Sandra Rodriguez is a director and creative director of immersive experiences that use AI to create spaces where you interact with sentient-like entities. I had a chance to catch up with her during Tribeca Immersive 2023 to unpack three of her...
Adrian Biedrzycki (aka Avaer) won the Poly Awards’ WebXR developer of the year in 2021, and has been working on creating an open metaverse technology stack for many years now. He’s the co-founder of Webaverse, Moemate virtual assistant, and M3...
#1267: Frontiers of XR & AI Integrations with ONX Studio Technical Directors & Sensorium Co-Founders
Matthew Niederhauser and John Fitzgerald are both co-founders Sensorium as well technical directors at ONX Studio. They both have been working on a number of different immersive XR projects that are including the latest generative AI and large...
Brandon Powers is a creative director and choreographer who is creating experiences across physical and virtual space at the intersection of performance and technology. He was showing a dance performance at ONX Studios during Tribeca Immersive that...
Brendan Bradley is an actor and storyteller who got into real-time animation systems and social VR during the pandemic, and then starting putting on live theatre shows in Virtual Reality both onsite, hybrid, and in-venue, and fully virtual. He co...
Matt Kim is the technical creative director at inworld.ai creating demos to show off their NPC platform, which was featured in my previous episode #1263 in the MeetWol demo by Liquid City and Niantic. I was really impressed with how my interactions...
Keiichi Matsuda is one of the deepest thinkers in the field of XR. He is trained as an architect, and he’s currently the director of Liquid City, a small design studio based in London that is engaged developing cutting-edge AR applications and...
Don Allen Stevenson III aspires by become the Bob Ross of the Metaverse by creating AR filters and creative technology XR projects, and XR developer that he promotes on this social media channels (@donalleniii on Instagram, X (Twitter), and TikTok)...
I had a chance to catch up with Jeri Ellsworth, co-founder and CEO of Tilt Five again at Augmented World Expo 2023. Be sure to catch my previous conversation in episode #1021 where she gives her full epic backstory in inventing Tilt Five at Valve...
Javier Fadul is Director of Innovation at HTX Labs, and I ran into him on the expo floor of the Augmented World Expo 2023. We talked about how he’s been using ChatGPT via AR Glasses as a impromptu research assistant, curriculum planner, and...
I had a chance to participate in a panel discussion exploring “The Intersection of AI and the Metaverse: What’s Next?” on the main stage of Augmented World Expo on the opening day on May 31, 2023. The discussion was moderated by Amy LaMeyer...
Michael Running Wolf is a Northern Cheyenne/Lakota/Blackfeet indigenous man who grew up in Montana. He’s worked for Amazon, but eventually left in order to pursue his lifelong goal of building XR experiences that integrate with AI for language...
I was invited to give an opening keynote talk about AI at a half-day seminar titled “Tech Talks: AI Tools, Tips, & Traps” on April 20, 2023 that was put on by San Jose State University’s King Library Experiential Virtual Reality Lab (KLEVR). I...
The Unclaimed Masterpiece won the best student VR project at Laval Virtual as it has a novel integration of a conversational interface with a virtual assistant / character who is assisting you as you try to find the correct virtual painting to steal...
Christina Kinne (aka XaosPrincess) wanted to seed social VR worlds with AI chatbots in order to help catalyze larger social VR gatherings, and so she created the The Quantum Bar in Neos VR, which features a robot bartender that does speech to text...
Violeta Ayala is a filmmaker, film futurist, and creative technologist who using semantics to create immersive art with ChatGPT and generative AI programs. I had a chance to catch up with her at NewImages France where she talked about how AI has...
The intersection of XR and Artificial Intelligence is a hot topic, and this is the start of a 17-part Voices of VR podcast series where I’ve interviewed different immersive artists and XR developers over the past four months about how they’re...
Kinfolk: Black Lands is described by co-founder Idris Brewster as “an Augmented Reality Archive of Black, Brown, LGBTQ, and underrepresented history in general using the power of immersive storytelling and immersive media to uplift stories from our...
Colored is a HoloLens 2-based, augmented reality immersive story installation for 3-10 people that talks about the forgotten history of Claudette Colvin. “This experience plunges the audience into the Deep South during segregation. In the course of...
Over The Rainbow is the second episode of a 360 video trilogy by Craig Quintero (see my interview about All That Remains from Venice 2022). Quintero is the artistic director of Riverbed Theatre, a Taipei-based performance group that has been doing 1...
Reimagined Vol II: Mahal is the second edition of the Reimagined VR series that premiered at Tribeca Immersive 2023 (see my interview about Volume I from Venice 2022). It’s a Quill animation piece that has lots of stylized cinematography, deliberate...
This year, the seven games that were a part of the Tribeca Games selections were co-located with the 13 Tribeca Immersive experiences at Spring Studios. I had a chance to unpack each of the games with Casey Baltes who curated the selection and...
The Expanse: A Telltale Series is a 5-part, 2D narrative game series that’s a prequel to the Amazon TV and book series. I had a chance to play through the first 90-minute episode at Tribeca Games, and then unpack it with game director Stephan Frost...
Emojiii is an immersive social experience for 20 – 200 people by the Smartphone Orchestra where people use their phone web browsers to be guided through a number of interactive games and quizzes exploring how we make meaning and communicate with...
The Pirate Queen: A Forgotten Legend is a narrative VR game with lots of exquisite environmental storytelling with embodied puzzles and escape room mechanics. You play as a 19th-century Chinese woman named Cheng Shih as she becomes one of the most...
#1244: “Maya: The Birth” Animation Uses Mythic Symbols & Magical Realism to Explore Menstrual Taboos
Maya: The Birth (Chapter 1) is an animated Quill piece that explores menstrual taboos by juxtaposing lots of mythic and archetypal symbols with more mundane scenes of shame and exile within the context of family, schools, and the broader culture...
Pixel Ripped 1978 is the third in a trilogy of game-within-a-game series from indie development shop ARVORE based in São Paulo, Brazil. It taps into some deep nostalgia by recreating the environmental and contextual aspects of computing through the...
In Search of Time is a 2D film that premiered at Tribeca Immersive, and it uses a lot of generative AI style transfer techniques on top of footage of Pierre Zandrowicz’s children. Atlas V co-founder Zandrowicz’s co-directed this piece with Matthew...
MONSTRORAMA is a mixed reality narrative game from Atlas V that transforms your living room into a monster museum. There is a lot of environmental storytelling that’s used to modulate your home, and you end up using your hands to draw mixed reality...
Meneath: The Mirrors of Ethics uses the Pepper’s Ghost Technique from theme parks and theatre to represent hidden indigenous ancestors within her animation film. This technique uses two perpendicular monitors with a piece of glass at a 45-degree...
Fortune is a series of 8 Snapchat and Instagram AR filters that explore the topic of money and our relationship to money. Each project is around 90-seconds in length and uses a variety of immersive storytelling techniques from tabletop-scale...
The Fury is a two-channel video installation in combination with a 360 video that “explores sexual exploitation of female political prisoners, referencing the Islamic Republic of Iran’s brutal treatment of political prisoners.” Director Shirin...
Originally launched in 2012, Sketchfab has grown to be the largest social media website for sharing 3D objects and scenes with over 500,000 members and close to 1 million experiences. At SIGGRAPH, Sketchfab launched their VR browser to be able to...
There was a VR Village again this year at the SIGGRAPH conference where a lot of experimental interactive technologies were on display. Virtual Reality was the common thread, but there were other immersive technologies like different prototype...
Back in February, Amazon announced that they had purchased and forked Crytek's Cryengine and made the full source code available in a free AAA game engine offering called Lumberyard. The only catch is that if you want to use any public cloud...
At Google I/O this year, Google announced the Daydream VR platform and mobile headset that will be coming to the latest Android phones later this year. There's a DIY dev kit that you can start using today to start developing Daydream-ready apps, and...
The artist Zenka has been documenting the evolution of virtual reality by making raku sculptures of head-mounted displays. She's also created an interactive timeline of some of the major VR and AR HMDs. Technology has been progressing so quickly...
The Khronos Group announced that the open standard of glTF was gaining momentum by some of the key players within the graphics industry before SIGGRAPH this year. glTF provides a standardized baseline and interchange format to deliver 3D meshes to...
Visionary VR premiered their Mindshow interactive storytelling platform at VRLA, and was quite a unique experience to be able to record an improv acting session within the body of a virtual character and then step outside of myself to then watch my...
Cerevrum Inc is building an ambitious educational platform starting with training people to become better public speakers with Speech Center VR. The basic mechanic is that you stand in a variety of different virtual rooms in front of an animated...
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...
People were waiting in lines for over an hour to see Pearl both at SIGGRAPH and VRLA, which is one of the best narrative VR experiences that I've seen so far. The central character in the story is a car named 'Pearl' who gives selfless service to...
AMD has made a number of different announcements over the past couple of weeks at both SIGGRAPH and VRLA. They announced some new Radeon Pro graphics cards designed for professional visual effects creators, as well an open source VR video stitching...
Digital lightfields are a cutting-edge technology that can render photorealistic VR scenes, and Otoy has been a pioneer of the rendering and compression techniques to deal with the massive amounts of data required to create them. Their OctaneRender...
During the Enlightenment, René Descartes declared that the mind and body were split and that we should think about them as separate dualistic entities. But more and more evidence is pointing to the fact that our bodies are much more involved in...
When the recession hit in 2008, book publisher Charlie Melcher looked to reinvent how Melcher Media told stories using the latest smart phone technologies. They developed an iOS app for Al Gore's Our Choice, and started having a lot of conversations...
Adventure Time creator Pendleton Ward has been fascinated by the idea of virtual reality since he first read Snow Crash as a teenager. He backed the Oculus Kickstarter, and has been exploring many of the early VR prototypes over the last three years...
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...
Catherine Rehwinkel is working on creating a conceptual framework that enables storytellers to storyboard linear stories in VR. She's a filmmaker who recently finished a master's degree computational & systems thinking at NYU. She's been inspired by...
Back in 2014, the CLOUDS interactive documentary premiered at Sundance New Frontier where it debuted a VR interface to navigate over 40 oral history interviews with creative coding pioneers. Movies have typically been pretty linear, but how could a...