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...
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...
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...
SoundSelf is a technologically-mediated, psychedlic experience (aka 'technodelic') that is being released by Andromeda Media on Wednesday, April 22nd. Developer Robin Arnott has been working on it on 8 years now, and he just released a The...
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 &...
One of the most powerful explorations of embodiment at Sundance New Frontier 2020 was Metamorphic. The creators describe it as exploring the 'ephemeral nature of the self by allowing participants to redefine their relationships to their own bodies...
The Book of Distance is one of the best VR narratives or immersive stories I've ever seen. Director Randall Okita tells the story of his grandfather Yonezo Okita's journey from Hiroshima, Japan to Canada in 1935 to begin a new life. It has some...
Hypha is a VR experience that premiered at Sundance New Frontier 2020 that allos you to embody the full life cycle of a mushroom. You start as a spore in space that comes to Earth, you find enough water, and the go underground to grow into a hypha...
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)...
Atomu is a social VR experience that premiered at the Sundance New Frontier Biodigital Theater on Friday, January 24, 2020 by co-creators Shariffa Ali (half-Kenyan, half-Ethiopian) and Yetunde Dada (half-Zambian, half-Nigerian) who met growing up in...
Queerskins VR is an embodied story that explores the range of experiences from love to loss, and the shame, regret, and fears around sexual identity. It's got a magical realism aesthetic that transports you back to the 80s AIDS crisis as two devout...
Tripp is a VR toolkit to gamify meditation in order to help you self-regulate and perform better. They had a really interesting strategy of bootstrapping the company by targeting corporate wellness clients, which allowed them to create a production...
I talk with Winslow Porter at Tribeca 2017 about Tree VR, which is an experience catalyzed by the Rainforest Alliance where you embody a tree and experience an accelerated life cycle that comes to a premature end as human activity is catalyzing the...
Through the Wardrobe was an augmented reality experience by Rob Eagle about gender identity that took place in a pop-up shop in the hallways of Amsterdam's Central Station. The IDFA DocLab had three storefronts in Central Station this year during...
Ali Eslami is an Iranian VR creator whose livelong project is an ever-expanding virtual city called False Mirror, and he was showing off the latest edition at IDFA DocLab called Nerd_Funk. Nerd_Funk is a surrealistic, guided tour through an...
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...
Wendy Seltzer is the Lead Strategist and Counsel for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and she says that the concerns of privacy and security on the web have been taking up a lot of her time lately. I had a chance to talk to her at Mozilla's View...
Selena Deckelmann is the Senior Director of Firefox Browser Engineering, and she gave a great talk at Mozilla's View Source conference titled 'Our privacy and the web' that covered a lot of the work that she's been doing to protect user privacy...
Mozilla's Diane Hosfelt is the Privacy and Security Lead on Mozilla’s Mixed Reality Team, and I had a chance to sit down with her again a two months after our SIGGRAPH panel discussion. Hosfelt has been spending a lot of time writing academic papers...
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...
Danny O'Brien is the Director of Strategy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has been around since 1990. He describes it as the ACLU for geeks on the Internet as they're made up of technologists, activists, and lawyers who are trying to...
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...
Sophia Batchelor is a recent neuroscientist graduate from UC Berkeley who focused on immersive technologies and neuroethics. We talk about the power of XR for creating new memories, the moral implications of experiential design when XR can be so...
Avi Bar-Zeev has been involved with immersive technologies for over 27 years, including working on the very first prototypes of Microsoft's HoloLens back in 2010. He's mostly been working on secret projects for the last 11 years, and so I got was...
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...
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...
Andre Elijah is an independent VR developer who recently launched Viewport Interactive working on branded experiences for car companies and beyond. We talk about the Elixir Quest Handracking demo that he tried at Oculus Connect 6, and how it shifted...
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...
Walter Greenleaf has been involved with the intersection of virtual reality and medicine for 35 years, and I had a chance to catch up with him at Oculus Connect in order to get some of his impressions from the keynote announcements. He was at the...
7 Lives aims to explore the underlying structure of fluidity and interdependence by taking a non-narrative, symbolic, and embodied poetic approach. You witness an experience, and then time freezes as you're able to explore how that event is related...
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...
Healium XR won the XR pitch competition at CES and SXSW this year for their immersive experiences that respond to biometric data. I saw the first demo of Healium XR (powered by StoryUp) back in 2017 at Oculus Connect 4, which I talk about more here...
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...
University of Cambridge's Dr. David Menon is a clinical neurointensivist who is specializing in traumatic brain injury. He's an advisor for the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Azrieli Brain, Mind & Consciousness program, and he was an...
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...
CTRL-labs is creating neural interfaces for robotics and immersive worlds that leverage electromyography (EMG) signals that are radiated from muscle contractions. This gives them the ability to isolate individual motor neurons, which is opening up a...
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...
MindMaze is creating Brain-Computer Interface that's integrated with VR head-mounted displays, and they're also creating immersive technologies that neurorehabilitation. I had a chance to talk with MindMaze founder and CEO Tej Tadi at the XTech...
Noah Falstein started as a game design pioneer back in 1980, and lately he's been collaborating a lot with virtual reality companies like MindMaze, Akili Interactive Labs, StoryUp, and AppliedVR on different immersive medical applications and...
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...
Craig Chapman is a movement neuroscientist at the University of Alberta, and he's received an EEG in the Wild grant form the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research in order to study the combination of movement tracked by VR technologies, eye gaze...
Andreea Ion Cojocaru is one of the few architects who is designing both virtual experiences as well as real buildings with Numena VR. I first met her in Germany during VR Now in November where I talked to her about her award-winning experiments in...
Chelley Sherman is an XR artist who has been working in VR for 4 years, creating audio-visual performances, and exploring how to created heightened, highly-perceptive experiences. Sherman says that her experience with scoliosis early in her life...
Estella Tse discovered Tilt Brush at the Unity Vision AR/VR Summit in February 2016 where she met the developers, and became a beta tester where she provided feedback. She was invited to become an artist in residence with Google where she...
Ethical design of technology is a hot topic right now, and Tristan Harris has been catalyzing a lot of broader discussion about the perils of persuasive technologies. He quit his job as a design ethicist at Google after feeling limited in his...
The XR Safety Initiative (XRSI) was co-founded by Kavya Pearlman and formally announced at the Open AR Cloud Symposium on Tuesday, May 28, 2019. XRSI is going to be looking at the safety and security issues within XR in collaboration with security...
Mozilla Hubs is an open source social VR platform built using open web technologies. You can create your own 3D scenes using their Spoke platform, or launch your own private Hubs server using the open sourced infrastructure code for Hubs. Mozilla...
Nancy Baker Cahill is a multidisciplinary artist from Los Angeles, and she's created a public art application called The 4th Wall AR app that allows people to place augmented reality art onto contested sites. Cahill used her 4th Wall AR app to place...