Moral philosopher Erick J. Ramirez writes that we "we are now in the beginning stages of a methodological VR renaissance in moral psychology" in his book "The Ethics of Virtual and Augmented Worlds: Building Worlds." He argues that our imagination...
With These Hands is a VR installation that “shares challenging, complex and under discussed stories of sexual assault and recovery. It explores the role of listening in the recovery of both survivors and those responsible for sexual harm.” It was...
The Choice is an interactive documentary that explores the issue of reproductive rights in Texas. The team uses a special stereoscopic compositing pipeline that combines depth sensor information with a stereo camera capture, but creates a shader to...
The immersive story of Notes on Blindness: Into the Darkness (2016) VR experience (Quest, Rift) was awarded with a Legacy Peabody Award for Digital & Interactive Storytelling along with 15 other projects on Thursday, March 24th. This experience has...
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...
Jeremy Bailenson founding director of Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, and his latest book Experience on Demand traces his academic journey through virtual reality. It's an intellectual memoir that focuses on his personal work in...
Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL) premiered an experience called Becoming Homeless: A Human Experience at the Tribeca Film Festival in April. It was an experiment researching whether it's possible to cultivate empathy through emboding...
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...
Testimony is one of the most profound and powerful applications of virtual reality that I've seen so far. It's an experimental documentary that captures the stories of sexual assault from five women broken up into five segments. You're completely...
Danfung Dennis has an ambitious vision for the potential of virtual reality, and it's one of the most radical ones that I've come across. He believes that VR can be used as a tool to cultivate compassion through having an embodied experience of...
Last year, Baobab Studios' Eric Darnell was skeptical about adding interactivity to virtual reality stories because he felt like there was a tradeoff between empathy and interactivity. But after watching people experience their first VR short...
Gabo Arora founded the United Nations VR, and directed some for the more well-known VR empathy experiences starting with Clouds Over Sidra in December 2014 in collaboration with Chris Milk and Here Be Dragons. Milk first showed Clouds Over Sidra...