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...
Vince Kadlubek is one of the co-founders of Meow Wolf, and at the time of this interview on March 24, 2019 he was the CEO (but he recently resigned in October 2019.)
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...
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...
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...
Astrid Feringa had a video essay installation at the IDFA DocLab where she was critiquing how the British Institute of Digital Archaeology was using photogrammetry to reconstruct a piece of destroyed architecture. What are the ethics around...
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...
Look Inside is an immersive experience the premiered at IDFA DocLab 2019 where you get to take an audio tour of a complete stranger's home. This was one of the hottest tickets in all of IDFA DocLab selling out quickly, and being one of the hardest...
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...
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...
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...
Alex Coulombe's Agile Lens takes an interdisciplinary approach to immersive technologies at the intersection between theater and architecture. He was showing off a demo piece called That Kind of Guy at XR for Change, which explored a variety of...
I speak with three recent graduates of architecture school about how they're using virtual spaces for speculative design. Paula Strunden is working with the interface between physical objects and mixed reality environments. Nicholas Zembashi uses...
Andreea Ion Cojocaru is one of the few architects who is designing both virtual experiences as well as real buildings with Numena VR. I first met her in Germany during VR Now in November where I talked to her about her award-winning experiments in...
Architects Anna Mill & Luke Jones spent eight years creating a graphic novel called Square Eyes that explores the speculative design of augmented reality technologies and interfaces. They see this project as an in-depth paper architecture...
Yasmin Yesilipek is an architecture student at the Architectural Association who has been primarily focusing on virtual reality. She's been creating spaces for online gatherings, and trying to recreate a campfire digitally through experimenting with...
Space Popular is a multidisciplinary design and research practice led by Lara Lesmes & Fredrik Hellberg, and they've been architecture students for the last eight years about spatial design as well as the latest immersive technologies. They've been...
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...
Mozilla Hubs is an open source social VR platform built using open web technologies. You can create your own 3D scenes using their Spoke platform, or launch your own private Hubs server using the open sourced infrastructure code for Hubs. Mozilla...
Nancy Baker Cahill is a multidisciplinary artist from Los Angeles, and she's created a public art application called The 4th Wall AR app that allows people to place augmented reality art onto contested sites. Cahill used her 4th Wall AR app to place...
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...
Graham Sack says that dream analysis and the language have film have co-evolved together as visual forms of symbolic communication, and he wanted to further that exploration in an experimental narrative series funded by Samsung VR. Sack and...
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...
Pilgrim is an AR audio documentary that I experienced at the IDFA DocLab premiere as I was walking through the streets of Amsterdam. Co-director Lauren Hutchinson captured audio stories of people as they were walking the Camino de Santiago trail in...
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...
Designing impossible architecture in VR is changing how Andreea Ion Cojocaru designs real buildings, and she's reveling in the fact that she finally has a tool with VR to be able to explore some of the deeper philosophical questions about the nature...
Quiddale O'Sullivan is an architect who is using his spatial design skills to design environments within virtual reality. We cover a wide variety of worldbuilding insights from an architectural perspective, and how the process of architecture is an...
I facilitated a panel discussion at the Decentralized Web Summit that brought together some of the leading virtual reality creators who have been integrating blockchain technologies and creating the foundations of the decentralized metaverse.We...
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...
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...
Google's mission statement is to 'organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful,' and so it's a natural fit that they'd be a leader in creating educational experiences for AR & VR. Google Expeditions continues to...
Keiichi Matsuda went from being a dystopian filmmaker to becoming the vice president of design at hand-tracking company Leap Motion. Matsuda is probably the most famous for his HYPER-REALITY dystopian filmthat imagined an commodified & gamified AR...
Felix & Paul Studios had two experiences at Sundance this year. One featured the training of NASA astronauts in Space Explorers, and the other was a time-lapse VR story featuring characters from Wes Anderson's Ilse of Dogs film in front half with a...
Miyubi is Felix & Paul Studios' first scripted narrative piece that is 40 minutes in length, and it transports you to the early 1980s as you embody an imminently obsolete toy robot. Felix & Paul instructed the individual actors to unexpectedly try...
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...
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...
One of the unique affordances of virtual reality is it's power to convey the vastness of scale, which can invoke feelings of awe. Denise Quesnel is a graduate student at Simon Frasier University's iSpace Lab, and she has been studying the process of...
Mark Pesce is a VR pioneer who has been thinking about networked virtual and augmented reality for over 20 years now. He developed the Ono-Sendai Sega VR helmet prototype, co-created VRML, and presented his Cyberspace Protocol spec at the first Web...
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...
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...
Hassan Karaouni is one of the 11 winners of an Oculus Launch Pad scholarship for his project My: home, which allows people to share 360 videos of locations that are meaningful to them. In my Voices of VR episode about Google Earth VR, I talked about...
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...