After I gave my Ultimate Potential of VR: Promises and Perils talk at SXSW, I met a third-year Ph.D. student in the field of Media Geography named Claire Fitch who wanted to follow up with me about the representation of virtual natures within...
Once a Glacier is a 360 video that visualizes the before and after a glacier melts over the course of a single human life time. Director Jiabao then expanded this piece as a part of a live motion capture dance performance that showed at The ONX +...
Horizon is a one-on-one immersive theater piece where an audience member is asked a series of questions by a 15-year old to imagine their future 30 years from now in 2052. It ends up being a world building exercise where the audience has to create...
This episode kicks off my 18-episode coverage from International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam (IDFA) DocLab, which features the latest innovations of immersive storytelling from the documentary community. Okawari VR is an immersive experience...
The Miracle Basket is the perfect example for why you shouldn’t judge a book by it’s cover as it’s a really well-told story behind what director Abner Preis calls a DIY Punk aesthetic that he describes as looking like it may have been drawn by a...
Liam Young is a director and speculative architect who is designing regenerative futures via provocative thought experiments. Planet City VR is the provocation of centralizing all 10 billion humans on the planet to a city the size of Texas so that...
First-time VR artists Miri Chekhanovich & Édith Jorisch in collaboration with Dpt. and '>The NFB created some unique embodiment experiments within Plastisapians as they explored speculative futures about plastic permeating and changing our bodies...
FRAMERATE is a timelapse LIDAR art installation by ScanLAB Projects that showed at SXSW. It encourages the audience to 'think and feel in another time scale: geological time, seasonal time, tidal time.' I had a chance to talk with director & ScanLAB...
Liminal Lands is an environmental VR piece commissioned by Luma Arles to document and volumetrically capture different objects and organisms within 'overlooked wetlands at the edge of the Mediterranean.' It's a piece where the sound design adapts to...
On the Morning You Wake (To the End of the World) won the best XR Experience at SXSW, and is set to be released this week on March 24th, 2022. (UPDATE 3/24: It's now been released and can be found here.) It's an amazingly well-told story about how...
Gondwana VR simulates 100 years of climate change in the Daintree Rainforest within a 24-hour durational simulation that's running each day throughout the Sundance New Frontier 2022 selection. Lead artists Ben Joseph Andrews and Emma Roberts...
Michaela French is a visual artist working with moving image, primarily in immersive experiences in the context of a full dome space. She's been collaborating with DocLab since 2019 in creating dome content, supporting new artists, and promoting a...
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...
Breathe is a Magic Leap, mixed reality experience with four people in shared environment that uses a biometric sensor measuring chest movements in order to explore how our breathing connects us to each other and to the atmosphere. It's a powerful...
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...
Vulcan Productions has been producing social impact films and XR experiences since 1997, when it was founded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who passed away in October 2018. Their four main topics they're focused on are climate change, ocean...
Marshmallow Laser Feast is one of my favorite studios with projects like Into the Eyes of an Animal, Treehugger, Sweet Dreams, & We Live in An Ocean of Air. Most of their work has only shown at Film Festivals like Sundance or Tribeca, but last year...
Michaela French has been making large-scale immersive, full dome experiences since 1999, and at IDFA DocLab she was showing her Climate Crimes piece, which explores the complex relationship between global air pollution, climate change and human...
Duncan Speakman's Only Expansion was an augmented audio tour showing at the IDFA DocLab that was doing real-time modulation of the surrounding soundscape mixed with produced sounds in order to create a unique experience. The headphones had...
Jakob Kudsk Steensen is a Danish artist who has been creating virtual landscapes for 15 years, and has recently been creating virtual reality environments. Steensen comes from the fine arts world, and he's been working as a VR artist with different...
Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun is an indigenous artist and painter who created his first VR experience called Inherent Rights, Vision Rights back in 1992. He collaborated with VR artist Paisley Smith in a piece called Unceded Territories that premiered...
I talk with Jason Edward Lewis about the Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace initiative, as well as the two 2167 Indigenous Storytelling in VR that he helped to produce. How do we reckon the past, present, and the future, and what types of...
Marshmallow Laser Feast is a collective of artists who are interested in using VR technologies to capture the aesthetic beauty of nature, and provide immersive experiences that inspire people to cultivate an even deeper with the reality that...
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...
Google Earth VR has been one of the most mind-blowing experiences that I've had so far in VR, for so many different reasons. It's felt like it's been rewiring my brain to accommodate the new perspectives of the earth in a way similar to what...