Technology

395 episodes

Episodes where a specific technology is discussed.

#503: Conversational Gameplay & Interactive Narrative in Human Interact’s ‘Starship Commander’

by kentbyeFebruary 10, 2017

Human Interact announced this past week that they are collaborating with Microsoft's Cognitive Services in order to power the conversational interface behind their Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, interactive narrative title named Starship Commander...

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#502: An Elemental Theory of Presence + Future of AI & Interactive Storytelling

by kentbyeFebruary 8, 2017

Jessica Brillhart is the principle filmmaker for virtual reality at Google, and she been exploring the cross section of artificial intelligence and storytelling in VR. I had a chance to catch up with her at Sundance again this year where we did a...

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#499: VR as the Ultimate Empathy Machine with Gabo Arora

by kentbyeJanuary 31, 2017

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...

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#496: Quantifying Touch on 15 Dimensions with SynTouch

by kentbyeJanuary 20, 2017

SynTouch has created a system that can quantify the sense of touch on fifteen different dimensions called the SynTouch Standard, and they're one of the most impressive haptic start-ups that I've seen so far. SynTouch isn't creating haptic displays...

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#495: Tricking the Brain is the Only Way to Solve the Infinite Degree of Freedom Haptics Problem

by kentbyeJanuary 19, 2017

Deep in the basement of the Sands Expo Hall at CES was an area of emerging technologies called Eureka Park, which had a number of VR start-ups hoping to connect with suppliers, manufacturers, investors, or media in order to launch a product or idea...

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#494: OSSIC CEO: The Future of Music is Immersive & Interactive

by kentbyeJanuary 17, 2017

OSSIC debuted their latest OSSIC X headphone prototype at CES this year with one of the best immersive audio demos that I've heard yet. OSSIC CEO Jason Riggs told me that their headphones do a dynamic calibration of your ears in order to render out...

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#492: HTC’s Dan O’Brien on Vive Tracker & Privacy in VR

by kentbyeJanuary 10, 2017

The most significant VR announcement from CES 2017 was the Vive Tracker, which is a modular lighthouse tracked 'puck' attachment that will enable users to track additional objects within VR experiences. It has the potential to drive a lot of new...

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#491: Brain-Controlled VR Experiences: Challenges & Potentials

by kentbyeJanuary 4, 2017

When I attended the Experiential Technology Conference in May 2016, I heard from a number of commercial off-the-shelf brain-control interface manufacturers that their systems would not natively work with VR headsets because there are some critical...

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#486: “Everything We Do is Experiential:” The Many Innovations of Felix & Paul Studios

by kentbyeDecember 23, 2016

Felix & Paul Studios have been innovating on their own immersive VR camera technology since they pioneered the first-ever stereoscopic VR video with Strangers with Patrick Watson. They went on to sign a deal with Oculus Studios to produce a number...

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#481: Call for VR Open Standard Backed by Valve, Oculus, Google, & OSVR

by kentbyeDecember 8, 2016

The Khronos Group announced on Tuesday that they have a critical mass of major VR players who are collaborating on a VR open standard. This VR open standard will have a software and hardware component that will enable VR application portability...

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#480: Op-Ed Comparing Oculus Touch vs HTC Vive Technology & Ecosystems

by kentbyeDecember 6, 2016

The Oculus Touch motion-tracked controllers are launching on December 6th after eight months of the Rift solely supporting gamepad experiences. I wanted to take a moment to dig into some of the more subtle technical nuances when comparing the Oculus...

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#472: Google’s Josh Carpenter on Bringing WebVR to Daydream

by kentbyeNovember 8, 2016

Google announced at the W3C WebVR workshop in mid-October that they would be shipping a WebVR-enabled Chromium browser in Q1 of 2017. I had a chance to catch up with Josh Carpenter last week to talk about some of the work that Google is doing to...

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#471: Mozilla on Enabling the Open Metaverse with WebVR, A-Frame, and Servo

by kentbyeNovember 4, 2016

Some of the earliest experiments of making VR a first-class citizen on the web originated at Mozilla in 2014. Then the WebVR spec was drafted in a collaboration between Mozilla and Google's implementations. There's been a lot of excitement and...

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#465: An Inflection Point for WebVR and the Open Metaverse

by kentbyeOctober 22, 2016

There's been a couple of key developments in the evolution of WebVR during the month of October. First, Nate Mitchell announced during his Oculus Connect 3 keynote that Oculus will be supporting the WebVR ecosystem with the React VR framework and a...

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#464: The Graphics Pipeline: Optimizing VR Experiences & Texture Compression from Binomial

by kentbyeOctober 20, 2016

Stephanie Hurlburt is a low-level graphics engineer who has previously worked on the Unity Game Engine, Oculus Medium, and Intel's Project Alloy, and now she's creating on a texture compression product called Basis at her company Binomial. I had a...

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#462: Denny Unger on Valve’s New Controller Prototype & Future of Non-Linear Storytelling

by kentbyeOctober 14, 2016

Valve premiered a prototype of a new type of VR input controller at Steam Dev Days in order to get some preliminary feedback from developers. They've created a capacitive-touch controller that is attached to your hand so that you can open and close...

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#459: Oculus Connect Highlights + Questions about Min Spec & Room-Scale

by kentbyeOctober 11, 2016

In this episode of the Voices of VR podcast, I recap some of my highlights from Oculus Connect 3, but also dive into some of my biggest concerns and questions coming out of this year’s big developer conference. My two biggest concerns were the...

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#456: Google’s Clay Bavor on Daydream View, YouTube, & AI in VR

by kentbyeOctober 5, 2016

On October 4th, Google revealed Daydream View, which is their reference design for their mobile VR headset. Google CEO Sandar Pichai also announced the first Daydream-ready phone designed called Pixel, which also has native hardware support for...

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#453: DIY Volumetric Capture with Depthkit

by kentbyeOctober 1, 2016

Alexander Porter & James George want to democratize volumetric capture with Depthkit. Depthkit combines depth sensor devices like the Kinect or RealSense cameras with high-end digital SLR cameras. They're able to create a 3D mesh from the captured...

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#452: Warehouse-Scale Tracking with Worldviz + Vection in VR

by kentbyeSeptember 30, 2016

Andy Beall is the CEO of Worldviz, and has been doing VR since 1992. I had a chance to catch up with him at SIGGRAPH where he told me about the type of work that Worldviz has been doing in the VR space since 1992, including creating warehouse-scale...

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#451: Lessons for Marketing VR Experiences from Mobile App Store Optimization

by kentbyeSeptember 29, 2016

Once a developer creates a VR experience, then the real difficult phase begins in trying to market their experience. VR is a new communication medium, and so traditional photos or videos don't always do the experience justice. At Casual Connect, I...

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#449: A History of the Google Cardboard Ecosystem with DODOcase

by kentbyeSeptember 27, 2016

The story of how DODOcase started the Google Cardboard VR ecosystem within 24 hours, and became responsible for producing 20% of all of the Cardboard headsets is really quite an incredible story. I had a chance to catch up with CEO and founder Craig...

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#448: Mobile AR & VR Tracking with uSens

by kentbyeSeptember 26, 2016

uSens is working on gestural input and inside-out tracking for both AR and VR. I had a chance to catch up with uSens' vice president of product development, Yiwen Rong, at GDC in March to talk about some of their current tracking research and larger...

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#447: VRLA Highlights + 2017 as the Year of Mobile VR

by kentbyeSeptember 25, 2016

Anshel Sag is an analyst for Moore Insights and Strategies where he has focused on mobile computing platforms. I had a chance to catch up with him at VRLA where talked about his content highlights there as well as why he thinks that 2017 is going to...

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#444: Developing a New Eye Interaction Model with Eyefluence

by kentbyeSeptember 23, 2016

I had a chance to do a demo of Eyefluence, which has created a new model for eye interactions within virtual and augmented reality apps. Rather than using the normal eye interaction paradigm of dwelling focus or explicitly winking to select...

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#442: Framestore VR on Digital Lightfield Workflows & VR Ad Campaigns

by kentbyeSeptember 21, 2016

When I was at SIGGRAPH this year, one of the hottest topics was figuring out the workflows for how to deal with the complexity of capturing, processing, and distributing volumetric digital light fields. Otoy's Jules Urbach had a lot of insights, and...

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#440: Spherica’s Stabilization Technology Used in HBO’s ‘Westworld’ VR Experience

by kentbyeSeptember 18, 2016

HBO premiered a VR experience for their new Westworld series at TechCrunch Disrupt, and they used Spherica's camera stabilization technology in order to pull off an extended live-action tracking shot in VR. Common advice given to new VR filmmakers...

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#437: Adding Haptic Feedback through Inaudible Bass with SubPac

by kentbyeSeptember 14, 2016

It was on a San Jose sidewalk in 2015 that I first tried the SubPac, and it blew me away. I felt like I was immediately transported into a dance club standing in front of giant subwoofers with the soundwaves of bass rippling through my body, but yet...

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#436: Providing Wide-Area Tracking for VR Arcades with OptiTrack

by kentbyeSeptember 13, 2016

OptiTrack premiered a new demo at GDC that shows the extent of their tracking technology precision. They put passive tracking markers on a basketball and football that allowed people to go toss a ball back and forth to each other in VR. I had a...

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#434: Tracking Your Hands using Flex Sensor Technology with Manus VR

by kentbyeSeptember 10, 2016

I had a chance to try out the Manus VR hand-tracked controller on the expo floor of GDC this year, and saw that there a couple of really strong use cases for having your hands and fingers tracked in VR. You can be a lot more expressive within Social...

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#429: Revolutionizing VR Sports Training with STRIVR Labs

by kentbyeSeptember 1, 2016

When Derek Belch was a kicker on Stanford's football team in 2004, he took a class with the Virtual Human Interaction Lab's Jeremy Bailenson where he was exposed to virtual reality technologies for the first time. Belch asked Bailenson if it was...

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#428: SMI Eye Tracking VR Applications & Foveated Rendering

by kentbyeAugust 31, 2016

Sensomotoric Instruments (SMI) is a German-based eye tracking company who has released an eye tracking kit for the Oculus DK2 & Gear VR, and most recently for the HTC Vive. At SIGGRAPH this year, Nvidia was showing a foveated rendering demo where it...

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#418: NVIDIA at SIGGRAPH: New Quadro GPUs, AI, & the Future of Interactive Ray Tracing

by kentbyeAugust 15, 2016

SIGGRAPH is a conference where GPU manufacturers announce new versions of professional graphics cards designed for the visual effects industry and high-end virtual reality content producers in architectural visualization and engineering. NVIDIA...

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#417: Social Presence & Training Social Dynamics with Virtual Humans

by kentbyeAugust 12, 2016

Team training scenarios are often difficult to schedule due to the logistics involved coordinating many different people's schedules. One solution has been to use virtual humans as stand-ins for actual humans in team training scenarios where the...

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#409: Wizard of Oz Narratives: Puppeting Virtual Characters with Improv Acting

by kentbyeJuly 31, 2016

Wizard of Oz' VR experiences use improv actors to drive either a single or multiple virtual characters. This technique is commonly used within VR training applications where it's cheaper to have a single actor puppeting multiple virtual characters...

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#390: AI & VR: Using IBM’s Watson for Game Design, Interactive Narratives, & Conversational Interfaces

by kentbyeJune 28, 2016

Machine Learning is going to revolutionize so many different aspects of our lives, and it's starting to enter into game development with IBM's Watson. Developers can integrate cloud-based AI services into their game to dynamically change the game...

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#385: Going down the Rabbit Hole: Simulation Theory, AI, & the Battle for Reality

by kentbyeJune 18, 2016

For the past three years, Cris Miranda has been taking VR pioneers down the rabbit hole of thinking about the deepest philosophical implications of virtual reality on his Enter VR podcast. He has been seeking out the boundaries of our understanding...

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#369: The White House on the AI Revolution: Policy, Privacy, & GPUs

by kentbyeMay 26, 2016

Artificial Intelligence has the potential to disrupt so many different dimensions of our society that the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy recently announced a series of four public workshops to look at some of the possible impacts...

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#362: Future of VR on the Open Web: WebVR, WebGL 2, & WebAssembly

by kentbyeMay 13, 2016

Brandon Jones has been one of the lead developers on the WebVR API over the past couple of years as part of his 20% project at Google. He announced this week that he's now going to be working on WebVR full-time, which is a great indicator that...

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#350: VR on the Open Web with A-Frame and WebVR

by kentbyeApril 26, 2016

Is VR on the open web going to provide a good enough experience as to be a viable distribution platform for certain VR content? That's the big question that people have been asking for the past couple of years, and there's been a lot of big steps...

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#315: Job Simulator and the Magic of Hand Presence

by kentbyeMarch 9, 2016

Owlchemy Labs' Job Simulator was recently announced to be one of the bundled games to be included with the HTC Vive, and it's also going to be a launch title for the Sony PlayStation VR as well as for Oculus Touch. I had a chance to catch up with...

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#293: AI & the Future of Interactive Drama

by kentbyeFebruary 6, 2016

Andrew Stern doesn't enjoy most AAA video games because he wants to be able to say anything at any moment within a social simulation and participate in an interesting story. About once week, he'd like to engage with a high agency, interactive drama...

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#112: Brandon Jones on WebVR for Chrome

by kentbyeMarch 25, 2015

Brandon Jones is a WebGL developer who started implementing WebVR into the Chrome web browswer as a part of his 20% project at Google. He's been working on it for the past year in order to get VR into the browser. You can find the latest WebVR...

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#106: Josh Carpenter on The Future of WebVR and Enabling the Metaverse

by kentbyeMarch 16, 2015

Josh Carpenter is a researcher and interaction and user interaction designer for figuring out how to use virtual reality on the web with WebVR. Mozilla has been increasing the size of the team working on WebVR because they're betting that immersive...

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#81: Josh Carpenter on WebVR & upcoming VR experiments from Mozilla including collaborative web browsing with TogetherJS

by kentbyeOctober 20, 2014

Josh Carpenter is a VR researcher at Mozilla looking to see how to combine the best of the web with what the VR communications medium can offer. Mozilla lead the effort to release a WebVR API in June and it's supported in Firefox as well as Chrome...

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