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...
STRIVR started as a VR training platform for elite athletes for college and professional quarterbacks, but they've been recently expanding into corporate training for Walmart. Over 200 Walmart Academy location will soon be equipped with virtual...
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...
Kevin Mack is an Oscar-winning visual effects artist and abstract artist who creates digital spaces with fluidly moving textures that are awe-inspiring in it's ability to create a novel experience unique to VR. In Blortasia you float weightlessly...
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...
Dr. Skip Rizzo heads the Medical VR Research Group at USC's Institute for Creative Technologies, which has been exploring how to use VR for psychological treatments, cognitive assessment, motor rehabilitation therapy, as well as interactions with...
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...
Custom avatars in social VR add a lot of fidelity of identity expression and creative flair in applications like VRChat or High Fidelity. Morph3D is a custom avatar solution that offers a number of free avatars within VRChat, but they also have a...
Dance is all about bodies moving through space, and it's something that shows the strength of the VR medium since there's something that's lost when it's translated onto a 2D screen. Lily Baldwin observed how audience members heard the music...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Philip Rosedale has been thinking deeply about how to architect large-scale, distributed virtual worlds after experiencing many bottlenecks in running Second Life. High Fidelity is taking a much more distributed approach with how it's being...
Eric Matzner identifies as a Techno-Optimistic Futurist who sometimes works an entire second workday within VR exploring different ways to expand his mind. He's pushing the limits of mental presence by using nootropic supplements for cognitive...
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...
One of the most immersive flying experiences that I've had a chance to have so far was Mindride Airflow. I had a chance to try it out last fall at VRLA, and the weightless harness combined with a variety of different wind speeds gave me a deep sense...
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 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...
Advanced Brain Monitoring is a 17-year old neurotechnology company that has been able to extract a lot of really useful information from EEG data. They've developed specific EEG Metrics for drowsiness, inducing flow states, engagement, stress...
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...
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...
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...
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...
At GDC this year, SensoMotoric Instruments (SMI) showed a couple of new eye tracking demos at Valve's booth. They added eye tracking to avatars in the social VR experiences of Pluto VR and Rec Room, which provided an amazing boost to the social...
Tilt Brush launched on the Oculus Rift today, and I had a chance to catch up with Tilt Brush product manager Elisabeth Morant, launching. We have a broad discussion about adapting Tilt Brush for the Touch controllers, the Tilt Brush Artist in...
Within premiered their first real-time rendered, interactive experience at Sundance New Frontier this year with Life of Us, which is the story of life on the planet as told through embodying a series of characters who are evolving into humans. The...
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...
Virtual Reality has the potential to enable so many amazing utopian futures, but it also has the potential to become one of the most intimate surveillance technologies that could create a Big Brother dystopia of political and economic control. But...
The most significant VR announcement from CES 2017 was the Vive Tracker, which is a modular lighthouse tracked 'puck' attachment that will enable users to track additional objects within VR experiences. It has the potential to drive a lot of new...
When I attended the Experiential Technology Conference in May 2016, I heard from a number of commercial off-the-shelf brain-control interface manufacturers that their systems would not natively work with VR headsets because there are some critical...
In July, I was invited to give a talk about virtual reality at the bi-annual Illustration Conference with indie VR developer Ashley Pinnick, who studied as an artist and illustrator. On today's Voices of VR podcast, we talk about the process of...
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...
Robin Arnott had a peak experience from a LSD trip at Burning Man, and wanted to see if he could replicate this type of peak psychedelic experience within virtual reality. The result of four years of work is a transcendent experience called...
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...
There was an immersive dome experience at VRLA called Samskara that was based upon the Hindu Vedas produced by 360art. It featured different Hindu mythological characters reimagined by visionary artist Android Jones. I had a chance to talk to...
The concept of embodied cognition is a hot topic within immersive education circles, and was a featured topic at during the Embodied Learning educational workshop that happened at the IEEE VR academic conference. Embodied Learning could help...
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...
I had a chance to do a demo of Eyefluence, which has created a new model for eye interactions within virtual and augmented reality apps. Rather than using the normal eye interaction paradigm of dwelling focus or explicitly winking to select...
When Owlchemy Labs' Alex Schwartz saw that Rick and Morty creator Justin Roiland was a fan of their Job Simulator VR experience, then he reached out and met up with Justin in Los Angeles. They came up with the idea of creating an interactive Rick...
When Derek Belch was a kicker on Stanford's football team in 2004, he took a class with the Virtual Human Interaction Lab's Jeremy Bailenson where he was exposed to virtual reality technologies for the first time. Belch asked Bailenson if it was...
Team training scenarios are often difficult to schedule due to the logistics involved coordinating many different people's schedules. One solution has been to use virtual humans as stand-ins for actual humans in team training scenarios where the...
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...
Adventure Time creator Pendleton Ward has been fascinated by the idea of virtual reality since he first read Snow Crash as a teenager. He backed the Oculus Kickstarter, and has been exploring many of the early VR prototypes over the last three years...
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...
I didn't expect that a VR rock-climbing game that used neck thrusts as one of the primary locomotion mechanics would be as immersive or fun as it was, but I was really impressed with the level of immersion and presence that I felt while playing...
Owlchemy Labs' Job Simulator was recently announced to be one of the bundled games to be included with the HTC Vive, and it's also going to be a launch title for the Sony PlayStation VR as well as for Oculus Touch. I had a chance to catch up with...