The ONX + DocLab MoCap Stage at IDFA DocLab 2022 featured a number of experimental XR performances using a high-end OptiTrack – Motion Capture System within a theatrical stage with a screen that was projecting the virtual representations. Each of...

I was invited to give a keynote at the Capturing Reality in Motion session as a part of the ONX + DocLab MoCap Stage. I gave a 20-minute talk reflecting on how some of the different projects on the film festival circuit have been using motion...

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...

The book Collective Wisdom: Co-creating Media for Equity and Justice by the MIT Co-Creation Studio founder Kat Cizek & MIT Open DocLab founder William Uricchio was the named as the recommended book of 2022 by IDFA. They held a launch party during...

With These Hands is a VR installation that “shares challenging, complex and under discussed stories of sexual assault and recovery. It explores the role of listening in the recovery of both survivors and those responsible for sexual harm.” It was...

Ghana Airways by Hakeem Adam was shown at IDFA DocLab 2022 as an experimental, non-linear audio installation with accompanying visuals, but it is also available online on Bandcamp as a linear, one-hour, 3-part audio series. The piece is Adam’s...

New Update Available – Version 2.1 is a VR installation piece that blends contemporary audio documentary recordings of computer help sessions for the elderly, but then recreates these characters in VR within a speculative future where elders...

Taylor McCue’s He Fucked the Girl Out of Me (play for free on itch.io) won the IDFA DocLab Digital Storytelling Award at DocLab 2022. It is a deeply personal story and powerful exploration of shame and trauma that uses a unique blend of retro 2D...

Polymorf's Symbiosis is a multi-sensory VR experience that uses soft-body haptics, a bespoke, microdose smell dispersal system, and different tastes. The piece debuted at IDFA DocLab 2021 (see my previous interview here), and it has a sold out run...

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...

You Destroy. We Create: The War on Ukraine’s Culture is a 360-video documentary by NowHere Media & Meta’s VR for Good that was released on Meta Quest TV on November 30th. Shot over the course of 2 weeks and a distance of 4000 kilometers by co...

Noah Robinson’s Inner World launches today on the Quest Store after slowly cultivating an engaged peer-to-peer counseling community that is providing affordable mental health interventions across multiple social VR and 2D platforms on Mac, PC & iOS...

The Khronos Group published a blog announcement on November 3rd titled, “Deliver Interactive Experiences with glTF: A Node Graph-Based Approach,” which is adding an interactive extension called KHR_Behaviors to glTF (the *.jpg format for 3D objects)...

The seeds of Golf+ VR started with founder Ryan Engle creating an iOS ARKit app to help read the golf putting green topology to give a suggested path to help improve his puts, but the lack of demand caused a pivot into moving into a professional...

Grant Maxwell’s book Integration and Difference: Constructing a Mythical Dialectic looks at the problem of the opposites through the lens of 13 philosophers who mostly fit within a constructivist stream of pragmatist, speculative, or process thought...

Brad Lynch has described his SadlyItsBradly YouTube channel as a speculation and prediction channel focusing on the next generation VR hardware, and it has been providing some of the most insightful and detailed VR hardware analysis in the XR...

Meta Connect happened this past week on October 11th where Meta announced the Meta Quest Pro, and also released quite a lot of interesting information about their future strategies. I participated in a panel discussion with 3 other immersive...

This is the 26th & last episode of my Venice Immersive 2022 coverage, and I wanted to end with this discussion amongst film and immersive critics about the various challenges for reviewing and critiquing immersive art and entertainment. This is a...

VRChat world builder Fins had 3 experiences in Venice Immersive 2022 with one in competition (Treasure Heist), and two in the Worlds Gallery (Magic Heist and District Roboto). Fins comes from an illustration and concept artist background, and so...

Kindred is a short and sweet experience that explores issues of non-binary, gender-questioning, and LGBTQ+ identities in the context of family. It’s an animated piece that manages to be both general and universal in it’s themes, but you learn at the...

Mike Salmon is the producer of the VRChat Worlds Gallery at Venice Immersive, which means that the scouts out potential worlds, helps track down potential events to feature, and coordinates all of the physical and virtual docents who helping to...

Fight Back is an interactive narrative that is aiming to help teach the broad movements of self-defense to women. There were five different levels showing at Venice Immersive where you learn a new hand motion that’s detected via hand tracking. The...

Paper Rock Scissors is an interactive story that uses hand-tracking to allow the audience member to play the game of Rock Paper Scissors in the context of a story of how a mother and daughters use the game to make a variety of different types of...

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...

Elele is an Venice Immersive experience that was selected as a part of the Biennale College Cinema selection, and it’s a quite compelling embodied experience exploring that transforms your hands via hand tracking into a spatialized living sculptures...

Reimagined Volume I: Nyssa uses Quill to tell the fairy tale story of a young woman on a mission to find her friend, and there’s a lot of stylized camera movements that adds a cinematic quality to a spatial story that’s otherwise pretty theatrically...

Eurydice: Descent into Infinity sets out to combine theatrical staging with opera with walking incredibly long distances in VR to reimagine the myth of Eurydice and Orpheus. The take-away feeling that I had from this experience was a deep and...

All Unsaved Progress Will Be Lost is the type of experience that is better the less you know about it, but I really, really loved this piece as it efficiently packs in a lot of emotional punch in such a short time. The primary mode of storytelling...

Funique VR Supervisor Ming-Yuan CHUAN worked on three projects that all finished at the same time under deadline for the Venice Immersive 2022. Red Tail is an animation piece that uses photogrammetry on built figures, and The Man Who Couldn’t Leave...

Mandala: A Brief Moment in Time is an immersive theater experience for 3-6 people that uses group discussions to tell different stories from Buddhism around the themes of suffering, happiness, hungry ghosts, & living the good life. There's a moral...

Two of my favorite experiences at Venice Immersive this year were from Taiwan, All That Remains and The Man Who Couldn't Leave, which took the top jure prize this year. Red Tail was another animated piece from Taiwan that was selected for...

The Stay Alive, My Son VR experience is an adaptation of Pin Yathay's memoir of his survival of the Cambodian genocide under the Khmer Rouge. Attorney turned immersive storyteller Victoria Bousis translated this book into a spatial journey that...

XRMust is part online magazine covering the immersive storytelling industry through news and interviews, but it’s in process of aggregating thousands of immersive stories into a database that have been showing on the festival circuit (with a...

Mrs. Benz: Voyage of Discover combines escape room puzzle mechanics with environmental storytelling with exquisite attention to detail in order to tell the story of Bertha Benz, the the wife of the founder of Mercedes Benz, as she steals his car to...

Darkening is a personal memoir experience by Ondřej Moravec, who takes the viewer on an interactive journey through a variety of spatial metaphors of his experience of depression. There are a number of interactive opportunities to use your voice to...

All That Remains is a surreal embodied adventure through liminal moments that is open-ended enough to leave a lot of room for the audience to project a wide range of associative meaning, memories, or emotions onto it. It is the closest that I've...

I speak with the four creators of Dazzle: A Re-Assembly of Bodies experience, which includes choreographer and dancer Ruth Gibson and visual artist Bruno Martelli of Gibson/Martelli, as well as Bine Roth & Alexa Pollmann of Peut-Porter. This dance...

The Man Who Couldn’t Leave is a emotionally-evocative 360 video and powerfully-told story about political prisoners during Taiwan’s White Terror trying to communicate with their families. It took home the top prize at Venice Immersive 2022 for it’s...

From the Main Square tells the story of a polarized city by placing you in the middle of a hand-drawn and animated city as it goes through different waves of conflict and evolution. There are many individual characters who you can trace throughout...

Eggscape is a mixed reality gaming prototype from the Argentinean 3Dar VR, film, & animation studio behind Gloomy Eyes and Paper Birds that leverages the black & white, mixed reality passthrough mode of the Meta Quest 2. It's a has a really...

Venice Immersive 2022 featured 30 immersive stories in competition with some of the fiercest competition yet. I’m joined by Pola Weiß to break down, analyze, & critique each one of the 30 experiences in competition starting with the three winners:...

Kevin Mack is a virtual reality artist who creates abstract and surreal art, and his first VRChat world called NAMUANKI has been selected as one of the 30 projects in competition at Venice Immersive. You take a tour through some of his organic...

I get an overview of the Venice Immersive festival that's taking place from September 1st to 10th with co-curators Liz Rosenthal and Michel Reilhac. There are 75 total experiences with 30 experiences in competition, 10 project in Best Of Immersive...

I got a demo of RP1's single shard with 4000 users in mid-July, and then chatted with 3 team members in August to unpack their journey towards creating a scalable network architecture for the Metaverse. Their demo was built on WebXR, but it could be...