heist and District Roboto). Fins comes from an illustration and concept artist background, and so...
Mike Salmon is the producer of the VRChat Worlds Gallery at Venice Immersive, which means that the scouts out potential worlds, helps track down potential events to feature, and coordinates all of the physical and virtual docents who helping to...
The Stay Alive, My Son VR experience is an adaptation of Pin Yathay's memoir of his survival of the Cambodian genocide under the Khmer Rouge. Attorney turned immersive storyteller Victoria Bousis translated this book into a spatial journey that...
Kevin Mack is a virtual reality artist who creates abstract and surreal art, and his first VRChat world called NAMUANKI has been selected as one of the 30 projects in competition at Venice Immersive. You take a tour through some of his organic...
Liam Young is a director and speculative architect who is designing regenerative futures via provocative thought experiments. Planet City VR is the provocation of centralizing all 10 billion humans on the planet to a city the size of Texas so that...
First-time VR artists Miri Chekhanovich & Édith Jorisch in collaboration with Dpt. and '>The NFB created some unique embodiment experiments within Plastisapians as they explored speculative futures about plastic permeating and changing our bodies...
Lustration is a 4-part episodic VR series illustrated within Quill that's in the fantasy, detective noir genre, and created by First Nation Creative Ryan Griffen. It allows you to change camera perspectives within Quill as it blends together aspects...
The MetaMovie Presents: Alien Rescue is one of the most immersive experiences I've had in VR. It's part Cinematic Adventure, part Immersive Theater, and part game that's fusing the affordances of each of these different mediums in a unique way...
Monika Bielskyte is a world designer, immersive artist, science fiction critic, and cultivator of Protopia Futures (@ProtopiaFutures on Instagram), which is a an intersectional design practice that was distilled down into a Protopia Futures...
The Venice VR Expanded portion of the Venice Film Festival opens today, and runs from September 1-19, 2021. I had a chance to talk to the co-creators Liz Rosenthal and Michel Reilhac to get a sneak peak of the 37 immersive storytelling projects with...
Episode #1000 of the Voices of VR podcast is a special, three-hour retrospective featuring over 100 of the best answers I've received about the ultimate potential of VR over the past 7 years. I hope that it serves as a primer on the scope and...
One of my favorite pieces at Sundance New Frontier 2021 this year was a series of four open web experiences created as a part of the piece Traveling the Interstitium with Octavia Butler. Born out of The Guild of Future Architects' Futurist Writer...
Worldbuilding and speculative design was a big theme at Sundance New Frontier 2021, and I had a chance to participate in an experience that facilitated a collaborative & deliberative process of worldbuilding that was called Beyond the Breakdown...
Mária Rakušanová got her start in the VR industry in 2014 when she was a product marketer for the Gear VR at Samsung. Her job meant that she would watch a lot of immersive content that she would use to market this stand-alone, mobile VR headset. In...
Human Interact's Alexander Mejia has a hard time describing what exactly Starship Commander: Arcade is. For movie lovers, he says it's a choose-your-adventure narrative where your the main character of your own movie. For gamers, he calls it a...
My wife, Wonder Bright, has absolutely fallen in love with the VR experience Gnomes & Goblins. Her mindset and approach to the game was almost totally opposite from my own. While I focused trying to solve the scavenger hunt puzzles within their core...
The full release of Gnomes & Goblins was released on September 23, 2020, and it has some of the most sophisticated worldbuilding that I've seen in VR so far. Hollywood director Jon Favreau started to collaborate with Wevr's Jake Rowell and Neville...
VRChat is one of the most popular social VR applications out there, and Chief Creator Officer Ron Millar recently told me that they had over 18,000 concurrent users this past weekend. I had a chance to catch up with the co-founders Jesse Joudrey &...
Anti-Gone is a mixed reality play that features two actors performing in front of a wall that has an open, virtual world projected on it. One of the actors spends the majority of the time in VR navigating this world and interacting with the other...
Rec Room is one of the most successful social VR platforms, and they're also on the most platforms including PC VR, Quest, PSVR, PC 2D, PS4 2D, and most recently iOS phones and tablets. There aren't a lot of other casual social mobile app...
I speak with three recent graduates of architecture school about how they're using virtual spaces for speculative design. Paula Strunden is working with the interface between physical objects and mixed reality environments. Nicholas Zembashi uses...
Architects Anna Mill & Luke Jones spent eight years creating a graphic novel called Square Eyes that explores the speculative design of augmented reality technologies and interfaces. They see this project as an in-depth paper architecture...
Owlchemy Labs have been pioneering VR experiences exploring hand presence and embodied gameplay in VR since the release of Job Simulator and Rick & Morty VR, and they're releasing their next experience in this sequence called Vacation Simulator...
Human Interact's Starship Commander uses AI-enabled, voice-activated commands in order to participate within an interactive story. It was recently was released as a location-based entertainment arcade game, and I first talked to Alexander Mejia...
Ali Eslami is an award-winning Iranian virtual reality developer who has recently taken an artist residency in Amsterdam in order to continue his speculative design of a virtual city. Eslami's premiered False Mirror at the International Documentary...
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...
Rust LTD is composed of four avant-garde artists who are experimenting with political philosophy as game design through surrealist narratives and open world sandboxes of resolving paradox through play. I spoke with Rust's CTO Anton Hand about Hot...
I talk with Jason Edward Lewis about the Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace initiative, as well as the two 2167 Indigenous Storytelling in VR that he helped to produce. How do we reckon the past, present, and the future, and what types of...
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...
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...
One of the best VR experiences I did at PAX West this year was Funomena's Luna, which is a unique blend of tactile puzzles, creative world building, musical improvisation within the context of an emotionally-charged narrative. Luna is designed by...
Patrick Harris is the lead game designer at Minority Media where they're developing a sci-fi adventure game called Time Machine VR. The premise of Time Machine VR is that humanity is facing a deadly plague from ancient times, and that best way to...