Noah Robinson’s Inner World launches today on the Quest Store after slowly cultivating an engaged peer-to-peer counseling community that is providing affordable mental health interventions across multiple social VR and 2D platforms on Mac, PC & iOS...
Darkening is a personal memoir experience by Ondřej Moravec, who takes the viewer on an interactive journey through a variety of spatial metaphors of his experience of depression. There are a number of interactive opportunities to use your voice to...
The Extended Reality (XR) Ethics in Medicine is the next paper in the series of the IEEE Global Initiative on the Ethics of Extended Reality. This paper explores the applications of medical XR, trends of telemedicine, AI assistant bots, and some...
Weird Times is an 5-part, VR episodic series that explores issues of teenage mental health that's produced by the teach at Flight School and executive produced by Meta's VR for Good. The first two episodes premiered at SXSW, and focus on Depression...
The Severance Theory: Welcome to Respite is a VR adaptation of an immersive theatre piece of the same name originally produced in 2019 by CoAct Productions founder Lyndsie Scoggin. Immersive theatre & VR performer Deirdre Lyons did some voice work...
GOLIATH: PLAYING WITH REALITY is an interactive VR story that explores the experience of schizophrenia & psychosis through the story of a Twitch Streamer named GoliathGames. It's a really strong piece of immersive storytelling balancing...
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...
Inside COVID-19 is a new 360 video series that premiered on Oculus TV on Friday, November 20, 2020, and it features Dr. Josiah Child who manages emergency departments at five different hospitals. Dr. Child contracted COVID-19, and this film takes us...
On October 6, 2020, Dr. Brennan Spiegel released his book titled 'VRx: How Virtual Therapeutics Will Revolutionize Medicine,' which is an amazing survey of different applications of what could be called virtual medicine, experiential medicine...
Howard Rose has been working in medical VR for over 20 years now, and he's the co-founder and CEO of Firsthand Technology. He reached out to me after listening to the XR for Change panel on Ethics in order to talk about some of the specific ethical...
Dr. Jessica Stone is a licensed psychologist and registered play therapist who has been experimenting with integrating technologies into her therapeutic practice specializing in working with children. She and her husband developed a Virtual Sandtray...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Dr. Sook-Lei Liew is an assistant professor at the University of Southern California, and the director of the Neural Plasticity & Neurorehabilitation Labatory at USC. At IEEE VR 2017, she was showing off a DIY Brain Computer Interface called...
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 Multiplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies has been doing frontier research into the therapeutic uses of psychedelics for the past 33 years, and they're currently in Phase 3 FDA trials for MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for the treatment of...
Andromeda Entertainment is creating and distributing immersive entertainment experiences for healing and self actualization. I previously talked with CEO Robin Arnott about his Sound Self experience, as well as a previous incarnation of Andromeda...
Larry Minikes is a technological pioneer in the consciousness hacking space having started in the space back in 1989 after seeing LED glasses at CES that flickered light in order to invoke different brainwave frequencies. Minikes went on to star AV...
Dr. Cassandra Vieten is the president of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, who's current tagline is 'Informed by Science. Transformed by Experience.' Dr. Vieten gave an opening keynote at the Consciousness Hacking's Awakened Futures Summit where she...
East Forest has been crafting musical rituals for psilocybin journeys for the past decade, and he just released a five-hour album titled 'Music For Mushrooms: A Soundtrack For The Psychedelic Practitioner' coincidentally just a few days after Denver...
Dr. Jeff Tarrant founded the NeuroMeditation Institute in order to research the neuroscience principles of different meditation states. He came up with a taxonomy of four different types of NeuroMeditation that include Focus, Mindfulness, Quiet...
Muse is an immersive meditation device that provides real-time feedback on your mental activity, heart rate, breathing, and body movements. They've optimized the device for ease of use, and to assist in making the invisible and intangible process of...
Consciousness Hacking produced the The Awakened Futures Summit in San Francisco on May 18th & 19th, looking at the intersection between psychedelics, technology, and meditation. Consciousness Hacking previously hosted a sold-out event on October...
BehaviorMe is using virtual reality to enhance behavior therapy for children and young adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). It's started by four people including two therapy practioners with fifteen years of experience working with clients...
Lucid Dreaming is ability to become aware that you’re dreaming, and to potentially even start to interact and direct what happens within your dream. Arthur Gillard is a VR enthusiast who has been tracking the intersection between immersive...
Embody was an experience at the Sundance New Frontier that started to blend Yoga movement practices into virtual reality. VR artist and MAP Design Lab founder Melissa Painter collaborated with Lululemon's Whitespace Innovation team in order to...
The medical professionals at the VR Privacy summit has a lot of interesting insights into how they navigate issues around informed consent in medical research through Institutional Review Boards, and perhaps how privacy policies for companies need a...
I talk with StoryUp XR CEO Sarah Hill about an experience that they collaborated on called Healium XR in order to use biofeedback with VR to train positive thinking. They're using a commercial, off-the-shelf EEG Muse headband to detect the...
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...
Sound Self developer Robin Arnott is starting a publishing label named Orpheus Technodelics to curate and distribute consciousness hacking VR experiences. 'Technodelics' are digital psychedelics that provide peak experiences, and Arnott hopes till...
The VR Unicorns use a rapid iteration, game jamming approach to VR development, and co-founder Julie Heyde does daily playtesting and quality assurance gathering feedback and guidance for the development team. Heyde has also been experiencing a...
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...
The design team behind Bioflight VR has worked on television shows such as CSI and ER, and they've been able to translate their VFX visualization skills into a virtual reality medical education venture. Their original plans were to use virtual...
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 process of diagnosing a concussion is largely a subjective process of variations of attention, focus, and balance, which means that the existing self-reporting methods are unreliable and easily gamed. Using foundational research from military...
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...
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...
There's been more than 30 years of research into the medical applications of virtual reality, but it's not until the recent consumer VR revolution that the technology has been cost-effective enough to use. The research shows that the combination of...
Larry Hodges is a professor of human computer interaction at Clemson University, and he was one of the co-chairs of the very first IEEE VR academic in 1999. Hodges also co-founded a start-up named Recover, which originated from a successful research...
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...
On today's episode, I talk with Dr. Benjamin Lok from the University of Florida about how they're using Virtual Humans as patients to train medical students. He talks about the key components for creating a plausible training scenario which include...
I talk with Shauna Heller from Clay Park VR about here thoughts about non-entertainment and non-gaming VR content in education, medicine, and enterprise applications.
Theresa Duringer has a fear of flying, and rather than treating her aviophobia with VR exposure therapy she's been experimenting with using VR to just completely opt out of the real-life signals of the flying experience altogether. She's found some...
Karl Krantz made a strategic move to California in order to start the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality meetup in May of 2013. One year later, he organized the first consumer VR conference with SVVRCon that had 400 people and 35 companies. SVVRCon 2015...