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...
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...
The Valve Index officially launches today, and it provides a strong vision for the future of high-end PC VR with solid tracking, fidelity, and hand-tracked Index controllers that provide a deep sense of hand presence. Valve sent me hardware to...
Metaphors of Presence & Experiential Design keynote talk that I gave at the Symposium iX conference in Montreal covers provides some concrete metaphors for presence, explores the connections between the Yin and Yang concepts of Chinese Philosophy...
I speak with Mike Sapiro about the Indian Philosophy concept of the five koshas and insights that might provide into VR presence.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Presence Capital is a new early-stage venture capital firm that's focused on funding virtual reality and augmented reality startups. I had the chance to interview one of the co-founders Amitt Mahajan at the VRX Conference about this new fund and how...
Sunny Dhillon is a principal and co-founder of Signia Venture Partners as well as a lifelong gamer. Signia has been an investor in mobile games, and so he knows what to look for in terms of a solid team and distinct art style that resonates with...
The Oculus Touch Toybox demo was shown to the most number of people in one day at Oculus Connect 2 on September 23rd. This was the first time that a lot of developers were able to get their hands on the Half Moon Prototype VR input controllers. But...
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...
Richard Skarbez in a Ph.D. candidate at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who has been researching how to measure presence in VR. Mel Slater has proposed that there are two key components of having the sense of presence that he elaborated...
Danny Woodall is the Creative Director at Sixense, and he talks about how the electromagnetic STEM controllers can help to bring full-body presence into VR. He talks about the SDK improvements that they've been making, and some of the updates that...
This is the 100th episode of the Voices of VR podcast marking 33 hours of interviews with the leaders of the consumer VR revolution over the past 10 months.
Tom Kaczmarczyk is a developer of SUPERHOT, which is an FPS where time moves only you move, which recently raised $250k on Kickstarter. It was a popular 2D game that was developed as a part of the 2013 7-Day First Person Shooter game challenge.Tom...
John Dionisio is an associate professor of computer science at Loyola Marymount University, and he talks about moving towards omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence in virtual and augmented realities. He sees augmented reality as the reversal of...
Michael Licht is a professor of level design at USC's Viterbi School of Engineering and has involved in video games for over 15 years and has an architecture background. He paired up with Nonny de la Pena in creating immersive journalism pieces...
Terry Beaubois is the director of Montana State University's Creative Research Lab, and he talks about how he used Second Life to teach architecture classes and the different limitations he faced from having an imprecise physics model in the virtual...
Scott Phillips was making 3D scans of people at the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference and part of his toll was to listen to his pitch about his shoe-based, locomotion idea called the the VR Walker.I decided to record the pitch in this...
Philip Rosedale is the creator of Second Life, and more recently High Fidelity. He talks about a lot of the things that he's doing differently in creating a virtual world for the second time around including a focus on 3D audio, low latency, speed...
Jan Goetgeluk talks about creating Virtuix Omni Treadmill, and how he didn't want to have just a sit-down experience within virtual reality. He talks about participating in the Meant to be Seen forums before the Oculus Rift came about, and how he...
Amir Rubin, CEO of Sixense, the distributors of the Razer Hydra controller and manufacturers of the wireless STEM controllers, which have been described as enabling a 3D mutli-touch interface and will could become the first 'mouse of VR.'Amir talks...
Jason Jerald of NextGen Interactions has been involved with creating computer graphics and next-generation 3D computer interfaces for 20 years. His virtual reality consulting client list ranges from Oculus VR, Valve and Sixense Entertainment to NASA...
Oliver 'Doc_Ok' Kreylos is a research scientist / computer scientist who develops virtual reality applications for scientific research, specifically immersive 3D visualizations for the department of geology at the W.M. Keck Center for Active...