I had a chance to talk with Oculus Founder Palmer Luckey about the past, present, & future of XR where he reveals to me that his defense contracting company Anduril has more people employed working on VR than Oculus did when it was bought out by...
In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats is a landmark immersive documentary that seamlessly integrates so many different immersive storytelling techniques and XR modalities earning it the IDFA DocLab Award for Immersive Non-Fiction. You’re transported back...
Photo of The Beast Prototype courtesy of Rony AbovitzI had a chance to sit down with Magic Leap founder Rony Abovitz for two hours to unpack some of the many threads Magic Leap's behind origin story, including some of the underlying philosophical...
Time Detectives AR by Picture This Productions is a site-specific AR trail experience meant to be seen at the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth, UK, but you can also experience it remotely as a table-top experience at home. Time Detectives AR asks...
#1082 Roman Rappak’s Mixed Reality Live Music Performance & an Art History Perspective on XR + music
Roman Rappak's Miro Shot band had a unique mixed reality performance of a single song at SXSW to an audience of 50 people who were wearing GearVR headsets. The experience was live mixed by Rappak, who was switching between a monoscopic VR...
Targo Stories has created a number of really well-produced and well-told immersive stories using the 360 VR video medium over the past three years. Their latest co-production with Meta is Surviving 9/11: 27 Hours Under the Rubble, which premiered in...
Nonny de la Peña was one of the 16 Legacy Peabody Award recipients honoring historical work as a part of their new Digital & Interactive Storytelling Award. Specifically, de la Peña is receiving a Field Building honor for her body of work that has...
(Hi)story of a Painting: The Light in the Shadow won a special jury prize at SXSW for Immersive Storytelling as it uses the medium of VR to take us back into history to explain the deeper historical context of the work of Artemisia Gentileschi, a...
I talk with the creators of Choctaw Code Talkers 1918, Kilma Lattin, Founder & CEO of OurWorlds as well as Catherine Eng, Co-founder & CTO of OurWorlds, who are bringing Native American Stories to VR with their platform. OurWorlds won the SXSW EDU...
Suga': A Live Virtual Dance Performance was a live performance in Mozilla Hubs that premiered at SIGGRAPH 2021 and also screened at the Sundance New Frontier 2022. This project tells the story of rebellion, resistance, and resilience of the...
William Uricchio is a Professor of Comparitive Media Studies at MIT, who started Open Documentary Lab in 2012 as a research initiative to look at implications of emerging technologies & the implications for the work of documentary. The MIT Co...
On March 23, 2021, Rec Room announced that they raised $100M with a valuation of $1.25 billion, which makes them the first VR software company to achieve 'unicorn' status. Rec Room was launched for the Vive on June 1, 2016 after 99 days of...
One of the most magical AR demos I've ever had a chance to see was Tilt Five at Augmented World Expo 2021. Jeri Ellsworth stumbled upon a complete paradigm shift towards AR while she was at Valve and accidentally had a beam splitter turned around...
Mark Pesce's new book Augmented Reality: Unboxing Tech's Next Big Thing was released on Friday, January 8th, 2021. It's a lucidly-written look at the past, present, and future of augmented reality. He contextualizes AR within the history of...
Virtual and Augmented Reality pose unique privacy challenges, and so it's worth going back to look at the evolution of privacy laws in the United States to see how we got to this point today. There's also a lot of current discussions for the need...
The first Laval Virtual Conference happened on 3-4 June, 1999 in Laval France, and had a chance to talk with the founder Simon Richir about the 20+ year history of Laval Virtual when I attended in 2019. It's an amazing history of the evolution of...
Kai Frazier is a history teacher who decided to make a complete pivot into creating accessible and diverse educational content and kits for education. She curates 360 videos and produces content aimed for underrepresented minorities to be able to...
StoryFile is an interactive storytelling platform that allows you to interact with someone as they tell their story. A comprehensive oral history could be as many as 1000 questions and 20 hours of content, and StoryFile's combination of a...
Nancy Baker Cahill is an artist who is creating the 4th Wall App AR platform that distributes inclusive, augmented reality art at site-specific, locations that are contested in some way. She launched Battlegrounds: New Orleans in December 2019, and...
Kathy Brew tried her first VR experience at NASA Ames in 1985. She's been at the intersection of art of technology for a long time, and she was at IDFA DocLab scouting for immersive experiences as a guest curator of Museum of Modern Art's (MoMA) Doc...
The MIT Open Documentary Lab held it's first official event back on Tuesday, March 20, 2012 a day-long summit called 'The New Arts of Documentary.' Part of the MIT Open Doc Lab's mission is to bring 'storytellers, technologists, and scholars...
ARTE is a French German television network that promotes cultural programming that was started in 1992, and they've been pioneers in the digital space for a long time. They've also funded over 60 VR projects over the past 5 years including many...
On July 17th, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was a scheduled passenger flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur that was shot down while flying over eastern Ukraine killing all 298 on board. This has been huge news in the Netherlands, and when...
Avi Bar-Zeev has been involved with immersive technologies for over 27 years, including working on the very first prototypes of Microsoft's HoloLens back in 2010. He's mostly been working on secret projects for the last 11 years, and so I got was...
On April 15, 2019, the Notre-Dame Cathedral suffered a devastating fire. I recently had a chance to see a 360-degree VR documentary by Targo called The Man Behind Notre-Dame, which follows the Rector-Archpriest of Notre-Dame Patrick Chauvet and his...
The History of the Future' book was published on February 19th, and it's a storified non-fiction account of the modern resurgence of virtual reality through the eyes of the founders of Oculus. Author Blake Harris was able to cultivate some...
I moderated a discussion with VR pioneers Fred Brooks & Henry Fuchs at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts' Future of Reality Summit (original video is here). We talk about the evolution of immersive technologies since the mid 1960s...
Our stores of the past shape our future. There is a growing movement to use augmented reality technologies to reclaim suppressed histories by creating site-specific AR art installations that challenge institutionally-backed narratives. Glenn...
Linda Jacobson got into VR when she helped organize the 1990 CyberArts International gathering of artists and technologists who were using virtual reality technologies. She edited a compilation of CyberArts essays from that first gathering, and she...
Jaron Lanier is a pioneer of the first commercially-available virtual reality systems with his VPL Research Inc startup that was founded in 1984. He has written a memoir called Dawn of the New Everything about his life leading up to and during his...
In 1978, a number of film scholars gathered at a conference in Brighton to re-evaluate the early days of film in terms of a developing new medium on it's own terms rather than though the lens of a mature narrative and storytelling communications...
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...