Voices of VR Podcast – Designing for Virtual Reality: Recent Episodes
Kent Bye
Process-Relational Foundations of the Elementshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01M5NcOYzx0This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Sister Sylvester about Constantinopoliad on Friday, September 12, 2025 at Venice Immersive in Venice, Italy.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Phoebe Greenberg about Blur on Friday, August 29, 2025 at Venice Immersive in Venice, Italy.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFXTon0-tQ0This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Steen Sverdrup about Dark Rooms on Saturday, August 30, 2025 at Venice Immersive in Venice, Italy.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JV7H0mn_BPUThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Gwenaelle Clauwaert about Less Than 5gr of Saffron on Saturday, August 30, 2025 at Venice Immersive in Venice, Italy.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7VtxTHx_H0This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Victor Maes about A Long Goodbye on Saturday, August 30, 2025 at Venice Immersive in Venice, Italy.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-kttoua1PAThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Singing Chen about The Clouds Are Two Thousand Meters Up on Monday, September 1, 2025 at Venice Immersive in Venice, Italy.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEUki2mN-psThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Mike Salmon about the VRChat Worlds Gallery selection that was a part of the Venice Immersive 2025 on Tuesday, September 2, 2025 at Venice Immersive in Venice, Italy.vent.What is Virtual Art – Volume 1FLASHING WARNINGFlat EarthNeuronPowdergameFzmz Pointzeroよるとうげ -Yorutouge-Ritual （v․1․3)The Reality of HopeMirageNatura’s QueendomUncanny Loungethe colony - flat 804Scale Journeyexhibition ⁄ back seeing東雲風船 - SHINONOME BALLOON -CyberLove ｜ A7 サイバーラブExperienceDracula’s CastleNeoWorldsLight AquariumBreak 15˸ ArcanumThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
on Tuesday, September 2, 2025 at Venice Immersive in Venice, Italy.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NceaoEO4hasThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Pei-ying Lin about Happy Shadow on Sunday, August 31, 2025 at Venice Immersive in Venice, Italy.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-I_cHTsVEcThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Hsin-hsuan Yeh about Sense of Nowhere on Tuesday, September 2, 2025 at Venice Immersive in Venice, Italy.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDajMkKRjXoThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Menghui Huang about The Big Cube on Monday, September 1, 2025 at Venice Immersive in Venice, Italy.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdVmImU9G3AThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Jonathan Astruc about La Magie Opera on Friday, August 29, 2025 at Venice Immersive in Venice, Italy.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_dnnx1ysHgThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
ombre (The Shadow) on Tuesday, September 2, 2025 at Venice Immersive in Venice, Italy.https://vimeo.com/1111269272This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Sarah Silverblatt-Buser about Collective Body on Friday, August 29, 2025 at Venice Immersive in Venice, Italy.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1uOAEL7Do8This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Kris Hofmann about Out of Nowhere on Sunday, August 31, 2025 at Venice Immersive in Venice, Italy.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20WWsJnqlWIThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Daniel Ernst about The Great Orator on Sunday, August 31, 2025 at Venice Immersive in Venice, Italy.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuknO0VzmmEThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Wuer about Mnemosyne on Sunday, August 31, 2025 at Venice Immersive in Venice, Italy.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEAyABepKFMThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Kazuki Yuhara about First Virtual Suit on Sunday, August 31, 2025 at Venice Immersive in Venice, Italy.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUYqDjP1QpUThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Vitalijus Žukas about Creation of the World on Monday, September 1, 2025 at Venice Immersive in Venice, Italy.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Cristina Rambaldi about Alien Perspective on Sunday, August 31, 2025 at Venice Immersive in Venice, Italy.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Chequered Flags on Tuesday, September 2, 2025 at Venice Immersive in Venice, Italy.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJHGVNuf9tgThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Eric Zhao about Mulan2125 on Sunday, August 31, 2025 at Venice Immersive in Venice, Italy.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8z1hFV8PagThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Michael Golembewski about The Time Before on Friday, August 29, 2025 at Venice Immersive in Venice, Italy.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oahwg3hyE0This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Vincenzo Cavallo about Re-Launching-Luigi-Broglio on Monday, September 1, 2025 at Venice Immersive in Venice, Italy.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jo-L88oT7Y0This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Rose Bond about 1968 on Sunday, August 31, 2025 at Venice Immersive in Venice, Italy.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPgr1nul4roThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Massimiliano Borghesi about 1968 on Thursday, August 28, 2025 at Venice Immersive in Venice, Italy.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPgr1nul4roThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Nicolas Bourniquel about The Sad Story of the Little Mouse Who Wanted to Become Somebody on Tuesday, September 2, 2025 at Venice Immersive in Venice, Italy.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2C83cO-zapEThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Aleena Hanif about Mirage on Saturday, August 30, 2025 at Venice Immersive in Venice, Italy.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9unNsHKGEcThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Kenji Ishimaru about If You See a Cat on Tuesday, September 2, 2025 at Venice Immersive in Venice, Italy.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkUwnPSzxHkThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Joren Vandenbroucke about The Great Escape on Monday, September 1, 2025 at Venice Immersive in Venice, Italy.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jH5bGRsqn4kThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Producer Sngmoo Lee about 8pm and the Cat on Saturday, August 30, 2025 at Venice Immersive in Venice, Italy.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQ3HCloXspkThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Maya Shekel about Eddie and I on Monday, September 1, 2025 at Venice Immersive in Venice, Italy.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Cmrp3POKKoThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Vassiliki Khonsari about LILI on Sunday, August 31, 2025 at Venice Immersive in Venice, Italy.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Ives Agemans about Wall Town Wonders on Tuesday, September 2, 2025 at Venice Immersive in Venice, Italy.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mk-ebdJmK0IThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Richard Turco about One True Path, Part 1 on Tuesday, September 2, 2025 at Venice Immersive in Venice, Italy.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2U8p6mEwmIThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Tom Sneed about Ghost Town on Friday, August 29, 2025 at Venice Immersive in Venice, Italy.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
fe=vlThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Metaphor is not just a shiny paint job on the vehicle of cognition. It is the engine of thought. Its coupling of concepts drives the limits of conceivability, shaping what is thought together and what is not thought at all. The metaphorical imagination is our main means of tuning in to the otherwise invisible effects of new media technologies. Part of the discipline philosophy brings is allowing us to notice an analogy as an analogy before advertising crystalizes it into the unnoticed transparency of common sense. A fact is a fact, but it might also be a fossilized metaphor. The governing analogy of our age is that cognition is computation: the brain an information-processing device, perception its input and behavior its output, memory a form of physical storage, learning the adjustment of weights, and intelligence an algorithm for minimizing error or surprisal. On this view, given enough training data and computational power, consciousness itself will eventually be engineered… The metaphor “the mind is a computer,” for example, tacitly proposes that mind is to brain as software is to hardware… Reiterated in textbooks and earnings calls, in grant applications and policy briefs, the partial comparison congeals into an ontology, until we find ourselves insisting not that the mind is like a computer in some respects but that it simply is one — and,...
the ethics of AI on Wednesday, June 17, 2026 at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, California.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
the aspiration for open source alternatives on Thursday, June 18, 2026 at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, California.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
ll be investigating how to cultivate human flourishing through various research and collaborations to explore human potential through the lens of immersive technologies.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Metaverse Standards Forum President Neil Trevett about key open Standards enabling the Open Metaverse Browser Initiative with RP1 on Tuesday, June 16, 2026 at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, California. You can see their AWE talk here, and check out the Open Metaverse Browser wiki for more information.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s Open Metaverse Browser Initiative announcement with the Metaverse Standards Forum on Tuesday, June 16, 2026 at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, California. You can see their AWE talk here, and check out the Open Metaverse Browser wiki for more information.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
The Academy of Immersive Arts and Sciences on Thursday, June 18, 2026 at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, California.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
VR as the Perfect 3DUI for Robotic Teleoperation on Thursday, June 18, 2026 at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, California.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed founders of Stay Warm Studio Carol Silverman and Dario Laverde about an interoperable OpenXR experience titled fun4player that was deployed from a single APK to 3 different VR HMDs (Samsung Galaxy XR, Oculus Quest 3, and Pico 4). We chatted on Wednesday, June 17, 2026 at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, California.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Victor Agulhon about the growing interest in immersive storytelling through his Targo Stories on Thursday, June 18, 2026 at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, California. Targo won an Auggie this year as well as an Apple Design Award both for D-Day: The Camera Soldier (see episode #1565 for more).This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s School of Cinematic Arts on Thursday, June 18, 2026 at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, California. Fairchild was at AWE showing off some student projects of Immersive Video, and I really quite enjoyed the hyperstylized, fever dream of Elevator by LILLETH who is coming from an immersive theatre background. Ori Inbar had mentioned how immersive video was one of the sectors that was growing within his opening keynote. The Apple Vision Pro has helped to revitalize interest in the more cinematic 180-degree forms, but also for XR as a screen replacement and more immersive way to experience cinematic content.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s Immersive Archive Initiative on Thursday, June 18, 2026 at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, California. Also be sure to check out my interview with Avinash Changa on the The Institute of Immersive Preservation, which is addressing other aspects of the required operating system infrastructure to emulate drivers over the past decade of immersive works.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s AWE talk on the Augmented Imagination, which provides a lot more visuals for many of the same topics that we cover in this conversation.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s worldwide expansion of their Location-Based Entertainment Immersive Expeditions on Wednesday, June 17, 2026 at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, California. You can check out my previous interviews with Excurio in episode numbers #1430, #1588, and #1651. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
AI on Wednesday, June 17, 2026 at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, California. You can check out the The Temple of Dendur and Oceanic Art in Virtual Reality within the Atopia VR application.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Education Lab. We chatted on Wednesday, June 17, 2026 at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, California.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Devon Marble about ArborXR on Immersive Training Trends on Tuesday, June 16, 2026 at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, California.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Patrick Ascolese about Trip the Light and other Dark Arts Software projects on Tuesday, June 23, 2026.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s Nick Ladd, Nicholas Saunders, and Peter Ariet about the app Spatial Mailbox on Thursday, June 18, 2026 at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, California.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
TigerVision Immersive Displays on Wednesday, June 17, 2026 at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, California.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Ines Said about Tanit XR on Wednesday, June 17, 2026 at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, California.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
software lead Parth Arora as well as founder Thomas Suarez about their Linux-based Raven Prism display glasses on Wednesday, June 17, 2026 at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, California.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s announcement from AWE.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Ralph Jodice about XREAL AURA spatial computing glasses on Wednesday, June 17, 2026 at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, California.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Russell Patton about Snap Specs on Tuesday, June 16, 2026 at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, California.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s co-founder and executive director Chip Giller as well their chief of programs and strategy Amy Seidenwurm. I got some updates on where some of their initial $6.5 million of funding has gone so far in order to support the broader XR industry around immersive storytelling in what has been a lot of foundational field building. Most of this money has been done through private invitations, and this open call is the first time that Agog has opened up funding to the wider XR industry.We dig into more details about this Climate Futures + Immersive Media open call, and be sure to check out my previous three conversations for more context: Episode #1720 on the Immersive Impact Review hybrid journalistic / academic magazine launched at SXSW, Episode #1721 on the Impulse Impact Study that came out last week, and #1722 is the keynote on Patterns of Meaning, Transformation, and Impact that I gave at the Meaningful XR Conference over the weekend that explores my phenomenological framework for understanding the unique affordances of experiential design and immersive storytelling as well as some theories of change for XR. Giller said that each proposal will need to have their own theory of change with plans for how to engage existing communities and be able to track the success or failure of your work.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Friction.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-XNH4upTVwThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
that was also written by Sierra (it is in the process of being made available). The study tracked the behavioral shifts of over 100 people across three different cohorts who watched the Impulse: Playing with Reality immersive documentary experience that was first launched in 2024. You can check out my previous interviews covering this experience in episodes #1378 and #1421. But I had a chance to speak with co-director May Abdalla about some of her highlights of this study, as well as some deeper reflections as an artist what it means to have pieces of art quantified and evaluated with such rigor. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJIdBEKnniAThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I spoke to managing editor Michael Epstein at SXSW four days after their launch to get a bit more context on their founding with support from Agog, and we unpack some of the articles from the first issue.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s time working for Rec Room. Rec Room is officially are closing everything down today at noon PDT, and you can check out their final AMA that was posted yesterday. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s a list of the chapters of the book, which we also do a brief recap and overview throughout the course of this interview.Why Should We Care about Ethics?The Story of Human–Computer InteractionWhat Connects Us AllUniversal Design for Spatial ComputingMerging Human Creativity with TechnologyThe BodyAffordances of Immersive Technology and the Future of ComputingSpatial Computing and the BrainWhere Do We Go From Here?There are also a lot of questions and activities at the end of each chapter, which makes this Human Spatial Computing book a compelling textbook option for folks teaching XR design.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s happening with their hybrid immersive documentary archive and nascent social VR platform.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
D Summit, but had some travel delays. Hopefully this conversation helps to explain the many ways that the Lincoln Center for Performing Arts is totally in alignment with some of the broader themes of providing opportunities to de-isolate and revitalize civic society that is covered extensively in this report. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
to be much broader than any single technology, and why they think immersive will be the next big wave of innovation that can help promote public interest values.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s program runs from 11a to 6p CDT from Sunday, March 15-17, 2026.XR Experience CompetitionEscape The Internet (Part 1) (50 min)Inter(mediate) Spaces (45 min)Winterover (45 min)Fabula Rasa: Dead Man Talking (30 min)Frustrain: Trainman (30 min)The Forgotten War (30 min)Watsonville (30 min)Fillos do Vento: A Rapa (28 min)Crafting Crimes: The Mona Lisa Heist (20 min)Love Bird (20 min)The Baby Factory is Closed (20 min)Lionia Is Leaving (18 min)Body Proxy (15 min)Cycle (15 min)The Great Dictator: A participatory AI installation about power, rhetoric, and memory (15 min)XR Experience SpotlightThe Clouds Are Two Thousand Meters Up (62 min)The Great Orator (50 min)Lesbian Simulator (40 min)A Long Goodbye (35 min)Dark Rooms (35 min)Lacuna (34 min)The Dollhouse (24 min)Reality Looks Back (21 min)Insider Outsider (12 min)loss·y (10 min)Lost Love Hotline (10 min)Out of Nowhere (10 min)Spectacular: The Art of Jonathan Yeo in Augmented Reality (10 min)Ascended Intelligence (9 min)MIT Open Documentary Lab’s AR and Public Space Artist CollectiveLayers of Place: Austin [90 min total]ORYZA: Healing Ground (15 min)The Founders Pillars (15 min)Open Access Memorial (15 min)Paper Boat (15 min)Humble Monuments (15 min)Moving Memory (15 min)This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
t like. The Polys 6th Annual Immersive Awards takes place next weekend on Sunday, March 22, 2026 at SVA Theatre in New York City.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s metaphoric sign down signaling that they are no longer willing to live within a lie. Canada is untethering itself from their relationship to the United States as the US takes an authoritarian turn into dem
d point to Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna’s The AI Con book, Karen Hao’s Empire of AI, Shoshana Zuboff’s Age of Surveillance Capitalism,...
Consciousness with Matt Segall#1708: How Process Philosophy Centers Experience. A Prismatic Tour of “Whitehead’s Universe” by Andrew M. DavisThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
is a Revelatory Embodied Poem by Karim Ben KhelifaThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Hail Khalaf about Under the Same Sky on Saturday, November 15, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Alexander Devriendt about Handle with Care on Wednesday, December 3, 2025.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Iris van der Meule about Lesbian Simulator on Tuesday, November 18, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Omid Zarei about Reality Looks Back on Tuesday, November 18, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Maisha Wester about Coded Black on Monday, November 17, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Celine Daemen about Nothing to See Here on Monday, November 17, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s Co-Creating XR Distribution Field Initiative on Wednesday, November 19, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Avinash Changa about The Institute of Immersive Perservation on Tuesday, November 18, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Amy Rose about first year of the Undershed at the Watershed on Saturday, November 15, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Martijn de Waal about revitalizing civic engagement through immersive art on Sunday, November 16, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Sergey Prokofyev about Eternal Habitat on Monday, November 17, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Domenico Singha Pedroli about Another Place on Saturday, November 15, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Monique Grimord about Unimaginable Red on Wednesday, November 19, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Matthew Wright from 4PI Productions and CULTVR Lab about The Rift on Monday, November 17, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Maarten Isaak de Heer about We Are Dead Animals on Saturday, November 15, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Roel Wouters about Deep Soup on Tuesday, November 18, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands. You can also check out their Designing Friction Manifesto.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Victorine van Alphen about The Oracle: Ritual for the Future on Wednesday, November 19, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Victorine Van Alphen about IVF-X on Saturday, April 8, 2023 at New Images in Paris, France.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Sjef van Beers about Gamer Keyboard Wall Piece #2 on Saturday, November 15, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Matt Romein about MILKMAN ZERO: The First Delivery on Monday, November 17, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Jeroen van Loon about Life Needs Internet 2010–2025 on Wednesday, November 19, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Albert Johnson about A Ü T O / M Ö T O R on Sunday, November 16, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Nathalie Lawhead about individualism in the dead-internet age: an anti-big tech asset flip shovelware r̶a̶n̶t̶ manifesto on Monday, November 17, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
is a Revelatory Embodied Poem by Karim Ben KhelifaThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
is a Revelatory Embodied Poem by Karim Ben KhelifaThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
m curious to hear a little bit more about your 3D art technical pipeline, and process of iterating both inside and outside of VR. Do you prototype within VR art programs like Gravity Sketch or Tilt Brush / Open Brush? Or do you go straight to Blender or Maya,...
s book, then be sure to tune into my conversation with him or check out the transcript down below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s Jay Rinsky conducted ahead of the world premiere. And I also share some impressions of the two enhanced cinema productions of The Black Phone and M3GAN within Blumhouse Enhanced Cinema Quest App. These films have some similarities to what The Matrix at Cosm is doing, but at a much smaller scale and not nearly as effective as the expanded immersive worldbuilding in one of the greatest science fiction films of all time. The Matrix at Cosm is setting a quality high bar for this type of format that is going to be difficult to match. You can see more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
safety.Snap doesn’t have their own preferred LLM or AI service, and so the Spectacles and Specs may be one of the only AR devices that allow developers to more freely explore all of the various AI options that are out there. But at the same time, the developers of these apps may also be on the hook to foot the bills for whatever AI-driven services they create. The business models for all of these AI-driven AR experiences have yet to be fully fleshed out, and the fly-wheel of innovation is at the point of pure experimentation to see what types of compelling AI-driven experiences may be enabled by the convenience of a face computer.An oft-repeated adage in a number of my conversations is that AR will likely serve as the experiential UI and frontend to an AI backend. Therefore, Snap is very much interested in empowering developers to experiment with these new AI capabilities. The prompt for the Spectacles Lensathon participants was to leverage these new Snap Cloud features from Supabase, including being able to call edge functions to various AI services, implementing database-driven apps, or to have some sort of live multi-player and social interaction facilitated by the Spectacles.Serving as a preliminary judge for the Lensathon allowed me to have a chance to experience what the ten Spectacles track teams were able to pull off in a quick 25-hour hackathon. I share more about some of the trends that emerged in the introduction to my interview with the Lensathon winner, but also within my interviews with the 2nd place and 3rd place teams. Yes, technically many of these AR apps could also be phone-based apps, but the convenience of hands-free, gesture-based triggers with a head-mounted camera on your face may lower the friction enough to make new AR applications much more viable than a phone-based equivalent.Snap as a Dark Horse in the AR Glasses RaceOverall, I see Snap as a bit of a dark horse in the race towards fully functional AR glasses, and the big differentiating factor may be what types of experiences developers will be able to make for the Snap Specs launching sometime next year (likely sometime after Labor Day in either Q3 or Q4).This dark horse status is mainly because Snap is going up against some of the biggest companies in the world. The 14th-Anniversary of Snap on September 8, 2025 was marked by an email that Evan Spiegel sent out to all of his employees. In the letter, Spiegel says, “The cutoff for inclusion in the Fortune 500 was $7.4 billion in revenue in 2025, and with analyst estimates suggesting Snap could reach nearly $6 billion in revenue in 2025, we’re not far from achieving Fortune 500 status.” Snap is competing in the XR space with other companies that are near the top of the Fortune 500 list by revenue with Apple at #4, Alphabet (Google) at #7, and Meta at #22. By profit, then Alphabet is #1, Apple is #2, and Meta is #6.It takes a lot of money to do a proper consumer launch of XR hardware, and reporter Alex Heath published a report last week on his new “Access” Substack that Snap CEO Even Spiegel will be in Saudi Arabia this week speaking at their Future Investment Initiative with the intent to raise a $1 billion round money for the Specs release. Heath reports that “sources say Snap plans to turn its Specs hardware unit into an independent subsidiary that can continue raising capital from investors. The idea under discussion is to structure it similarly to Waymo, which operates independently within Alphabet, rather than fully spin off Specs into a new company outside of Snap.” Heath’s report answers some of my own logistical questions, and could provide some additional puzzle pieces for how Snap would continue to punch above its weight on releasing consumer AR glasses in competition with some of the largest companies in the world.Snap Betting on Developer Relations as Differentiating FactorGiven that Snap is an underdog in the race towards AR glasses, it means that they have had to differentiate themselves in some fashion, and Snap is betting on their development relations strategy as the key differentiating factor. Meta has de-emphasized collaborating with third party developers for their AI Glasses and Meta Ray-Ban Display Glasses as their smart glasses have been on the market for a couple of years before Meta finally recently announced a pathway for developers to have their own apps interface with them.In contrast, Snap has been taking a much more developer-centric approach for their AR glasses strategy with the Spectacles dev kit being made available on a subscription-basis. Despite the odds, the Spectacles dev kit feels like it is on par with what Micro
s Developer Conference of Lensfest, I did an interview with 1st place team in the Snap Spectacles Lensathon named Decisionator including Candice Branchereau, Marcin Polakowski, Volodymyr Kurbatov, and Inna Horobchuk. I also summarize the other 10 Spectacles Lensathon projects after serving as a preliminary judge for the competition. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s Developer Conference of Lensfest, I did an interview with 2nd place team in the Snap Spectacles Lensathon named CartdB including Guillaume Dagens, Nigel Hartman, and Uttam Grandhi (the other team member Nicholas Ross had some prior commitments). See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s Developer Conference of Lensfest, I did an interview with 3rd place team in the Snap Spectacles Lensathon named Fireside Tales including Stijn Spanhove, Pavlo Tkachenko, and Yegor Ryabtsov. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s Developer Conference of Lensfest. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s Developer Conference of Lensfest about their latest Project Jade Spectacles demo. See more context in the rough transcript below.https://twitter.com/tweetsfromasim/status/1981830288771887606This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
d like to check out the two interviews with Matt Hargett that I reference in the intro, then be sure to check out epsiode #1311 and episode #1660.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s Developer Conference of Lensfest. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s Developer Conference of Lensfest. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s a really great set of questions about their consumer release of Specs AR glasses next year, some of their thinking about the role of AI at Snap, and reflections of their 10 years of working with AR lenses going back to the vomiting rainbows facial filter released in 2015.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s AR Developer Relations Plan for 2026 Specs Consumer Launch with Joe DarkoThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
D Gameplay#1666: VRChat CEO Graham Gaylor on Exploring Various UGC Monetization StrategiesThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Dragons: Battlemarked, which enables some pretty interested co-located mixed reality social features, but also enables individual players to have their own mixed reality or VR POV. You can cee more context in the rough transcript below. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
ll be diving into Battlemarked within the next conversation You can also see more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I did an interview with Michael Markman at Meta Connect 2025 talking about all of the latest updates to the VR design and prototyping tool of ShapesXR, and then we start to dive into some of his hot takes after getting a chance to try out the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses and associated Neural Band. He sees that the neural band is essentially transforming your hand into a mouse that is providing a simplified navigation system (probably closer to a D-pad on a TV remote), but the index-finger-to-thumb serves as a functional left click and middle-finger-to-thumb serves as a functional right click, which has been enough to build the foundation of most modern HCI for computer software for the last 57 years since The Mother of All Demos debuted the mouse in 1968. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
re the most excited about coming out of Meta Connect 2025. JoyReign also talks about developing the VR game Crystal Frenzy within Horizon Worlds, and which parts of GenAI she found to be the most helpful. They also won the Amplifier Award at the Meta Horizon Creator Summit that was being held ahead of Connect. We also chat a bit about how Meta was also promoting different mobile phone games on their Horizon platform including Super Strike, Battle Kin, Shovel Up, Smash Golf early access, and Bumble Dudes. You can also see more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I did an interview with Jasmine Uniza at Meta Connect 2025 where we talk about her journey from being a robotics engineer for the Mars Rover to doing a career pivot into the VR games industry with the founding of Impact Reality marketing firm for games as well as Flat2VR Studios that is porting popular 2D games into VR. We also reflect upon the current state of VR gaming with Meta and their store curation strategies and emphasis on free-to-play games, while focusing on premium VR games. You can see more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s been working on including React Native for VisionOS, as well as working with NativeScript for VisionOS, and also working to bringing Node API support for React Native. Also be sure to check out his git visualizer Factotum, which is an app that is using some of these alternative production pipelines.Hargett also mentions a couple of recent React Universe Conf talks covering this work including Hermes + Node API: A Match Made in Heaven and Bringing Node-API to React Native. You can also see more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s been providing to them from the perspective of an independent, third-party game developer. You can see more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
from Sundance New Frontier 2019, our interview about Love Seat from Venice Immersive 2020, and then our interview about Finding Pandora X from Venice Immersive 2020. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
to get even more details on it. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
ll follow up with an interview about her immersive theatre piece that won a prize at Venice Immersive 2019 called Finding Pandora X. And the final I did with her at Meta Connect 2025 doing a bit of a career retrospective, including some work she did in Horizon Worlds and her latest piece focusing on accessibility and dance performance. Also be sure to check out the second recorded interview that I did in 2019 about her hybrid theater and VR piece Love Seat, which showed at Venice 2019. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I did an interview with prolific Horizon world builder Paige Dansinger at Meta Connect about the latest Meta Horizon news including the new Meta Horizon Studio as well as Meta Horizon Engine. She also was wearing some custom, hand-made pants that were inspired by virtual pants that she designed for her MetaversePaige avatar. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
t been any announcement about if or when third-party developers will get access to develop apps for it as Meta seems content to focus on their own first-party apps at the launch of the device today. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s AI products. You can see more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
D Gameplay#1666: VRChat CEO Graham Gaylor on Exploring Various UGC Monetization StrategiesThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
ll be diving more into more 30+ hours of coverage from Venice Immersive within the next couple of weeks, likely after I return from Meta Connect.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s program.Already Released - BEST OF EXPERIENCESThe Midnight WalkGhost TownOne True Path, Part 1Wall Town WondersD-Day: The Camera Soldier - Apple Vision ProSubmerged - Apple Vision ProAdventure: Ice Dive - Apple Vision ProAlready Released - BEST OF WORLDS - VRChat links includedvent. by Premium²What is Virtual Art – Volume 1 by JessienFLASHING WARNING by xlxxlFlat Earth by Niko LangNeuron by Juice…Powdergame by Pema Malling[NOT REPLAYABLE YET] FZMZ Pointzero by ReeeznD [VR_SMEJ]よるとうげ -Yorutouge- by mikkabouzu / Kikuo [VR_SMEJ]Ritual （v․1․3) by DrMorroThe Reality of Hope by Joe Hunting[NOT PUBLISHED YET] -- Mirage by TOKYO WAIYOZNatura’s Queendom by Anders Fray, Starheart[NOT PUBLISHED YET] -- Uncanny Lounge by Christopher Lane Davis, Rick Treweekthe colony - flat 804 by Glory NyaScale Journey by S_ASAGIRIexhibition ⁄ back seeing by haruki_haru東雲風船 - SHINONOME BALLOON - by sakanaplusCyberLove ｜ A7 サイバーラブ by Artsy GlitchExperience by NOOTAUDracula’s Castle by Tanner WhiteNeoWorlds by Widget365Light Aquarium by phi16Break 15˸ Arcanum by PK / reklumaThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Arbi Close Out Raindance with a Breathtaking Music and VJ Show at the Moon PoolThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s Queendom as a part of my Raindance Immersive 2025 coverage. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I spoke with Jessien about his Virtual Museum of Virtual Art as well as his latest What is Virtual Art? VRChat World exhibition as a part of my Raindance Immersive 2025 coverage. We also talk about his previous Raindance award-winning world Thickness Of Calligraphy. See more context in the rough transcript below.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xOZhfAMORwThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Kylie Supski about The Continuous Present as a part of my Raindance Immersive 2025 coverage. See more context in the rough transcript below.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DL_2L0jzUhAThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Rixx about Hommage as a part of my Raindance Immersive 2025 coverage. See more context in the rough transcript below.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqOjHRWRAfMThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I spoke with Juliana Loh about creating immersive art in VR and AR as a part of my Raindance Immersive 2025 coverage. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Eliza Zhang about their short film shot in VRChat called Our Precious Autumn as a part of my Raindance Immersive 2025 coverage. See more context in the rough transcript below.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxrbWg5vYdkThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Starheart about Cathedral of Witches as a part of my Raindance Immersive 2025 coverage. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Kiashi_GL about Silhouette of Memories as a part of my Raindance Immersive 2025 coverage. See more context in the rough transcript below.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsgZm4u8UsUThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I spoke with VoxelKei and R_Tone with RIKU_VR as the Japanese translator about Tonevok: Sonic Sky Journey as a part of my Raindance Immersive 2025 coverage. See more context in the rough transcript below.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aS7eZWK6oIThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
d like to check out one of their shows. See more context in the rough transcript below.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IjGhiINz5AThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s VR photography called Kaerun, event photographer on #vrchat. See more context in the rough transcript below.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hR--zc4MOVkThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I spoke with Jiyue Human about VRChat Doc The Architect Across Realities as a part of my Raindance Immersive 2025 coverage. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Safety processes. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s Avatar Marketplace. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s new trust and safety lead in a subsequent interview to go into more details for how VRChat is responding to these potential gaps. You can see more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I spoke with Navid Khonsari about Fire Escape at the Vancouver International Film Festival 2018. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Brooks Brown about Hero at Sundance 2018. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I spoke with Navid Khonsari about the GDC Narrative Innovations Showcase Highlights at GDC 2017. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
AI Agents (2025)#1630: Keiichi Matsuda on Metaphors for AI Agents in XR User Experience: From Omniscient Gods to Animistic Familiars (2025)This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s Parabrains system that Niantic Spatial was using in their VPS guided tour demo they were showing at AWE. And you can also see more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s my interview with Caitlin Krause, Founder of Mindwise, that was conducted on Wednesday, June 11, 2025 at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, CA. This is part 2 of 2 of my conversations with Krause, you can see part 1 from 2019 here. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Curator of Experiences, that was conducted on Wednesday, September 25, 2019 at Oculus Connect in San Jose, CA. This is part 1 of 2 of my conversations with Krause, you can see part 2 from 2025 here. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
My interview with Trevett was conducted on Tuesday, June 10, 2025 at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, CA. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Investor, that was conducted on Wednesday, June 11, 2025 at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, CA. This is part 2 of 2 of my conversations with Emrich, you can see part 1 from 2018 here. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s my interview with Tom Emrich from June 17, 2018 when he was still a partner of Super Ventures, co-producer of Augmented World Expo. This is part 1 of 2 of my conversations with Emrich, you can see part 2 from 2025 here. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Spatial Computing, that was conducted on Wednesday, June 11, 2025 at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, CA. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s announcements from AWE 2023, including the dual-render fusion features for tethering the touch-screen interfaces to AR experiences that could be seen on different head-mounted glasses form factors. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s my interview with Karl Guttag of the KGOnTech Blog as well as independent analyst for consumer XR display devices and systems that was conducted on Thursday, June 1, 2023 at Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara, CA. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s my interview with Scott Myers, Vice President of Hardware Engineering at Snap and Snapchat Spectacles, that was conducted on Tuesday, June 10, 2025 at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, CA. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s my interview with Ray Kallmeyer, Founder and CEO of Enklu and their 22 Verse Immersive AR LBE locations, that was conducted on Tuesday, June 10, 2025 at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, CA. See more context in the rough transcript below.
s my interview with Ryan Cole, Vice President of Video Technology at Cosm, that was conducted on Wednesday, June 11, 2025 at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, CA. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Aidan Wolf, that was conducted on Wednesday, June 11, 2025 at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, CA. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Eric Gradman, that was conducted on Thursday, October 11, 2018 at site visit to Two Bit Circus in Los Angeles, CA just over a month from their grand opening September 5th, 2018. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
WebXR, and this interview was conducted on Wednesday, June 11, 2025 at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, CA. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Ayushman Johri (3D Artist at Paradowski) that was conducted via Zoom on Tuesday, March 12, 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s my interview with Matteo311, VR Content Creator, that was conducted on Tuesday, June 10, 2025 at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, CA. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Thursday, June 12, 2025 at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, CA. See more context in the rough transcript below. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
XR from AWE 2025 Panelhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91E_ffrW9u4This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s Head of Trend and Innovation Scouting, that was conducted on Tuesday, June 10, 2025 at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, CA. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s my interview with Joshua Rubin, Interactive Emmy-Winning Narrative Director, Immersive Storyteller, and Narrative Futurist, that was conducted on Tuesday, June 10, 2025 at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, CA. We talked about his talk at SXSW 2025 titled Building the Personalized, Responsive XR of the Future: Lessons we can learn from immersive theater and gaming See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s my interview with Brenda Laurel, Board of Virtual World Society, VR Artist, Theorist, Writer, Speaker, Designer, author of five books including Computers as Theatre, that was conducted on Wednesday, May 29, 2019 at Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara, CA. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s my interview with Deirdre V. Lyons, Founder of Ferryman Collective and winner of the 2023 Women in XR Innovation Award, that was conducted on Thursday, June 1, 2023 at Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara, CA. See my conversation with the XR Women Real World Impact Award recipient Paige Dansinger in episode #1308 and as well as XR Women The Trailblazer Award winner Athena Demos in episode #1192. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Sciences, that was conducted on Wednesday, June 11, 2025 at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, CA. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s my interview with Inga Petryaevskaya, Founder, CEO, ShapesXR, that was conducted on Wednesday, November 10, 2021 at Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara, CA. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s my interview with Amy LaMeyer, Managing Partner of The WXR Fund and Angel Investor in VR, AR, AI space, that was conducted on Thursday, May 30, 2019 at Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara, CA. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s my interview with Tony Bevilacqua, Founder and CEO of Cognitive3D, that was conducted on Friday, June 2, 2023 at Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara, CA. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s my interview with Jason Marsh, Founder and CEO of Flow Immersive, that was conducted on Thursday, June 12, 2025 at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, CA. This is part 3 of 3 of my conversations with Marsh, you can see part 1 from 2018 here and part 2 from 2019 here. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s my interview with Jason Marsh, CEO and Founder of Flow Immersive, that was conducted on Wednesday, October 16, 2019 at Virtual Reality Strategy Conference in San Francisco, CA. This is part 2 of 3 of my conversations with Marsh, you can see part 1 from 2018 here and part 3 from 2025 here. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s my interview with Jason Marsh, CEO and Founder of Flow Immersive, that was conducted on Tuesday, October 16, 2018 at Virtual Reality Strategy Conference in San Francisco, CA. This is part 1 of 3 of my conversations with Marsh, you can see part 2 from 2019 here and part 3 from 2025 here. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s my interview with Suzanne Borders, CEO and Co-Founder of BadVR, that was conducted on Thursday, November 11, 2021 at Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara, CA. This is part 2 of my conversation with Borders, see part 1 here. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s LEAPCON in Los Angeles, CA. This is part 1 of my conversation with Borders, see part 2 here. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s my interview with Vasilisa Glauser, educator specializing in twice exceptionality, that was conducted on Wednesday, June 11, 2025 at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, CA. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Trippy VR Concert on EngageXR that was released a few days before this follow-up conversation with Whelan. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s my interview with Rylan Pozniak-Daniels, XR Developer and Futurist, that was conducted on Tuesday, June 10, 2025 at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, CA. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s my interview with Rylan Pozniak Daniels, Futurist and AR/VR Developer, that was conducted on Wednesday, May 29, 2019 at Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara, CA. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s my interview with Michael Peeler, Business Development Manager at Mass Virtual, that was conducted on Thursday, June 12, 2025 at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, CA. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s my interview with Sonia Haskins, Head of Programming at Augmented World Expo, that was conducted on Wednesday, June 11, 2025 at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, CA. This is part 2 of 2 of my conversations with Haskins, you can see part 1 from 2023 here. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
s my interview with Sonya Haskins, Head of Programming at Augmented World Expo, that was conducted on Friday, June 2, 2023 at Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara, CA. This is part 1 of 2 of my conversations with Haskins, you can see part 2 from 2025 here. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
AI Agents (2025)#1630: Keiichi Matsuda on Metaphors for AI Agents in XR User Experience: From Omniscient Gods to Animistic Familiars (2025)This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I speak with visual artist Elizabeth Honer who uses Open Brush to pain her dreams as well as with Martha Crawford who leads dream workshops. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Jules Rimbaud, business development manager for the US territory, about expanding Excurio to 22 locations worldwide, and now with a focus of expanding into North America. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Erik Horn about Space-Time Adventure Tour in Central Park during Tribeca Immersive 2025. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I speak with the curators of the 28 immersive documentary projects being featured at the 18th edition of IDFA DocLab including Caspar Sonnen, Nina van Doren, and Toby Coffey. The theme of this year's program is "This is Not a Simulation," and there were many immersive projects that featured AI this year. We talked about each of the experiences in this year's program, except for the three projects I've previously covered at Venice Immersive 2024 (All I Know About Teacher Li, Fragile Home, & Impulse: Play with Reality) . We also briefly discussed the IDFA campaign around being complicit and challenging neutrality. For more information on each of the pieces in this year's program,, then be sure to check out the time stamps below to hear what the curators have to say.12:15You Can Sing Me on My Way15:01AI & ME17:59About a Hero22:54Oryza: Healing Ground26:26Future Botanica27:42Ancestors31:00Drift 32:58Burn from Absence36:13Sincerely, Victor Pike00:00X00:00X00:00X00:00X00:00X00:00X00:00X00:00X00:00X00:00X00:00X00:00X00:00X00:00X00:00X00:00X00:00X00:00X00:00X00:00X00:00X00:00X00:00XThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Film Gate Interactive celebrated their 10-year anniversary in 2023, and I had a chance to get a retrospective recap from founder and curator Diliana Alexander as well as with board members Savannah Niles and James Powderly. Their 11th edition of Film Gate Interactive is happening December 4-8th, 2024 and so be sure to check out their sponsorship deck for more context on the many different partnerships and collaborations that Alexander has set up in this unique regional immersive festival. We talk about the curation process, the unique character of Miami and the various immersive excursions to explore the city, and a retrospective look at the founding and evolution of this cultivation of the immersive community within the unique cauldron and culture of Miami. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Lena Herzog's Any War Any Enemy is a hauntingly beautiful spatial poem that takes us on a liminal journey about nuclear annihilation. Rather than disassociating and letting power structures sleepwalk us all into catastrophe, she explores a new form of transcendental anti-war protest by leaning into an underlying existential angst that doesn't turn away from the human costs. It's a cautionary tale that serves as a wake-up call about the insanity of mutually-assured destruction, and an opportunity to use VR to ground apocalyptic abstractions into an embodied experience that allows us to bear witness to possible futures that should be avoided at all costs.I previously spoke with Herzog about her first VR piece Last Whispers in 2019 about the extinction of languages. This piece is about the potential extinction of all of humanity via nuclear annihilation, and she's working in the third piece in her trilogy that is aiming to end on a more positive and optimistic note. I had a chance to catch up with Herzog virtually to unpack more about her process of creating this piece, and how she's exploring the more poetic and metaphoric dream logic within her immersive, anti-war poem.
I interviewed Kerestell Smith, Chief Creative Officer at Another Axiom and original solo creator of Gorilla Tag, at Meta Connect 2024. Another Axiom announced in June that Gorilla Tag has surpassed $100 million in lifetime revenue. We talk about the journey into creating Gorilla Tag, the underlying design philosophy of emphasizing embodied gameplay and proprioceptive consistency, as well as what's coming next in their follow-on title of Orion Drift. See more context in the rough transcript below.Since this is the last episode in my series from Meta Connect 2024, then here's a list of all 20+ interviews and 12+ hours of my coverage from this year:#1468: Kickoff of Meta Connect 2024 Coverage with Orion AR Glasses Hands-on Impressions with Tested's Norm Chan & CNET's Scott Stein#1469: Analyst Anshel Sag on Meta Connect Announcements & Orion Glasses Impressions#1470: Meta's Hyperscape Serves Cloud-Rendered, Photo Gaussian Splat Captures#1471: Tyriel Wood & Zimtok5 on Oculus Quest 3S Tradeoffs with Quest 3#1472: VR Training Trends Using AI with Virti's Courtney Harding#1473: Learn XR's Dilmer Valecillos on Teaching XR Development & Meta Connect Announcement Impressions#1474: Teaching Immersive Storytelling at ASU's Narrative and Emerging Media Program with Nonny de la Peña & Mary Matheson#1475: A-Frame's Diego Marcos on WebXR Momentum and Integrations with Open Source AI#1476: UploadVR Editor Ian Hamilton's Deep Reflections: AR vs VR, Ethical Dilemmas, & Future of Meta's Algorithmic Realities#1477: Flat2VR Studios' Journey of Bringing 2D Games to VR with Eric Masher#1478: Agile Lens 2018: The Intersection of Architecture, Theatre, & Storytelling with Alex Coulombe#1479: Agile Lens 2023: Selling High-End Real Estate with VR, Unreal's Meta Humans. Pixel Streaming, & AI Experiments#1480: Agile Lens 2023: Hands on with Four Seasons VR Demo & A Christmas Carol VR 2023#1481: Agile Lens 2024: Context on Boz's Apology to VR Devs, Orion AR Glasses Impressions, & Unreal Engine Mediation with Apple/Meta#1482: Mixed Reality Gameplay Innovations & Design Insights from "Starship Home" Co-Directors Mark Schramm & Ashley Pinnick#1483: Dimensional Double Shift Combines Multi-Player Co-Op, "Job Simulator" Gameplay, & Hand Tracking#1484: Cas & Chary on Meta Connect Announcements & Using Ray-Ban Meta Smartglasses to Stay Connected#1485: Fitness Flow States with "Starwave" Design Innovation Leads & Finding Love within VR#1486: Going All in with Gaussian Splats: Gracia's Viewer, AI Training, & Photoreal Capture with VR Fund's Tipatat Chennavasin#1487: XR Evangelists JoyReign & JDun on Horizon World Trends & Meta Connect Announcements#1488: Nima Zeighami on Delivering WebXR Content with Infinite Reality's Ethereal Engine Acquisition#1489: Gorilla Tag Design Philosophy & Embodied Gameplay Deep Dive with Kerestell SmithHere's the launch trailer for Gorilla Tag:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivwQ2DUjcHIHere's a developer snapshot preview of their next title of Orion Drift:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xjnw_skc9gThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Nima Zeighami, VP of Product at Infinite Reality, at Meta Connect 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed XR Evangelists JoyReign Creator of Joy In The Morning Show and CEO of Onyx Leaf Media as well as JDun of the Getting Things Dun YouTube channel, Get'Em To The Metaverse Podcast, & Chief Metaverse Officer of Onyx Leaf Media, at Meta Connect 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.Here's the Question HDMI video that JDun mentioned in the podcast:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8QDvoEJLpsThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Tipatat Chennavasin, General Partner and co-founder of Venture Reality Fund, at Meta Connect 2024 about why he has gone all-in with Gaussian Splatting by investing in the Gracia.ai and their viewer that's on the Quest store. We also talk about some of the news from Meta Connect, Quest 3S excitement, the merits of AAA games like Batman Arkham Shadow to bring more people into VR, and other some experiences and demos that caught his attention at Meta Connect 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Job Stauffer and Robin Orr, the two design innovation leads on Starwave, at Meta Connect 2024. They also met and fell in love in VR, and each share their respective journeys into the space through building community around VR fitness experiences. See more context in the rough transcript below.Here's the launch trailer for Starwave:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LtG2qnPeSYThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Casandra Vuong and Chary Keijzer of the Cas and Chary YouTube channel, at Meta Connect 2024 about all of the latest announcements, their journey into their XR coverage, and how they use the Ray-Ban Meta Smartglasses to stay connected to each other. See more context in the rough transcript below.Here's their video about the Quest 3S launch produced while onsite at Meta Connect:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrGZ7ef84twThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Andrew Eiche, CEOwl at Owlchemy Labs, at Meta Connect 2024 about their latest title Dimensional Double Shift. See more context in the rough transcript below.Here's their launch trailer.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Co-Directors of Starship Home Mark Schramm, Director of Engineering at Creature, and Ashley Pinnick, Art Director at Creature, at Meta Connect 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.Here's the Launch Trailer for Starship Home:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6SepPOEwh8This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Alex Coulombe, Studio Lead & CEO of Agile Lens Immersive Design, at Meta Connect 2024 about Meta's Orion AR Glasses first impressions, being a mediator with Apple and Epic Games as well as with Meta and Epic Games, and a bit more context as to why Meta CTO Andrew "Boz" Bosworth gave an apology to developers at the beginning of the developer keynote. See more context in the rough transcript below. Also be sure to read Coulombe's Orion hands-on impressions in his UploadVR article.Here's the Developer Keynote where Boz gave an apology to developers:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztl25aRlnWE This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I'm diving into my backlog to publish three unpublished interviews with Agile Lens with this last conversation from December 2023. I interviewed Alex Coulombe, Lead & CEO of Agile Lens Immersive Design, Kevin Laibson, Experience Director for Agile Lens, and Jackie Roman, Cinematographer at Agile Lens, at FilmGate Interactive 2023 about the Four Seasons Lake Austin VR experience as well as the A Christmas Carol VR experience. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I'm diving into my backlog to publish three unpublished interviews with Alex Coulombe, Creative Director of Agile Lens Immersive Design, with the second interview that happened at Tribeca Immersive 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.Here's a talk that was given later in 2023 about the Four Seasons Lake Austin VR experience given at Unreal Fest 2023.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6la2yieiCG0This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I'm diving into my backlog to publish three unpublished interviews with Alex Coulombe, Creative Director of Agile Lens Immersive Design, starting with at Magic Leap LeapCon 2018. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Eric Masher, Chief Operating Officer for Impact Reality and Flat2VR Studios, at Meta Connect 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.Here's the trailer for the first four releases for Flat2VR Studios:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHJpfDgcWOQThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Ian Hamilton, Editor at UploadVR.com, at Meta Connect 2024. Here's the article about the twin sisters who play Walkabout Mini Golf VR together that Hamilton references. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Diego Marcos, Founder of A-Frame and worked on Firefox and one of the original creators of what would eventually become the the WebXR specification, at Meta Connect 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Nonny de la Peña, Emblematic Group founder & Founding Director of Arizona State University's Narrative and Emerging Media Program as well as Mary Matheson, Professor of Practice at ASU's Narrative and Emerging Media Program, at Meta Connect 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Dilmer Valecillos of the DilmerV YouTube Channel and Founder & Engineer LearnXR.io , at Meta Connect 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Courtney Harding, Founder and CEO of Friends with Holograms education & training in VR as well as Head of Immersive Content at Virti, at Meta Connect 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Tyriel Wood of the Tyriel Wood YouTube channel covering XR tech and Zimtok5, VR Streamer for last ten years, at Meta Connect 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.Here's Wood's video on the Meta Quest 3S:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-CXdU330NoHere's Zimtok5's video on the Meta Quest 3S:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csBnN73V95wThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Marcello Typrin Product Director at Reality Labs, at Meta Connect 2024 about the Hyperscape Demo. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Anshel Sag, Principle Analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy, at Meta Connect 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
This is the kickoff of my Meta Connect 2024 coverage with more than 12 hours of coverage across 20+ interviews on site. In my first episode, I interviewed Scott Stein, Editor at CNET, AR, VR, Wearables, Gaming, & Future of Tech as well as Norm Chan, Executive Editor of the YouTube Channel Tested, at Meta Connect 2024 talking about the AR Orion Glasses demo. See more context in the rough transcript below.Here are the lines to all of my episodes from Meta Connect 2024:#1468: Kickoff of Meta Connect 2024 Coverage with Orion AR Glasses Hands-on Impressions with Tested's Norm Chan & CNET's Scott Stein#1469: Analyst Anshel Sag on Meta Connect Announcements & Orion Glasses Impressions#1470: Meta's Hyperscape Serves Cloud-Rendered, Photo Gaussian Splat Captures#1471: Tyriel Wood & Zimtok5 on Oculus Quest 3S Tradeoffs with Quest 3#1472: VR Training Trends Using AI with Virti's Courtney Harding#1473: Learn XR's Dilmer Valecillos on Teaching XR Development & Meta Connect Announcement Impressions#1474: Teaching Immersive Storytelling at ASU's Narrative and Emerging Media Program with Nonny de la Peña & Mary Matheson#1475: A-Frame's Diego Marcos on WebXR Momentum and Integrations with Open Source AI#1476: UploadVR Editor Ian Hamilton's Deep Reflections: AR vs VR, Ethical Dilemmas, & Future of Meta's Algorithmic Realities#1477: Flat2VR Studios' Journey of Bringing 2D Games to VR with Eric Masher#1478: Agile Lens 2018: The Intersection of Architecture, Theatre, & Storytelling with Alex Coulombe#1479: Agile Lens 2023: Selling High-End Real Estate with VR, Unreal's Meta Humans. Pixel Streaming, & AI Experiments#1480: Agile Lens 2023: Hands on with Four Seasons VR Demo & A Christmas Carol VR 2023#1481: Agile Lens 2024: Context on Boz's Apology to VR Devs, Orion AR Glasses Impressions, & Unreal Engine Mediation with Apple/Meta#1482: Mixed Reality Gameplay Innovations & Design Insights from "Starship Home" Co-Directors Mark Schramm & Ashley Pinnick#1483: Dimensional Double Shift Combines Multi-Player Co-Op, "Job Simulator" Gameplay, & Hand Tracking#1484: Cas & Chary on Meta Connect Announcements & Using Ray-Ban Meta Smartglasses to Stay Connected#1485: Fitness Flow States with "Starwave" Design Innovation Leads & Finding Love within VR#1486: Going All in with Gaussian Splats: Gracia's Viewer, AI Training, & Photoreal Capture with VR Fund's Tipatat Chennavasin#1487: XR Evangelists JoyReign & JDun on Horizon World Trends & Meta Connect Announcements#1488: Nima Zeighami on Delivering WebXR Content with Infinite Reality's Ethereal Engine Acquisition#1489: Gorilla Tag Design Philosophy & Embodied Gameplay Deep Dive with Kerestell SmithHere's Chan's Tested coverage of Orion AR Glasseshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynLm-QvsW0QHere's Stein's CNET coverage of the Orion AR Glasseshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b020SbvnFX0Here's the full video of the Meta Connect 2024 keynote:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7JyydkqDeIThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Sam Jones, Kathryn Hicks, Lauren Cason, Emma Sofija, and Paige Piskin at the Snap Lens Fest about the Snap Spectacles as well as their award-winning Hackathon project called Emergensee. I also share some of my concluding thoughts on the Snap Spectacles based upon my 8 hours of coverage in the past 15 episodes. See more context in the rough transcript below.Here's my 15-episode series on the Snap Spectacles announcement and a deep dive into the Snap AR Ecosystem:#1453: Kickoff of Snap Spectacles Coverage with First Impressions with XR Analyst Anshel Sag#1454: Niantic Launches Virtual Pet AR Game "Peridot Beyond" on Snap's Spectacles#1455: Wabisabi Game Studio Leverages AR Connected Lenses on Snap Spectacles for Outdoor Capture the Flag Game#1456: Turning Your Phone into a Spectacles AR controller with DB Creations' "Tiny Motor Arcade"#1457: Snap's Lens Studio, Spectacles, & "Polygon Studio" Open Source Low-Poly Drawing App#1458: Building a Geo-Located, Dungeon-Raiding, AR Game for Spectacles with Aidan Wolf#1459: Snap Co-Founders Share Vision for AR & Spectacles at Lens Fest Q&A Panel#1460: Snap AR Platform Lead Sophia Dominguez on Spectacles and AR Ecosystem#1461: AR Lens Genres, Spectacles Impressions, & SelfReflect VTubing App Using Snap's Camera Kit with Brielle Garcia#1462: XR Industry Reality Checks with Cix Liv and Turning Your Phone into an AI-Driven Exercise Routine#1463: Arguing for Utility-Driven AR Minimalism with Lucas Rizzotto Reflecting upon the XR Market#1464: Snap's Head of Spectacles Software Engineering Shares Technical Break Down of Design Tradeoffs#1465: Team of Women AR Artists Explore Dreams in Spectacles Hackathon#1466: Freelance XR Dev Veronica Flint Shares Thoughts on Spectacles and Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses#1467: AR Medical Training App Wins Spectacles Hackathon + My Concluding Thoughts on Snap SpectaclesThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Veronica Flint at the Snap Lens Fest about the Snap Spectacles. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Alexis Zerafa, Lafiya Watson Ramirez, Meredith Binnette, Heather Dunaway Smith, and Nella at the Snap Lens Fest about the Snap Spectacles and their hackathon project about dreams. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Snap's Head of Spectacles Software Daniel Wagner at the Snap Lens Fest about the Snap Spectacles. See more context in the rough transcript below.Here's the presentation Wagner made at Lens Fest that I based my interview off of.https://www.youtube.com/live/FNoC73AbkzE?t=2270sThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Lucas Rizzotto at the Snap Lens Fest about the Snap Spectacles as well as his ideas on AR Minimalism. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Cix Liv at the Snap Lens Fest about the Snap Spectacles, his reality check reflections on the XR industry, and his latest fitness startup Vibe Fitness Gam. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Brielle Garcia at the Snap Lens Fest about the Snap Spectacles and her SelfReflect VTubbing app that uses Snap's Camera Kit. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Snap's AR Plaform Lead Sophia Dominguez at the Snap Lens Fest about the Snap Spectacles. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Snap AR Platform Lead Sophia Dominguez interviewed Snap co-founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy at the Snap Lens Fest about AR and the Snap Spectacles, and there was an audience Q&A at the end as well. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Aidan Wolf at the Snap Partner Summit about the Snap Spectacles. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Max van Leeuwen and Liisi Mononen at the Snap Partner Summit about the Snap Spectacles. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Dustin Kochensparger and Blake Gross at the Snap Partner Summit about the Snap Spectacles. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Anwar Noriega and Julio Martinez at the Snap Partner Summit about the Snap Spectacles. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Niantic's Erin Schaefer and Asim Ahmed at the Snap Partner Summit about the Snap Spectacles as well as their game Peridot Beyond. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Anshel Sag at the Snap Partner Summit about the Snap Spectacles. See more context in the rough transcript below.Here are the links to each of my 15 episodes on the Snap Spectacles announcement and a deep dive into the Snap AR Ecosystem:#1453: Kickoff of Snap Spectacles Coverage with First Impressions with XR Analyst Anshel Sag#1454: Niantic Launches Virtual Pet AR Game "Peridot Beyond" on Snap's Spectacles#1455: Wabisabi Game Studio Leverages AR Connected Lenses on Snap Spectacles for Outdoor Capture the Flag Game#1456: Turning Your Phone into a Spectacles AR controller with DB Creations' "Tiny Motor Arcade"#1457: Snap's Lens Studio, Spectacles, & "Polygon Studio" Open Source Low-Poly Drawing App#1458: Building a Geo-Located, Dungeon-Raiding, AR Game for Spectacles with Aidan Wolf#1459: Snap Co-Founders Share Vision for AR & Spectacles at Lens Fest Q&A Panel#1460: Snap AR Platform Lead Sophia Dominguez on Spectacles and AR Ecosystem#1461: AR Lens Genres, Spectacles Impressions, & SelfReflect VTubing App Using Snap's Camera Kit with Brielle Garcia#1462: XR Industry Reality Checks with Cix Liv and Turning Your Phone into an AI-Driven Exercise Routine#1463: Arguing for Utility-Driven AR Minimalism with Lucas Rizzotto Reflecting upon the XR Market#1464: Snap's Head of Spectacles Software Engineering Shares Technical Break Down of Design Tradeoffs#1465: Team of Women AR Artists Explore Dreams in Spectacles Hackathon#1466: Freelance XR Dev Veronica Flint Shares Thoughts on Spectacles and Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses#1467: AR Medical Training App Wins Spectacles Hackathon + My Concluding Thoughts on Snap SpectaclesThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed All I Know About Teacher Li director Zhuzmo at Venice Immersive 2024. Due to the sensitivities of the topic of Chinese censorship, then the director Zhuzmo has requested that he remain anonymous. I did an interview face to face with them in Venice, got a transcript, and then fed the text back into a text-to-speech AI at Eleven Labs in order to mask his voice. See more context in the rough transcript below.All I Know About Teacher Li also happened to top the unofficial Venice Immersive 2024 Survey results that I did in collaboration with XR Must for both the Top 5 as well as for the Audience Favorites. I found last year's survey results to be really useful in organizing the order of discussing pieces in our critic's roundtable, but also helping to understand the audience's reaction to the selection. Last year there were 50 respondents, and this year there were 82 respondents who on average saw 21.9 experiences each.Here's a list of the Most Seen experiences from Venice Immersive 2024, which is sort of a proxy for popularity and buzz, but also throughput.The next result is the audience favorites (no limit), which is calculated by how many people listed it as a favorite relative to how many saw it. This tends to have the most robust overview of the entire selection, and is also an interesting calibration process to see what you personally liked vs what might have been favored by the zeitgeist. Finally the top 5 ranking usually is a proxy for seeing which projects might have been in the running for a jury prize, but there was a lot more variance this year, which was reflected in the range of projects that people were predicting to be a prize winner. The top prize from the jury was awarded to Ito Meikyu, which was ranked 10th by the audience. The second place from the jury went to Oto's Planet, which was ranked 5th. And then the third place from the jury went to Impulse: Playing with Reality, which was ranked 2nd. I find it increasingly difficult to predict what will resonate with the jury as even the audience favorites can vary widely from my own personal favorites.Again what resonates with you may not resonate with others, and there are so many other qualities and nuances of each project that can’t be reduced down to numbers. Nonetheless, I found last year’s survey results to be quite an interesting cross section and sometimes confirms an intuition and many other times can be surprising. Either way, it’s additional data to help make sense of the selection and the industry.Here's my top 10 that I published after finishing watching all of the pieces on Wednesday, August 28th. I about watched 1/3 of the pieces ahead of the festival, 1/3 on the press preview, and the remaining 1/3 on the press & industry day and the first day bookings are available.Also, the essence of each project can't be reduced down to numbers, which is a big motivation that I have to record over 30 hours of coverage for Venice Immersive 2024 over the course of 5 days in order to unpack more of the design process, experiential design tradeoffs, and some of my own embodied experiences and impressions. #1416: Preview of Venice Immersive 2024 Innovations in Immersive Storytelling & Art Installations with Curators#1417: Kicking Off Venice Immersive Converge with Translating "Riven" Classic Point-and-Click Adventure to Open World VR Puzzler#1418: Award-Winning Animators Experiment with Sandbox Social VR "Garden Alchemy" Research Project#1419: Creating a Four-Sided Pepper's Ghost Pyramid Illusion with "Telos I" Dance Piece#1420: Experimental Documentary "Mammary Mountain" Captures Oral Histories of Breast Cancer Journeys#1421: Interactive Mixed Reality Doc on ADHD "Impulse: Playing With Reality" Takes Home Immersive Achievement Prize at Venice Immersive 2024#1422: A Simple Silence Wraps Up Craig Quintero's Trilogy Exploring Spatial Transformations & Immersive Encounters
I interviewed The Guardians Of Jade Mountain director Hayoun Kwon and producer Richard Turco at Venice Immersive 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Play Life (Žaisti Gyvenimą) co-directors Zilvinas Naujokas, Vilius Petrauskas, and Mantas Pronckus at Venice Immersive 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.Here's their artist's statement:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fc2KspZgGRkThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Mamie Lou director Isabelle Andreani at Venice Immersive 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.Here's her artist's statement:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJT99fqzyiwThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Body of Mine director Cameron Kostopoulos at Venice Immersive 2024 about his impact campaign since winning a special jury prize at SXSW 2023 (see my first interview with him here.). He showed Body of Mine as a part of the competition at Venice Immersive 2023, and he was back on the Immersive Island this year pitching his latest project A Cure for Straightness at the Venice Production Bridge. See more context in the rough transcript below.Here's the launch trailer for Body of Mine:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FE7KYISf7cIThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Une Eau La Nuit (Bodies Of Water) co-directors Chélanie Beaudin-Quintin and Caroline Laurin-Beaucage with producer Laurence Wells at Venice Immersive 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.Here is their artist statement:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_XVyHOle3YThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed The Art Of Change co-directors Simone Fougnier and Vincent Rooijers with producer Peter Ariet at Venice Immersive 2024. I had a chance to get an early look at this piece, and I watched it three times before stepping foot on the island. I absolutely loved this piece, and it was at the top of my personal favorites from the festival. I found this piece to be so emotionally moving, as well as innovative in it's spatial transformations and use of consonance and dissonance cycles within pacing and editing. I also really enjoyed the time-travelling self-reflective narrative conceit that's woven throughout the album, and then condensed down into each of the beats of that story. Overall, I loved this piece, and look forward to having more folks be able to see it on the festival circuit or if it picks up more distribution through domes or other LBE efforts.Fun fact is that I've been listening to the full Droeloe concept album also titled The Art of Change on repeat upon my return from Venice and throughout the process of editing and publishing this series. So I can also highly recommend checking out the full album if you'd like a sneak peak to the vibe of this piece.See more context in the rough transcript below. Here's their artist's statement:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPXYRnWCLaQThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed In The Realm Of Ripley director Soo Eung Chuck Chae at Venice Immersive 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.Here's their artist statement:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnFZyQ3S4vsThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Project: Lost Worlds director Fins at Venice Immersive 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Venice Immersive Worlds Gallery Producer Mike Salmon at Venice Immersive 2024 about this year's selection of 20 VRChat worlds as well as his process of scouting promising leads and trends of world building, music, art, and immersive storytelling.. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Uncanny Alley: A New Day co-directors Rick Treweek and Stephen Butchko along with Ferryman Collective's Deirdre V. Lyons and Christopher Lane Davis at Venice Immersive 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Duchampiana director Lilian Hess at Venice Immersive 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.Here is their artist statement:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FX8app5_XtIThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Rencontres director Mathieu Pradat at Venice Immersive 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.Here's their artist's statement:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVnsFWIUgp4This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Project_y: Working Title co-directors Yuzo Sugano, Taro Hirai, and Shingo Yoshimura at Venice Immersive 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.Here's their artist's statement:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-XngO8EebsThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Address Unknown: Fukushima Now director Arif Khan at Venice Immersive 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.Here's his artist's statement:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zP5rHv7x7goThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed What If…? - An Immersive Story director Dave Bushore at Venice Immersive 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below. What If...? also picked up an Emmy for Outstanding Innovation In Emerging Media Programming as awarded by a juried portion of the Emerging Media Programming Peer Group of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.Also, Bushore announced that he was leaving Marvel after returning home from Venice Immersive 2024. The Hollywood Reporter reported on how Bushore was really inspired by Venice Immersive and will be likely focusing on the frontiers of immersive storytelling in his next venture.“Being invited to Venice was mind-blowing,” Bushore tells The Hollywood Reporter. “Being there and seeing the embracing of this new type of content, and the people coming through doing the experience, filmmakers and ambassadors, that was a really cool thing.”And it’s exactly what this self-described “story nerd” wants to do more of.Bushore is not joining a new company, but instead is bounding into parts unknown. He seeks to take his experience in the intersection of technology and new ways audiences participate in their favorite brands. His goal is to create exciting, emotionally poignant, groundbreaking experiences that continue to push the boundaries of media and entertainment.My conversation with Bushore happened in the middle of his journey at Venice Immersive, and you can tell that his excitement about the potentials were palpable. Here's their artist's statement:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3IZiZMpeRAThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Strangeways co-director Adam Lieber, developers Dale P Deacon and Alex Bossman, as well as avatar creator Egbert Harm Westra at Venice Immersive 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.Here's their artist's statement:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qbu54ULcUC0This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Earths To Come director Rose Bond at Venice Immersive 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.Here's her artist's statement:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w871q2dmKx4This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Free UR Head director Tung yen Chou at Venice Immersive 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.Here's their artist's statement:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fcb_EFwm_aEThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed The Gossips' Chronicles director Corinne Mazzoli and producer Marta Bianchi at Venice Immersive 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.Here's their artist statement:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuMwoawxscsThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Symbiosis/\Dysbiosis: Sentience co-directors Tosca Terán and Brendan Lehman at Venice Immersive 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.Here's their artist's statement:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PzZXrqncsYThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Un Soir Avec Les Impressionnistes, Paris 1874 director Pierre Gable at Venice Immersive 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.Here's their artist's statement:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJaTpgZEAqAThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Emissive / Excurio co-founder and CEO Fabien Barati at Laval Virtual 2023 after having tried the free-roaming Immersive Expedition edition of Éternelle Notre-Dame, which was really quite incredible. I originally saw the sit-down version of Éternelle Notre-Dame at Venice Immersive 2022, but the free-roaming, immersive expedition version was such a distinctly different experience that felt like I was going on a proper adventure. Here's a showreel of Excurio's immersive expeditions that includes Horizon of Khufu, Tonight with the Impressionists, Paris 1874, Eternal Notre-Dame, and Life Chronicles.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUoOzBYQ1cMEmissive / Excurio had their Un Soir Avec Les Impressionnistes, Paris 1874 immersive expedition experience in competition for Venice Immersive 2024, and so I wanted to publish this unpublished interview from my archive backlog because their immersive expedition LBE experiences are really taking the immersive industry world by storm from France to China to Canada and beyond. They're able to put over 100 people per hour through their experiences, and over a hundred thousand over the period of months for some of their runs. There was certainly a buzz around how successful of a model this has been on both the creation of IP but also for the third-party exhibitors who are managing the on-site logistics. Hopefully this archival interview provides a bit more context for how these immersive expeditions have been developing as it was certainly a hot topic amongst folks during the festival who are thinking about the challenges of distribution, throughput, and finding sustainable models that have the promise of growing the XR industry. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Below Deck co-directors Martina Mahlknecht and Martin Prinoth at Venice Immersive 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.Here's their artist's statement:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tJmhkJC05QThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Somewhere Unknown In Indochina co-directors Asio Chihsiung Liu and Feng Ting Tsou at Venice Immersive 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below. (Note that I'll likely need to manually clean up this rough transcript as WhisperX seemed to be having some difficulties detecting speaker changes on this one.)Here's their artist's statement:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwLksFqZXs8This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Fragile Home director Ondrej Moravec at Venice Immersive 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below. There were also allegations of copyright infringement that were made within the context of a private WhatsApp group during the festival, and Moravec distributed an official statement privately to selected people privately on September 2nd, and then he shared his statement with me after the festival to be included here as an official comment on the matter.Here's their artist's statement about Fragile Home:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hcc00RQ5I-AThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Champ De Bataille director Francois Vautier at Venice Immersive 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.Here's his artist's statement:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37k4gIfTdawThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Ceci Est Mon Cœur (This is My Heart) co-directors Stephane Hueber-Blies and Nicolas Blies at Venice Immersive 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.Here's their artist's statement:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf3909F8UI8This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Nightmara: Episode 3 director Gianpaolo Gonzalez at Venice Immersive 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.Here's his artist's statement:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcgxlKjMN2sThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Mobile Suit Gundam: Silver Phantom creators from Bandai Namco Filmworks including Naohiro Ogata, Kiichiro Inoue, Ken Iyadomi as well as Atlas V producers Arnaud Colinart and Julien Bercy, and technical art director Gaël Chaize at Venice Immersive 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.Here's their artist's statement:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoxzpYrQvt4This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed A Simple Silence director Craig Quintero at Venice Immersive 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.Here's his artist's statement:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDqtTyBuuUAThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Impulse: Playing With Reality co-directors May Abdalla and Barry Gene Murphy at Venice Immersive 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.Here's the official launch trailer:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apgQxXwx7WEThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Mammary Mountain co-directors Tara Baoth Mooney, Camille C. Baker, and Maf'j Alvarez at Venice Immersive 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.Here's their artist's statement:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThEkIrqgDK0This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Telos I co-directors Emil Dam Seidel and Dorotea Saykaly at Venice Immersive 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.Here's their artist's statement:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVKFzca5jjcThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Garden Alchemy co-directors Michelle Kranot and Uri Kranot at Venice Immersive 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.Here's the artist's statement.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WgHtYWZoQsThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Riven's creative director Eric Anderson and development director Hannah Gamiel ahead of Venice Immersive 2024 since it was being featured within the Best of Selection. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
The 8th edition of the Venice Immersive 2024 will be kicking off on August 28th, which will be featuring over 28 hours of immersive storytelling and immersive art content across over 70 different projects. This year there area a lot more immersive installations representing over a third out of the total number of on-site projects (18 out of the 52). There's eight mixed reality projects, a couple of projects featuring haptics, and one that prominently featuring AI character interactions. There are also 20 VRChat worlds in the Worlds Gallery along with 3 VRChat worlds in competition with 1 project that's using Resonite social VR platform.I had a chance to catch up with the co-curators Liz Rosenthal and Michel Reilhac again this year to get a sneak peak of the 26 projects in competition as well as 9 of the projects within the Best of Selection (note we talk about 10 Best of experiences, but it was announced just this morning that the Apple Vision Pro experience Adventure was pulled from the festival after attendees who had it booked received a message from Vivaticket saying, "we regret to inform you that the immersive experience Adventure for which you made a reservation has been cancelled" ). We also talk about how there's going to be a private think tank on September 1st looking at LBE distribution challenges and opportunities. Be sure to check out their previous report titled "Think Tank: Immediate Options to Address the Pressing Needs of Immersive Distribution."[EDIT: September 16, 2024 - Here are the links to all of my coverage and interviews from Venice Immersive 2024]#1416: Preview of Venice Immersive 2024 Innovations in Immersive Storytelling & Art Installations with Curators#1417: Kicking Off Venice Immersive Converge with Translating "Riven" Classic Point-and-Click Adventure to Open World VR Puzzler#1418: Award-Winning Animators Experiment with Sandbox Social VR "Garden Alchemy" Research Project#1419: Creating a Four-Sided Pepper's Ghost Pyramid Illusion with "Telos I" Dance Piece#1420: Experimental Documentary "Mammary Mountain" Captures Oral Histories of Breast Cancer Journeys#1421: Interactive Mixed Reality Doc on ADHD "Impulse: Playing With Reality" Takes Home Immersive Achievement Prize at Venice Immersive 2024#1422: A Simple Silence Wraps Up Craig Quintero's Trilogy Exploring Spatial Transformations & Immersive Encounters#1423: Translating Anime IP into a VR Film with "Mobile Suit Gundam: Silver Phantom"#1424: Quill Animation Series "Nightmara" Pushes at the Edges of Immersive Storytelling Innovations and Novelty#1425: Immersive Art Installation "Ceci Est Mon Cœur" Uses the Poetry of Light to Explore Childhood Trauma#1426: Champ De Bataille Uses Cinematic VR to Explore the Horrors and Emotion of World War I#1427: Poetic Environmental Storytelling of "Fragile Home" Elegently Tells the Story of War in Ukraine with Mixed Reality#1428: Exploring the Horrors of Forgotten Refugee's Plight in "Somewhere Unknown In Indochina"#1429: Below Deck Innovations Fuse Theatrical Staging, Mixed Reality, & 360 Video#1430: Immersive Expeditions Prove to be Profitable LBE Business for Emissive's Fabien Barati#1431: Taking a Walk through Art History with "Un Soir Avec Les Impressionnistes, Paris 1874"#1432: Combining Biodata with Open World Mushroom Adventure with "Symbiosis/\dysbiosis: Sentience"#1433: Challenging the Authority of Museums with College Biennale Winner "The Gossips' Chronicles"#1434: Choreographing the Collective VR Viewing Experience into a Public Art Performance with "Free UR Head"#1435: Blending Poetic Animation with Spatial Audio Orchestration with "Earths To Come"#1436: Transforming 2D Art into an Immersive VRChat Journey Complete with Themed Avatars with "Strangeways"#1437: What If…? Director Dave Bushore on Translating Marvel IP into an Emmy-Award Winning Interactive Cinematic Journey
The Night Under Lights Presents: The Seasons at the Moon Pool (replayable VRChat link and video) shown during Raindance Immersive was one of the most immersive music experiences I've ever had in VR so far. It was so awe-inspiring and incredible to see 3 DJ / VJ sets using the SNR Labs particle-screen version of their holographic Apple Global Illumination shader that I covered previously in episode #1413 with Apple_Blossom and A://DDOSS. The real-time immersive lighting effects have to be seen in VR to fully appreciate the awe-inspiring nature of it. You can see a video capture of it below, but if you have PCVR, then I highly, highly recommend checking out the replayable version on VRChat.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZJ53W7NYnAVJs are able to input their 2D video livestream into the SNR Labs particle screen shader, which then translates the luminance values into height and enables a sort of volumetric translation. It has a DepthKit-like effect where you can see 3-dimensional shapes and objects with shadows or imagine if you were to push a cube through a sheet of fabric to get a feeling of objects from one-degree of fidelity, which is height from a fixed plane. VJ Silent and VJ namoron were instrumental in helping to develop this shader with SNR Labs, and TehArbitter's Moon Pool location for Night Under Lights was also instrumental in helping to shape the development of it. VJ TehArbitter (aka Arbi) brought together two other VJs and three DJs to present three sets with the theme of the different seasons. The first set was DJ Ladybug + VJ Silent, the second set was DJ Yuna + VJ TehArbitter, and then the final set was DJ Terkoiz + VJ namoron.I had a chance to catch up with half of the performers including VJ Silent and VJ namoron as well as with DJ Ladybug to talk more about the development of this specific project, but also to recount some of the history of the visual effects in the VRChat clubbing scene as well deeper trends of volumetric and holographic visual effects that VJs are exploring in VR. Also whether it merits a new terms as video jockey or visual jockey doesn't always fully encompass the holographic, volumetric, spatial, immersive, or narrative elements that are being explored. Some of the VRChat clubs discussed include: Dimension, Virtual Base event, Shelter, Ghost Club, Concrete, Concrete: Pale Sands, PSHQ, Slyfest, Loner, Kaleidosky, Sanctum, Schism, Deviate, Atlantis, Mochii's Island, Reflections, Redacted, Heist, Light Dimension, Simplicity, & Endless SerenityAlso worth noting is that there are three VRChat worlds that are being featured in the Venice Immersive Worlds Gallery that connected to the themes discussed in this episode, and they're also three of the 20 VRChat worlds in the Venice selection that are not and likely will not have a public-facing world that's easily accessible. The NUL Presents˸ The Seasons Replay ＠ moon_pool is not in the Venice Immersive worlds gallery, and does have replayable version. But Silent works at Sanctum, and their billboarded stereoscopic screen in the Reactor is being featured in Venice, and the SNR Labs: Test Facility will be demonstrating the more 3D version of their Holographic shader named Apple Global Illumination, and Silent also mentioned Jerk and May who have the Concrete: Pale Sands, which is also a part of Venice Immersive.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
SoftlySteph's The Friction of a Modulated Soul took home the Best Dance Experience at Raindance Immersive in a groundbreaking performance that tells the "story about the different cages that bind us from our authentic truth." It's a piece that completely blew me away with it's technological innovations, her fluid and emotionally-driven dance, a moving story that takes you on guided journey towards authentic identity, and an excellent curation of music from other VRChat creators. The piece manages to tie together so many different strands of technical innovation, storytelling, and performance, and it was one of my highlights from the entire Raindance Immersive festival this year.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAUjJ_ozldMThe crux of the innovations within The Friction of a Modulated Soul are from the new holographic shader (aka the "Apple Global Illumination") developed in partnership with SNR Labs' Apple Blossom, A://DDOS, and namoron (covered in great detail in the previous episode #1413) that both plays back recorded holographic objects that are a part of a timed dance performance, but also replicates and mirrors her dance performance at different scales in real-time. There's also real-time lighting effects on the 1.4 million point-cloud pixels that are utterly awe-inspiring, and took lots of black magic shader wizardry pull it all off by encoding and decoding information from video streams (again many of the more technical details are covered in episode #1413).I saw this piece as a live performance during Raindance, but they're also working on a replayable VRChat world that should be ready within the next month or so. SoftlySteph also curated a soundtrack of independent music by VRChat creators with five of the songs specifically composed for this piece. Everything in this piece was designed around story, which takes the audience on a journey from resisting internal disconnections, to achieving authentic connection to self, to then resisting collective pressures to disconnect, and then finally culminating with authentic connection. https://twitter.com/SoftlySteph/status/1807125937819148769Overall, this was a beautifully-executed piece that is pushing into new forms of dance genre and performance, and was well-deserving of the best dance performance at Raindance Immersive. I had a chance to catch up with SoftlySteph to get a bit more context about how this project came about, her journey into VR via the stage dance and dance performance scene, and then her intentions with architecting this story about authentic self.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
There was a new holographic shader developed by members of SNR Labs group on VRChat that completely blew me away in how it was used in a couple of performances at Raindance Immersive. It's like a new form of volumetric capture that also has lighting effects, and can be used in translating 2D images into 3D or capturing low-res 3D objects into a sort of hybrid of point-cloud, particle effect, 3D objects. It's called Apple Global Illumination after it's primary author Apple_Blossom, who worked with designing it with A://DDOS along with other collaborating artists including VJ Silent, VJ Namoron, and immersive dancer SoftlySteph. SoftlySteph's Frictions of a Modulated Soul took home the best dance performance at Raindance Immersive (and will be featured more in depth in the next episode), and the Night Under Lights: The Seasons at Moon Pool was one of the more awe-inspiring uses of this shader and was a personal favorite of mine from this year's festival. See the VRChat replay of the Moon Pool here and I'll be covering this in two episodes from now.There's a particle screen variation of the shader that is able to translate 2D VJ screens into more volumetric experiences based upon the luminance value of each pixel, which can be seen in this video below:https://youtube.com/watch?v=rZJ53W7NYnAThen there's a version that can encode 3D objects into a video that is streamed into VRChat, and then decoded into a dynamic hybrid between a particle effect, point cloud representation, and 3D model. And each of the particles are emitting light that are reflected on the surrounding environment and avatars. Here's a clip of SoftlySteph's performance as captured by Madame Kanahttps://twitter.com/SoftlySteph/status/1807125937819148769Their SNR Labs Test Facility was also selected to be a part of the Venice Immersive Worlds gallery that opens next week. Here's a video overview:https://twitter.com/SNR_LABS/status/1813989248837595504I had a chance to sit down with Apple_Blossom and A://DDOS to learn more about how this breakthrough shader was developed, as well as diving a bit into the weeds for the mechanics for how it works. The Apple Global Illumination feels like a real revelation and breakthrough in how it's opening up new avenues for how VJs and dancers will be able to use it for new forms of creative expression and holographic and volumetric effects to be paired with DJ sets across different clubbing venues in VRChat.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Shadow Canyon: A Puppeteer's Tale is a unique blend of VRChat Worldbuilding by nprowler, immersive dance performances by students of the VR Dance Academy founded by Dust Bunny, and then improv actors and immersive theatre staging led by Mycana. Overall, it was such a unique blend of different disciplines that the curators of Raindance Immersive awarded it with a special prize reserved for projects that embody the indie spirit of Raindance. The project started when nprowler and Dust Bunny saw some shadow effects in VRChat that inspired them to experiment with creating shadow dances with both sheet materials hanging from a line as well as onto the walls of a walking simulator VRChat world called Horse Canyon that premiered last year's Venice Immersive. Dust Bunny brought in her students from the VR Dance Academy, and then collaborated with theatre director and digital storyteller Mycana to figure out a narrative. The story primarily is motivating a sort of guided tour to different locations on the map that feature different dances that were inspired by different Tarot cards. The main protagonist is watching each of these dances while another Mystic sidekick character helps interpret the meaning leading to breakthroughs of creative inspiration. For me the strongest part of the piece were the awe-inspiring dance scenes with beautiful shadow effects and getting a chance to explore this latest iteration of nprowler's vast world of nature-inspired spatial architectures. To get a sense of some of the journey that you're taken on, then be sure to watch the section of Madame Kana's Raindance Immersive 2024 documentary featuring clips from Shadow Canyon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soHDdq0Lbwk&t=256sI had a chance to catch up with Dust Bunny, nprowler, and Mycana to unpack their unique creative collaboration and how they fused each of their strengths to put together a very unique and awe-inspiring piece that's at the intersection of immersive dance, the vastness of walking simulator world building, immersive theatre, improv, and immersive storytelling.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
FlowersRite (花之祭P) is a music producer, 3D artist, cosplayer, and VRChat world builder who won the Best Music Experience at Raindance Immersive 2024 with her experience called Children of the Seed. Within a couple of days of discovering VR in 2019, she had bought a PC, HTC Vive, and Vive Trackers to do full-body tracking, and has slowly been transitioning into becoming a professional 3D artist. She has published 11 VRChat worlds since August 2019, including The Great Inventor Escape, which was featured in the Worlds Gallery at Venice Immersive 2022. She was building the world for Children of the Seed at the same time as she was composing the music in a creative process where the VRChat world building directly feed into the creation of the lore and backstory that directly inspired the development of the music. The end result is a majestic performance space and auditorium that's suspended in a dark forest that the audience has to move up in vertical space through a series of ramps and stairs to get it. The audience sits in a semi-circle while she stands on a island-like stage in the middle performing as a DJ / VJ controlling a series of in-world effects like rain as well as circles of light and organic shapes that slowly transition each of the movements that are demarcated with their name in a floating text overlay.I had a chance to catch up with FlowersRite to get more context about her journey into VR, some of the different VRChat worlds she's created over the past 5 years, and how her world building creative process influenced the development of The Children of the Seed. At this point, she hasn't uploaded a replayable version of her musical performance in VRChat yet, but you can listen to her music in this 2D music video of Children of the Seed that has a completely different art style and experience than what was shown in VRChat during Raindance Immersive 2024.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Medra is the CEO and founder of the Creator Jam, which is a non-profit that's been consistently organizing weekly and monthly collaborative-building events within the social VR platform of Resonite (and originally within Neos VR) since June 2, 2019. Resonite's technological architecture allows for the rendering and editing of content in real-time in a collaborative fashion, which has led to a rich maker culture within Resonite as embodied by the Creator Jam Community.Neos VR and then Resonite were both developed by Tomáš Mariančík (aka Frooxius). When I interviewed Mariančík in 2015 at GDC, I had regarded him as one of the few "mad geniuses" of VR. He had won 3rd place in two game jams at that point including 3rd place in the Oculus & IndieCade 2013 VR Jam with SightLine, and then 3rd place in the Leap Motion 2014 3D Jam with World of Comenius. Then he would go on to win 3rd place in the Oculus & Samsung 2015 VR Jam with Neos The Universe after participating in the Rothenberg River Accelerator at the invitation of Tipatat Chennavasin. When I interviewed Chennavasin in Spring of 2015, he talked about recruiting Mariančík for the Rothenberg Ventures River Accelerator by saying, The mandate I had was, find awesome people in VR and support them and help them. I got to do that. Sightline the Chair was one of my favorite demos of all time in VR. When I saw that, I was never so jealous or angry. I was like, "This guy's brilliant, smarter than me. Oh my god! This is the demo I wish I was smart enough to think of doing." And I fortunately found his contact. He was in the Czech Republic, Tomas. I sent them a Skype message and it was just this amazing thing where I had to explain what's a VC, what's an accelerator program, how can it help them, what are they doing, and they were just kind of shocked, a little suspicious. But fortunately, after a couple talks, we got them out here and it's just been amazing to see them, support them, and help them flourish as entrepreneurs, but also developers and innovators in the VR space.After participating in the Rothenberg Ventures River VR incubator, then Mariančík and other Solirax co-founder Karel Hulec started working on his deep vision of Neos VR. That following spring Mariančík wrote a blog post titled "How VR became my day job because I didn't give up" in what he described as the "Frooxius origin story" to r/Oculus. He details how difficult it was to make it as a full-time VR developer. Despite his many successes in different game jams, he wasn't really receiving a lot of support from Oculus. Oculus always knew how to support game developers, but didn't quite know what to do with the more education-focused and experimental apps exploring the boundaries of perception that Mariančík was working on. And to top it all off, the depth of vision of how Mariančík was thinking the medium was also probably 5-10 years ahead of anyone else. He reflected on this in his origin story post by saying,The trouble is that Neos is a very complex and expansive idea and requires a lot of time to work through all the aspects of it and thorough consideration to make sure everything fits neatly together, because I needed to find a set of basic elements which are both very simple and elegant, but interact in so many ways that they provide extremely flexible, but also consistent system.I always know what to do from moment to moment, but there’s just a lot of things to do. So I keep working for months, piecing the system and working through it all. But before the system comes together, there isn’t much to show for it.What I found most difficult is watching as everyone else is showing off their VR projects with quickly made solutions, but with a fraction of functionality, gaining attention, winning awards, participating at events, demoing in public, getting invited to VR shows and podcasts, while I’m piecing together my big vision in the shadows.
The VRChat world Suku took home the Best Art World prize at Raindance Immersive 2024, and it's by Durk van der Meer who is a freelance digital artist, character artist, and VR world builder based in Curaçao. Suku blends together elements of Caribbean culture and geography with Dutch colonial architecture combined with a sort of psychedelic Studio Ghibli twist that gives the overall experience a sense of surrealism and magical realism. https://twitter.com/DurkatWork/status/1805274104460722464I had a chance to catch up with van der Meer to speak about his 3D artist pipelines and workflows primarily focused on Gravity Sketch, but we also cover some of his other tools like Google Blocks and Adobe Substance 3D Modeler (formerly known as Oculus Medium). We also talk about focusing all of his creative artistic side projects into the process of VRChat world building within Unity as a vast open world that also leverages the World Creator Professional plug-in.I also had a chance to go on a guided tour of the world with van der Meer where he added a lot of additional context for his creative process, some stories and myths about the history of Curaçao, but also other elements of the darker side of Dutch colonial history by featuring a slave house and plantation house that was transformed into an immersive art installation. There's also other elements of the Caribbean culture of Curaçao that van der Meer integrates that he himself started to wonder if it bordered on a form of cultural appropriation. His intention was to explore his own creative imagination, and he did not intend this world to be in any way educational or a historically accurate elaboration of the darker side of these colonial histories. He considered adding some additional context to the world, but ultimately decided to not add any other additional information about any of the symbols or architecture featured within the piece. Many of these aspects only came up within the context of the guided tour, which was part of the Raindance Immersive exhibition.But the allusions by van der Meer to the dark colonial history of Curaçao was definitely a part of the experience that stuck with me, and we have a chance to dig into a little bit at the end of our conversation, and I dug into a few additional references at the end of the podcast as I was wrapping everything up.Kirby Ferguson's Everything is a Remix YouTube series is probably one of the more compelling counter argument to worries about cultural appropriation as he argues that the core of remixing is "to copy, transform, and combine existing materials to produce something new." Ferguson argues that all art and cultural production is ultimately borrowing from a wide range of different sources from different cultures, and that nothing is actually truly original.Legally fair use in copyright law dictates four different factors measuring fair use that including "the purpose and character of your use, the nature of the copyrighted work, the amount and substantiality of the portion taken, and the effect of the use upon the potential market." That's the legal side of the argument, but concerns around cultural appropriation are more ethical and moral rather than strictly legal.I dug into some references on cultural appropriation from Google Scholar, which pointed me to this 2006 article titled "From Cultural Exchange to Transculturation: A Review and Reconceptualization of Cultural Appropriation" by Richard Rogers, which has over 700 citations. Rogers defines cultural appropriation pretty broadly by saying that it's the "use of one culture’s symbols, artifacts, genres, rituals, or technologies by members of another culture—regardless of intent, ethics, function, or outcome." He goes on to define four different categories that include exchange, dominance, exploitation, and transculturation across a spectrum from reciprocal exchange all the way to transnational corporations commodifying cultural art...
K. Guillory (aka Aemeth) has been writing The Metaculture online magazine since August 13, 2021 with over 70 articles covering the latest trends in arts and culture on social VR platforms such as VRChat. She focuses primarily on the live music and performance scenes, but also has been tracking the historical evolution of the underground clubbing scene in VRChat, virtual fashion, as well as many other artistic trends from painting in VR to film in VR to VTubers. In fact, I mention some of her intrepid work in my own interviews with Starheart on VTubing and BabyBonito on painting within VR as her previous interviews on these topics and coverage on these trends came up they were continuing to evolve and be featured at the Raindance Immersive festival in 2023 and 2024. Guillory has been ahead of the curve in terms of tracking some of these trends of virtual culture before they get picked up and highlighted by other curators and virtual cultural critics and essayists.Guillory was inspired to start The Metaculture magazine from a conversation that I had with her on July 24, 2021 at Nanotopia's Mycelia exhibition in VRChat as a part of the AMAZE festival. She was sharing with me all sorts of insider tips on the underground dancing and clubbing scene with VRChat, and so I suggested to her that she find a way to archive, document, and publicly share more of this oral history knowledge as most of the information about the nuances of these hidden corners of the VRChat cultural scene were scattered across disparate Discord servers, ephemeral Twitter announcements, as well as insider community knowledge from knowing someone who knew someone about it all. Starting in 2021 and 2022 there started to be more and more YouTubers creating documentaries about VRChat's underground clubbing scene trend with Straszfilms' The Virtual Underground: An Introduction to VRChat's Rave Scene published May 5, 2021. Then Phia's The EXPLOSIVE Rise of VRChat Clubbing published her take on it on her The Virtual Reality Show channel on Mar 12, 2022. Then I actually conducted this interview with Guillory featured here on March 25, 2022 right as the zeitgeist about the clubbing scene started to explode. I knew she was tracking it very closely, and I wanted to get a bit of an insider's perspective on it all.Then a few weeks after I recorded my chat with Guillory, PBS Voices published their I Went Clubbing in Virtual Reality: Raves of VRChat on Apr 6, 2022, and then Guillory/Aemeth was featured as a subject matter expert on Resident Advisors' piece The music, venues and creators driving virtual reality clubbing that was featured on Sep 28, 2022. You might able to detect some of the parallels of how she tells me the story in this interview as well as some of the points that she also makes within the Resident Advisor video.The Origin Story of VRChatIn the process of producing this episode, I came across this documentary by YouTuber Twice about the History of VRChat 2014-2022 that does a really great job of establishing the major platform developments, UI/UX changes, as well as turning points in the cultural evolution of the VRChat platform. Twice first came across VRChat in 2017, and so his video aggregates some archival footage before he started creating his own content, but for everything after 2017 he weaves his own personal history, footage, and memories on the platform to help flesh out the broader story of VRChat as a platform. This documentary inspired me to go on my own trip down memory lane as well as a entering into a bit of a rabbit hole of research into the origin story of VRChat itself, and so I wanted to share some of the results of my archeological dig here.I first ordered my Oculus Rift DK1 on January 1, 2014, and I received it about a week later. I along with many VR enthusiasts and VR developers ended up obsessively following the /r/Oculus subreddit as this where a critical mass of the community was congregating to share ...
Doug North Cook is the CEO and Creative Director for Creature, which is both an immersive game studio and label announced a year ago that's representing 10 different XR studios and 16 projects slated as far out as 2027. Creature had four different projects with announcements as a part of the UploadVR Summers Showcase 2024 on June 26th that included Laser Dance, Thrasher, Maestro as well as the "cozy sci-fi, psychedelic adventure" mixed reality game that they're building called Starship Home. Each of these games are exploring either innovative hand-tracking or mixed reality mechanics that are exploring new forms of embodied gameplay. He describes the ribbon dance-inspired gamed mechanic of Thrasher as "a form of extended proprioception" where it feels like an extension of your body when playing it. I totally agree with this assessment, and I elaborate more on the magical experience of Thrasher's hand tracking with the creators after having a chance to have an early look at Raindance Immersive where it took home the best game experience. I also caught up with the solo developer of Laser Dance, which picked up one of the Spirit of Raindance 2024 Awards. North Cook said that Laser Dance has become his go-to demo in order to show off the affordances of mixed reality, and both of these games capture the innovative indie spirit that are represented by the game label side of Creature.I had a chance to catch up with North Cook to unpack the challenges of mixed reality development, a bit of a behind-the-scenes sneak preview on their mixed reality game Starship Home, collaborating with SideQuestVR on a $1M Indie VR Fund, but also how he's found a unique sweet spot between an agency and publisher to create a collaborative brain trust of veteran XR game developers who are helping to solve many of these intractable XR design problems. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Thrasher is a really compelling VR game with a very satisfying and magical core game mechanic inspired by ribbon dancing. It's the latest VR game from Brian Gibson, who designed the art and music for the VR rhythm game Thumper, as he teamed up with former Harmonix co-worker Mike Mandel via Puddle Studio. Thrasher was also partially inspired by the classic Snake video game, but in this version you're controlling a much more abstract and artistic "space eel" entity with your hands in order to deliberately crash through crystals and avoid obstacles. There's many power-up permutations to extend on this idea, but the main thrust of the game is that it's just super satisfying to manipulate this space eel entity by moving a single hand around either using tracked controllers or hand tracking alone.Thrasher is launching today on the latest Meta Quest platforms as well as on the Apple Vision Pro. Inspired by the lack of input controls on the Apple Vision Pro, they also implemented hand-tracking to the point where you can quickly twirl around your index finger as an input control to the point where it started to feel like this entity was a sort of extension of my body. I played all the way through it first on the Apple Vision Pro with just hand tracking, and then on the Quest 3 with hand-tracked controllers, and I actually preferred the way that the game feels with just hand-tracking, even though it's technically more precise with Quest's 6-DoF controllers. Even though it's technically harder to play within the hand tracking mode, it just feels a bit better, especially if you prefer to play in more of a vibe-out mode than trying to climb up the leaderboards.I was a part of the Raindance Immersive jury that awarded Thrasher with the Best Game award because it has such a novel, unique, and satisfying game feel along with a lot of depth and development as they explore this mechanic to it's logical extreme with different power-ups, obstacles, and an increasingly difficult game progression curve. There's even a very subtle and nuanced combination system for advanced players that is elaborated in more detail on their website with this Thrasher Gameplay Guide, or you can watch this THRASHER: "How to Win" video for more details on how it works. I played through it twice without having access to these supplemental materials, and I wasn't able to fully figure it out. So this system is a bit cryptic and hidden from the perspective of the game design, but you can dig into more details in and experiment more on the first level. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jN6qfuSAqawI had a chance to catch up with Gibson and Mandel last month to talk about their journey and design process in creating Thrasher, and some of their preliminary thoughts on whether they'll release a more relaxed vibe-out or Zen mode. Whether they decide to or not, Thrasher is certainly one of the best games that I've played so far on the Apple Vision Pro, and their ribbon-dance inspired mechanic is something that feels super magical and fun to play around with. It's also a good example to discern some of the phenomenological differences in what the game feels like with controllers (and haptics) a blend of embodied movement with abstracted agency, and with just hand tracking or finger tracking and a bit more visceral embodied experience overall. Also stay tuned for my next episode where I had a chance to chat with Creature label co-founder Doug North Cook talking about helping to produce and represent Laser Dance, Thrasher, and their flagship mixed reality game of Starship Home.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Laser Dance is a mixed reality game by solo XR game developer Thomas van Bouwel, who previously released minimalist puzzle game called Cubism. I had a chance to try out Laser Dance through Raindance Immersive, and it's one of those types of games that I think will really help define some of the key affordances of successful mixed reality games that modulate your existing context enough to transport you into another realm of play where you use your body as a controller. https://twitter.com/tovanbo/status/1806323145000816867I had a chance to catch up with van Bouwel to unpack more about the mixed reality and hand tracking lessons from Cubism in the first half of our conversation, and then we dive into many of the peculiar considerations of mixed reality game design for Laser Dance covering everything from gameplay that adapts relative to the uniqueness of someone's space, the evolving Presence Platform functionality for mixed reality along with the types of custom programming needed to solve some of the open problems, as well as collaborating with the newly-formed Creature label that is providing additional support for innovative indie-driven, mixed reality and XR games like Laser Dance, Thrasher (more on this experience tomorrow), as well as their flagship mixed reality game of Starship Home. We also cover some of the unique insights from architecture that have also really helped to shape van Bouwel's journey from architectural visualization into the frontiers of leveraging spatial affordances for mixed reality gameplay. The release date for Laser Dance has not been announced yet, but you can wishlist it here.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Madame Kana is a French, transgender woman and VReporter who has been publishing a new documentary about VRChat every 2-3 weeks for the past year on her YouTube channel, and she won the Discovery Award this year at Raindance Immersive 2024 for her short film called New Eden Evergarden; Behind the Magic. She published a 39-minute documentary about last year's Raindance Immersive 2023 edition, and she also recently published a 32-minute documentary about this year's Raindance Immersive 2024 edition, which I highly recommend checking out as she highlights many of the projects that I have been and will be featuring on the Voices of VR podcast series featuring different Raindance Immersive artists.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soHDdq0LbwkI had a chance to catch up with Kana to get more information about her journey into VR, and her motivations for capturing so many different elements of virtual culture including the two Raindance Immersive documentaries from 2023 and 2024, short-form and long-form documentaries about Evergarden, a collection of meaningful moments from Public VRChat instances (Part #1 and Part #2), the Furry scene in VRChat, a vlog about how Joe Hunting's We Met in Virtual Reality film inspired her to make her own documentaries within VRChat, an update on Dust Bunny's VR Dance Academy, trip reports on the Virtual Market, Spookality and other VRChat horror worlds, a profile on VRChat Creator Tonton Demon, and reports on the Japanese scene in VRChat including VR Japan Tours performance group, the Japanese Jazz scene in VRChat, and an interview with Japanese musicians AMOKA. Needless to say, it's an impressive amount of coverage of the frontiers of virtual culture within VRChat over the past year, and certainly played a big part in why the Raindance Immersive curators Mária Rakušanová and Joe Hunting honored her with a Discovery Award. Kana is currently working on a documentary on the transgender community within VRChat as gender expression is a particularly personal interest of hers as VRChat helped her to become more public about her own transgender identity, and she sounds committed to continuing to explore the frontiers of virtual culture and continue to crank out these 10, 20, or 30-minute documentaries. Be sure to follow her on X (formerly Twitter) @Les_Gribouilles for clips and previews of her latest videos and be sure to subscribe to her YouTube channel to follow her latest completed works. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
BabyBonito is an artist, avatar creator and worldbuilder within VRChat who participant different VRChat communities including a creative collective in VR called GlitchesVR, which has a substack that covers the latest in virtual culture. As a classically trained artist Bonito first got into VR through the process of creating her own avatars, which have a distinctive look having a wiggly fish on her head. She also started to shoot documentaries within VR, and actually got an honorable mention from Raindance Immersive 2023 for her short film called The Painters of Virtual Reality, which documents the still life drawing community on VRChat. I wanted to catch up with Bonito as I saw her at a lot of events throughout Raindance Immersive, and I wanted to hear more about her journey into VR, some of the groups and communities she's involved with on VRChat, her thoughts on how the creator economy may change the creative dynamics on the platform, and some of the other pockets of indie artists and creatives who are actively co-creating different aspects of virtual culture.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Ariel Emerald is a VR filmmaker who has had a short film titled Ulterior Motives and music video screen titled Like Crazy at Raindance Immersive for the past two years. Before getting into social VR, she suffered from social anxiety and isolation, and didn't have the resources to pursue a career in film. But getting into virtual reality via VRChat allowed her to overcome social anxiety, discover the virtual clubbing scene, cultivate a friendship network, develop her cinematography and color grading skills, write and direct a range of different fiction and non-fiction pieces shot within VR, and and bring the community of VR filmmakers together with the Filmmakers of VRChat Discord.I had a chance to catch up Ariel to talk about her journey into VR by overcoming social anxiety, and the latest in her pursuit of a career in filmmaking via VR. We also cover some of the history of filmmaking in VR starting with VRChat user hirabiki's VRCLens that had a VRCLens Sample world that first launched on August 25, 2020 and was initially available on Booth, but now is exclusively available on Gumroad. We cover other turning points like Metacosm Studios, Joe Hunting's on “We Met in Virtual Reality" premiere at Sundance on January 21, 2022, VRCon Film Fest 2022 on December 17, 2022, Phia Bunny's The Virtual Reality Show Film Fest on February 25, 2023, the founding of the Filmmakers of VRChat community and Discord soon afterwards, and then a selection of films shot in VR at both Raindance Immersive 2023 and Raindance Immersive 2024.Filmmaking in VR is still in it's very early phases in exploring non-fiction and documentary forms, replicating existing fiction genres, and then eventually pushing forward new genres of storytelling that will be made possible by the affordances of VR, breaking down geographic access to performers around the world, and having thousands and eventually millions of easily accessible virtual film sets on social VR platforms like VRChat. It's very exciting to see where it'll all go. Ariel Emerald's gives me a glimpse of what's possible when all of these virtual and human resources come together within VR to push at these edges of genre, cultivation of moods and feelings with virtual architecture, and explore new possibilities in storytelling.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
TFMJonny is a full-time VTuber content creator with more than a million subscribers on YouTube and TikTok, but also does Twtich livestreams, releases music on Spotify, and has a background in acting, voices acting, and improv (more links are here on his Linktree). It's a journey that started with live singing within The Great Pug in VRChat, and then transitioned into livestreaming his performances, and eventually into a long-form and short-form video content on all of the major platforms. He uses VRChat to embody different characters as a VTuber, and engage with people via chat roulette platforms like Omegle in a way that blends the virtual and the physical. He stars in a music video of his song Like Crazy that was featured at Raindance Immersive 2024, and I had a chance to catch up him to learn more about his journey into VR, how he helped to start the Star Collective talent group of live performers in VRChat, and finally his recent focus on community building and how he's leveraging beta access to VRChat's creator economy to experiment with a monitized TFMJonny VRChat group to host meetups with his supporters. We move from the evolution of live performance in VRChat, catching the VTubing waves, while also navigating the ever-shifting landscape of content creation with the focus moving from long-form to short-form content where the revenue models and algorithmic tunings are all still in flux. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Starheart is a Musician, Composer, Filmmaker, and VTuber who has been doing live performances in VR over the past couple of years. She started making music videos on Halloween of 2022, and realized that she needed a persistent avatar. VR had already been creating a safe space for her to anonymously experiment with and discover her identity as a transgender woman, and she debuted her VTubing persona of Starheart on April 18, 2023 with a music video called "Elsewhere." Then three days later she opened for Naku on Phia's The Virtual Reality Show, which opened up opportunities to play at over 40 different music venues over the past year. VR has opened up many new opportunities for Starheart to discover the core essence of her identity and new modes of creative expression as an artist, musician, and filmmaker. Starheart is her name and persona, but it's much more than a character. In fact, she told The Metaculture magazine's K. Guillory last year that "Becoming Starheart has been integral for finding my musical voice, and is the most authentic version of myself as a performer I've ever been." I picked up on this thread to hear more about Starheart's creative journey into VR through her music videos, musical performances, filmmaking explorations and creation of her authentic identity beyond her physical body. Starheart's "I Still Love You" ended up winning the Best Music Video this year at Raindance, and this episode will be kicking off a series of interviews that I'll be doing with Raindance Immersive artists to get a better sense of what's been happening at the frontiers of virtual culture within the social VR platform of VRChat.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Cosm is a front-facing, 180-degree, 87-foot diameter, 8K+ LED dome screen that can seat up to 1500 people. Their first location is opening in Los Angeles this weekend showing UFC 303, which is produced by their Cosm Immersive division (formerly LiveLikeVR) focusing on live sporting events, music, entertainment. They also have a Cosm Studios division that will continue to produce educational content for their network of planetariums, but also developing new forms of immersive art and immersive stories. Cosm Studios has been working with different XR artists over the past number of years in order to translate their work into both full dome planetariums and front-facing dome venue formats.The Madison Square Garden Sphere opened up in Las Vegas on September 29, 2023 and has a seating capacity of around 18,600 people. Cosm is on a much smaller scale of a venue at 1500 people that allows them to be a bit more experimental with the types of immersive art, immersive stories, and immersive content as well as live sporting events to fill up their venue. Cosm listed a number of their content partnerships in a LinkedIn post from a couple of months ago where they said, "Transforming live sports and entertainment, Cosm LA invites you to experience the biggest and best live sports from ESPN, the National Basketball Association (NBA), Ultimate Fighting Championship, TNT Sports U.S., and NBC Sports in immersive 8K+. In addition to live sports, Cosm LA will showcase music, entertainment such as Cirque du Soleil Entertainment Group, and immersive art experiences from our Cosm Studios Creators Nancy Baker Cahill, Chris Holmes, Ricardo Romaneiro, and Guy Reid of PLANETARY COLLECTIVE."I had a chance to catch up with the head of Cosm Studios Neil Carty as well as the Senior Director of Studio Development for Cosm Studios Katy Yudin last year at Tribeca Immersive 2023 in order to get the backstory for how Cosm came about as well as how they've been working with immersive artists and immersive storytellers to translate their XR projects so that they could work in their different dome formats. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Ru is a transgender woman who works as a hospice nurse in Ohio, and since 2018 has been involved as an immersive artists, virtual DJ, and event producer holding weekly events in her psychedelic space called Kaleidosky, which is nominated for Best Music Experience for Raindance Immersive 2024. I had a chance to get a tour of her Kaleidosky 3.0 event space where she showed me how the intuitive VJ system works in creating feedback-loop fractal art in a kaleidoscope that's projected onto a sphere serves as a fully immersive skybox with a floating island in the middle that contains plenty of hang out spots, mini games, and a dancefloor. Kaleidosky has an indie art spirit with a lot of avant-garde performances, with many of them being within the trance or psychedelic trance (aka psytrance) genre, but performers are not limited to this genre. There ends up being an experimental vibe, and happened to have a lot more intimate conversations happening and deep listening happening rather than intensive dancing. Ru doesn't even consider Kaleidosky to be a club, but more of an event space for DJs and VJ artists to experiment with their artistic practice. Ru has featured over 300 different performers since opening the first Kaleidosky in December 2022 and holding events on a weekly basis. I had a chance to catch up with Ru to get a lot more context about her story as being one of the most prolific virtual music event producers in the VRChat scene. Be sure to join the Beat Syndicate group in VRChat and follow her on X (formerly Twitter) for more information on upcoming events. Also be sure to also check out these YouTube documentaries about the clubbing scene in VRChat as well as explorations of gender, and the thriving trans community on VRChat.I Went Clubbing in Virtual Reality: Raves of VRChat by Josef Lorenzo on PBS Voices [which features Ru and her Kaleidosky club]Why are there SO many Trans people in VRChat? Gender, Identity, and Self Discovery by The Virtual Reality ShowIdentity, Gender, and VRChat (Why is everyone in VR an anime girl?) by StraszfilmsThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
The Troll Project was created by clinical psychologist Ruth Diaz to interrogate the root causes of trolling, but also tackling the issue head on within social VR spaces with some community-driven solutions that she has experimented with. She's recorded a number of ethnographic interviews with existing trolls, former trolls, and community managers to get a better idea behind the root causes that are leading people to troll others online. And she's put her theories into practice when trolls have interrupted her group discussions on different social VR platforms.Diaz has developed a conflict resiliency framework called The D.O.T. Model, which stands for "Deepen. Orient. Transform." The core idea is that there are polarities between the villain archetypes of the troll who fights versus the victim archetype of the target whose response is flight, and then another polarity axis between the vicarious bystander archetype who freezes vs the hero archetype who takes action to fix the situation and become the victor. The D.O.T. framework helps people navigate between these archetypal polarities while dealing with trolls. She writes, "It is designed so we learn how to re-center without using anything on the outside changing to fit our needs. It is a re-orienting “compass” that identifies polarizing relationships patterns, the non-verbals and emotions that accompany these reactive dances, and where one fits in those polarities. Using a catchy visual and simple recipe for each polarity/archetype we embody in negative interactions; it teaches us how to get back to the humanness of heart and reconnect to those around us in a meaningful way. "Diaz was teaching these conflict resiliency methods in public social VR spaces where the group would get trolled, but then they would apply these principles as a group intervention that would actually sometimes result in a transformative experience for the troll. She then started doing ethnographic interviews on different social VR platforms that could potentially lead towards a more formalized community-driven intervention framework for how to deal with trolling. I had a chance to speak with Diaz a couple of weeks ago in order to get more context into some of her ideas about moving beyond the technological solutions of blocking and banning to more holistically address some of the root causes of trolling with more of a community-driven solution. She's presenting today at the Augmented World Expo in a session titled "Resilient XR Environments: Building & Navigating Conflict-Resilient Spaces", and is ultimately hoping that The Troll Project can "contribute to understanding the complex interplay between human behavior, online identity (in 2d and 3d), and social dynamics, facilitating the development of strategies to mitigate negative behaviors and enhance transformative experiences in online communities." Part of a technological solutionism mindset to to expect that technological architectures can solve human problems, but there's limits to the existing technological mitigating strategies and The Troll Project is a welcomed venture into digging deeper into this problem. Trolling is obviously a huge issue that is unlikely to ever be fully eradicated, but Diaz has seen some of the transformative potential of her process by converting trolls into former trolls, and it's worth exploring these types of community-based alternatives to get to the root of the problem. The Troll Project is looking for funding and collaborations to take it to the next level, and so be sure to check out their Join & Contribute section to get more details for how to get involved. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Today Niantic's 8th Wall is announcing Niantic Studio, which is "a new visual interface for Niantic 8th Wall developers that offers an entirely new way to build immersive 3D and XR experiences." It's essentially a web-based game engine using three.js that can render WebXR experiences and starts to integrate a few of Niantic's Lightship APIs, but will be launching with more integrated computer vision and geospatial mapping features soon. I had a chance to speak with 8th Wall Founder Erik Murphy-Chutorian at length to get a lot more details, and be sure to tune into the podcast or read more information below to get a lot more context on this announcement that's being made at the Augmented World Expo. You can read more about Niantic Studio in their blog announcement.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
YouTuber Brad Lynch (aka SadlyItsBradley) has completely replaced all of his computer screens with an Apple Vision Pro, even going as far as getting a headless Mac Book Pro that does not even have a screen. He's been using the Apple Vision Pro for around 8 hours a day since launch, and I wanted to get a sense of how he's been using it. It turns out the he is mostly streaming his gaming PC via Moonlight and using social VR apps like VRChat via ALVR to hang out with friends and ambient hang out virtual spaces. He's also using SteamVR overlays to augment his virtual reality experience with Steam apps like XSOverlay, VRHandsFrame, and OVR Advanced Settings. It's feels like a very niche use case of a hardcore VR enthusiast, but one that mixes and mashes realities in a way that might be a sign of things to come. Some of the most compelling apps for Lynch are open source that enable experiences that are being driven by his high-end Windows machine.https://twitter.com/SadlyItsBradley/status/1783406980192702842Lynch has been closely following a lot on VR hardware developments over the last number of years, but the Apple Vision Pro has satisfied most of his desires in what he wants within a high-end spatial computing device. The resolution is high enough and the quality good enough so that he can spend more time exploring different screen replacement use cases, augmented VR experiences via overlays, and productivity use cases of XR. Most PCVR enthusiasts are Windows users, and so Lynch's audience has traditionally focused more on the gaming use cases of VR. As a result they have not been as interested in the Apple Vision Pro due to the lack of high-fidelity input controls. But for Lynch, the basic locomotion gestures made available in ALVR are good enough for him to get around within VRChat without needed to hook up or use any external controllers. Because of the perceived or actual gaps between his ideal spatial computing use cases and his VR gaming audience, then Lynch actually scrapped his formal review video and is considering releasing clips or falling back to Q&A livestreams to field many questions about the trajectory of hardware in the XR industry. Lynch also has been enjoying the mashing up of spatial contexts in XR, mostly via the SteamVR overlays and windows but mentions some experiments of bringing in fully spatial objects. It reminds me of the interview that I did with the PlutoVR founders in 2020 when they were experimenting a lot with the idea of multi-app spatial computing paradigms with WebXR and apps like Aardvark by Joe Ludwig. Apple is slowly building out more and more spatial primitives across all of their operating systems, and are slowly becoming more and more game engine-like as new APIs were announced as a part of their WWDC, where visionOS 2.0 was announced as coming out later this Fall. We talk about some of the quality of life features, but also the role of an integrated ecosystem, and what BigScreen Beyond, Valve, and Meta might do to keep up with how Apple is pushing forward these ideas of multi-app integrations within spatial computing. At the moment Lynch's 8 hours of daily usage is likely an extreme outlier, but the types of ways that he's blending realities together feels like there's something deeper that we'll continue to see moving forward. VR typically involves a complete context shift, while AR tends to bring in modular elements of other contexts to shift your existing context. Lynch is on the bleeding edge of fully immersing himself within these virtual contexts, but modulating his experience with these SteamVR overlays in what could best be described as a sort of AR within VR use case. The visionOS 2.0 Beta release (coming this Fall) allows users to overlay their Mac Virtual Display over immersive environments, but SteamVR Overlays already enable this on PCVR experiences and so Lynch's experiences with overlays in VRChat could definitely be a sign of how Apple might e...
On June 12, 2024, VRChat announced they were laying off 30% of their staff, and they posted a letter to all employees sent from CEO Graham Gaylor that said, "We’re reducing the size of our team by around 30% and saying goodbye to many talented team members in the process. This is the hardest change we’ve had to make at VRChat, and Jesse and I take full responsibility for the decisions that brought us here." VRChat listed the four main reasons for the layoff in that they added too many individual contributors to their development team without a management layer to prioritize efforts, which meant they needed to reduce their headcount to folks who were more directly working on features that would lead to a path of profitability over the next five years.VRChat has taken a long time to launch their creator economy, which is still in closed beta, and their VRChat+ subscription models doesn't offer all that many differentiated features to drive users to join beyond a signal of patronage to support the platform. I wanted to gather some active VRChat community members to talk about the burgeoning creator economy as well as other potential pathways to profitability around streaming avatar streamlining, events, contributor / group subscriptions, and emerging features like increased instance size caps. The VRCSpaces community on X (formerly Twitter) held a Space on the day of the announcement discussing the layoffs, and I invited participants Table, yewnyx, and Miss Stabby as well as qDot who wrote up a really great thread breaking down some of the Silicon Vally startup dynamics. More than anything, I wanted to get their take about what VRChat is getting right, and where the most viable pathways for them might be on their road towards profitability.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Raindance Immersive 2024 opened last weekend in VRChat, and will run for the next four weekends featuring the latest innovations of virtual culture with 77% of experiences happening on social VR platforms and 69% that feature VRChat. I spoke at length with co-curators Mária Rakušanová and Joe Hunting about each of the 36 experiences that span nine different categories with four experiences each including Best Art World, Dance Experience, Game, Live Show, Music Experience, Narrative, Out of Competition experiences as well as the Music Video of VR and Short Film of VR. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZ-VmsZ5oAUThere are a number of mixed reality games that will be showing on the Apple Vision Pro and Quest 3, as well as the four narrative experiences that will be showing at a physical exhibition at Raindance, but otherwise the other 30 experiences all have some connection to a social VR platform.The best live show and best dance experience categories are new this year, and Hunting is continuing to cultivate the two film categories featuring short films and music videos, all of which were shot within VRChat. I talk with both Rakušanová and Hunting about the shift from June to November, and then dive into each of the nine categories and 36 experiences highlighting the latest trends and innovations by indie XR artists who are primarily working on social VR platforms including VRChat, Resonite, and EngageXR.
Curator Ana Brzezińska announced the Tribeca Immersive 2024 line-up on May 23, 2024 mentioning that "this year we are not presenting any VR/AR experiences," but rather that they're pivoting this year to featuring eight immersive art pieces by six different artists being shown at Mērcer Labs: Museum of Art and Technology, which first opened to the New York City public on January 4th, 2024. Tribeca Immersive opens on June 6th and runs for 12 days until June 17th, and you can get tickets to see it here. Some immersive creators discovered this surprising news by receiving a refund to their submission, which said "As the immersive landscape evolves, our category is taking new shape to explore formats outside of VR/AR this year and our decision is not a reflection of the quality of your work… Because our change in format was a recent shift and changed our consideration of the works, we will be refunding you your submission fee." Tribeca Immersive will be taking over five of the rooms at Mērcer Labs that includes "a two-story high 5-wall LED immersive hall; a 4DSOUND installation space; and two infinity rooms, including one equipped with volumetric technology that makes you feel like you’re watching a space opera." This space opera location is called the Dragon Room, which is described by Mērcer Labs on their Instagram page in the following way, "Volumetric lighting allows visitors to see voxels (volumetric pixels) of light in space. The light source is modeled as a transparent object in a container of volume. The resulting effect is of passing through a hologram. The use of mirrors and advanced technology, unlock the power of three-dimensional visualization to create a cascade of luminescent particles that appear suspended in infinite space. The individual light particles in an architectural format offer virtually endless opportunities for formal reinvention. The volumetric installation powered by @ledpulse, Dragon02 technology, features a unique configuration exclusive to Mercer Labs. This remarkable installation, the largest of its kind, and incorporates more than half a million LED neurons-microchips, meticulously synchronized to create an unparalleled visual experience."I had a chance to sit down with Brzezińska last week to get a bit more context on this pivot as well as on the eight immersive art pieces in the selection that will be spread across three different daily selections repeating four times over the 12-day run. Also be sure to check out her Substack post titled "In The Stillness of Synthetic Light*. Note on Tribeca Immersive 2024" to get even more context for her intentions and motivations for this year's selection where she says, "I believe that before we start seeking hope — which I expect to become a major theme in many upcoming art events — we need space for reflection and respite that allows for a radical suspension of judgment."I unfortunately won't be able to travel to Tribeca to check it out myself due to a family medical situation that's limiting my travel this year, but I'm looking forward to hearing back from folks in the community to hear how it all comes together. There will not be a formal Storyscapes competition this year, and so I will also be interested to see how the Tribeca Immersive selection continues to evolve over time and whether this represents a permanent shift away from immersive stories towards immersive art, or if we'll see an the inclusion of both forms in the future.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
ILM Immersive & Marvel Studios is releasing What If...?: An Immersive Story exclusively on Apple Vision Pro tomorrow, and I had a chance to take an early look and speak with producer and executive producer Shereif Fattouh as well as technical art director Indira Guerrieri about the process of creating this experience. It's mostly an immersive story with light interactions, but you can't actually die and so it's more about immersing yourself into these worlds with first-person embodiment and exploring around 10 different gesture-based interactions in nearly 50 different interactive moments across the 40 to 45-minute experience. There's also some disembodied moments where you're watching 3D movie cinematics on shards of glass floating in the environment, and so they're also really leaning into how good 3D movies look on the Apple Vision Pro within this experience.Overall, it's blending lots of elements together that feels like something new and a new genre of immersive storytelling that's building upon existing IP, and giving new opportunities to engage with these character's stories as well as their worlds.This is also the first Unreal Engine experience releasing on the Apple Vision Pro store, and so Fattouh told me that ILM Immersive has been making private modifications to get things working. There are features like mixed reality passthrough that are not available yet in Unreal Engine 5.4 yet. Agile Lens' Alex Coulombe told me, "The Epic Games XR team is small so I would I err on the side of assuming no major Vision Pro updates coming soon from Epic. To have the current features working it still requires a source build of Unreal Engine 5.4 (the Epic Games Launcher doesn’t work) and current features include fully immersive mode, hand tracking / gesture recognition, forward and deferred rendering." So hopefully we'll get more on this soon from Epic Games, but at least we know it's possible and we'll start to see more Unreal Engine experiences on the Apple Vision Pro soon.Be sure to check out the transcript below for more information, and also don't miss my episode featuring my talk on an Elemental Theory of Presence, Experiential Design, and Immersive Storytelling, as well as my previous 480+ episodes on the topic of immersive storytelling over the past decade including previous coverage on Cycles, Myth: A Frozen Tale, Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge, and a conversation with John Gaeta about ILMxLab's The Holo-Cinema from Sundance New Frontier 2016.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
The 77th edition of the Cannes Film Festival is featuring an inaugural Immersive Competition with eight pieces in competition along with six pieces outside of competition. I had a chance to speak with Elie Lavasseur, the Head of Immersive Competition Festival de Cannes, to get a bit more context for how this came about, their curatorial intention, and an overview of the program. I've had a chance to see 5 out of the 8 pieces in competition, and all 6 of the non-competition pieces curated by Atlas V in an exhibition titled "exhibition 'exhibition 'Cinema Beyond the Frame: An Introduction to Virtual Reality'. I'll link my Voices of VR podcast coverage down below.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uh7XTZNtzGsImmersive Competition for Festival de Cannes:Evolver -- #1104: Tribeca XR: “Evolver” is an Awe-Inspiring Fluid Dynamics Simulation of Human Blood Flow Giving an Embodied Experience of InterbeingColored -- #1251: From Book to Play to AR Installation, “Colored” Explores the Forgotten Segregation History of Claudette ColvinMaya: The Birth Of A Superhero -- #1244: “Maya: The Birth” Animation Uses Mythic Symbols & Magical Realism to Explore Menstrual Taboos as well as #1379: “Maya: The Birth of a Superhero” Evolves Storytelling Grammar with Magical Realism, Dream Logic, & Interactive EmbodimentTraversing The Mist -- #1325 End of Tung-Yen Chou’s Gay Sauna Trilogy with “Traversing the Mist”Human Violins: Prelude (Multi-user Version)En AmourTelos IThe RoamingImmersive Selection of Non-competitive works:Notes on Blindness (2016) -- #1068: “Notes on Blindness” VR Experience Receives a Legacy Peabody Award for Interactive StorytellingBattlescar (2018) -- Unpublished interviews coming soon Spheres (2018) -- #617: Journey into a Black Hole with “SPHERES: Songs of Spacetime”Gloomy Eyes (2019) -- Unpublished interview coming soon Missing Pictures: Naomi Kawase (2022) -- #1103: Tribeca XR: Translating Unmade Films into Spatialized VR Story Treatments with “Missing Pictures”Emperor (2023) -- #1276: Beautiful “Emperor” Explores Aphasia Communication Gaps with Compelling Interactions
One of the most common ways to describe the experience of VR is through the lens of presence, and in this episode I'm going to do a deep dive into the existing academic literature of presence in order to more fully contextualize my approach to it. This is my Storycon 2022 keynote where I elaborate on my elemental approach to presence as well as my thoughts on experiential design and immersive storytelling. I use the four archetypal elements to break down presence into four primary components where fire represents active presence, air represents mental and social presence, water represents emotional presence, and earth represents embodied and environmental presence. And I use the lens of quality, context, character, and story to explore the fundamental components of experiential design.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_2_qvIymt4I started to develop my approach to presence through a number of Voices of VR podcast interviews in the fall and winter of 2016, and I was then introduced to the work of Dustin Chertoff, whose presence work from 2008-2010 draws upon the field of experiential marketing. He similarly boils presence down into the components of Active Presence, Cognitive Presence, Relational Presence, Affective Presence, and Sensory Presence. When I interviewed Chertoff in February 2017, we agreed that our approaches to presence were functionally identical. I then went on to present my preliminary ideas on presence at a Silicon Valley Virtual Reality conference keynote in March 2017, and I've continued to develop these ideas over the past 5-7 years.I gave this Storycon Keynote on May 5, 2022, which happened to be the 8th-year anniversary of the Voices of VR podcast. Now two years later, I'm celebrating my 10-year Voices of VR podcast anniversary in part by airing this talk as well as a few others. I consistently refer folks to it as one of my more fully-formed and rigorous elaborations that I've given of my elemental theory of presence. I not only contextualize it with Chertoff's work, but also with the broader body of academic presence research and it's history. I would often find there were would be different presence theories talking about some of the same concepts, but using different terminology. In this talk, I take an archetypal approach that synthesizes these different frameworks through an archetypal lens. At times it can be a bit laborious reciting an archetypal complex of keywords, and there are definitely sections of this talk that are probably better off read than spoken. So I'd highly recommend also checking out the video version as well as the PDF of the slides, and/or the fully-annotated transcript in the shownotes that includes the embedded slides and linked citations. That all being said, be warned that this is still probably way too dense for an hour-long talk, as it's more like an entire semester's worth of material. It's also probably closer to a Ph.D. defense than a synthesized book or practical handbook that's ready for prime time. As with many other aspects of XR, many theoretical aspects are still developing, emerging, boundaries being pushed, and rules being broken. So it's in that spirit that this is my latest fully-formed iteration of these ideas.This talk also leans more into the theoretical parts, and some of the more practical applications often come within the context of individual interviews where the context is a lot more bounded to a specific situation, experience, or story. Be sure to check out my 30+ hours of coverage from Venice 2023 as an example for how I've put these ideas into practice. It's been through many invited lectures and keynotes around the world where I've been able to develop these ideas by engaging with audiences and interviewing thousands of creators over the past decade. At some point, I'm still hoping to go through a more formal write-up of these ideas to give them even more rigor, and perhaps potentially even go through a more for...
May of 2024 marks the ten-year anniversary of the Voices of VR podcast, and I wanted to air a featured session that I presented at SXSW 2023 called "The Ultimate Potential of VR: Promises and Perils." This is a 45-minute talk that distills down the biggest insights from my 3-hour episode #1000 of the Voices of VR podcast, which aggregated 120 of the best answers to the question of "What is the ultimate potential of VR, and what it might be able to enable?" This talk synthesizes all of the most exciting potentials as well as scariest perils, and provides an annotated roadmap of my coverage over the past decade on the Voices of VR podcast.Back in 2016, I synthesized the first 400 answers to the question of the ultimate potential of VR in order to map out the contextual domains of virtual reality within a Silicon Valley Virtual Reality conference talk. I also use the same contextual mapping within my XR Ethics Manifesto talk in 2019, which a summary can be seen in my Landscape of XR Ethics talk that I featured in the previous episode. I provide a lot more background to this archetypal mapping of contexts in a forthcoming paper titled "Privacy Pitfalls of Contextually-Aware AI: Sensemaking Frameworks for Context and XR Data Qualities" that will hopefully be published sometime in 2024.This Ultimate Potential of VR talk combines both the promises and perils exploring both the benefits and risks of XR through these different contextual domains. I have also added a categories section on my VoicesofVR.com website that uses this same contextual framework as a taxonomy to classify over 1000 episodes. I'm still in the process of tagging my entire backlog, but this talk should provide a good overview to this contextual taxonomy if you want to dive deeper into more episodes across any of the different areas. Again, you can explore these different sections by navigating to the categories section of my website.I also just uploaded a new video version of this talk with some updated slides and citations. Because I do rely heavily on about 140 slides throughout this talk, then I do highly recommend either watching the video version, listening along with the PDF of slides, or reading through the show notes afterwards where you'll find a full transcript with all 140 slides embedded throughout the transcript as well as links to over 170 of the footnotes and citations with hyperlinks. The podcast version and write-up will also include the Q&A session that happened after the talk at SXSW. I also wanted to elaborate on one other point about my motivation in putting together this talk. Over the past decade, there's been a persistent cycle where each year there's some journalist or tech pundit who pre-maturely declares the death of virtual reality. Now there have not been very many clear objective metrics to help quantify what's been happening in the broader XR industry to the outside world, which has made it difficult to establish a broad consensus as where the XR industry is at and how it might be evolving. But it's also also fostered an environment where skepticism about XR generally has been able to persist. After conducting over 2000 oral history interviews with XR creators over the past decade, it's given me many insights about the underlying affordances of the XR medium across many different contextual domains, which can be difficult to summarize or even communicate. That's what I hope to do in this talk. I wanted to lay out the evidence for why I believe virtual reality and spatial computing more broadly is a compelling enough medium to persist throughout these cycles of skepticism, and eventually find real utility throughout the full spectrum of the human experience. I actually have no idea when virtual reality may become a mass medium that's completely ubiquitous, but I'm convinced that it will some day in the future based upon some of the underlying principles that I lay out in this talk.Again, this talk is a 60,
This is a 19-minute talk that I gave at Laval Virtual 2023 that is summarizing the work that I've done on XR Ethics over the past ten years. There's around 60 slides in this talk, and so you may prefer watching the video version over on YouTube for the full multi-modal experience, or this audio-only podcast version includes the Q&A session at the end. And you can also check out the show notes for this episode that has each of the slides embedded within the full transcript along with all of the linked footnotes in case you'd like to dig into the full context of any one of these topics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bab0CM7zK4There's a lot of ground that I attempt to cover within my 15-20 minute allotted time slot at Laval Virtual 2023, but this should provide a high-level roadmap to how I see the landscape of XR ethics. The landscape of XR ethical considerations is also an ever-expanding area, and so this is far from a complete treatment, but hopefully covers some of the major issues that I've been covering on the Voices of VR podcast over the past decade. This talk at Laval Virtual was on Apr 13, 2023, which was a month after my Featured Session at SXSW on March 12, 2023 about The Ultimate Potential of VR: Promises & Perils. That talk explored both the exalted potentials of XR as well as the more troublesome perils, and this talk was focusing on just the perils. They both use a contextual framework that I elaborate more on within an upcoming paper titled "Privacy Pitfalls of Contextually-Aware AI: Sensemaking Frameworks for Context and XR Data Qualities" that was written for the Existing Law and Extended Reality Symposium at Standford Cyberpolicy Center in January 2023, and will hopefully be published later this year. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in![1]My name is Kent Bye, and I do the Voices of VR podcast. And today, I'm going to be doing a tour in the landscape of the XR moral dilemmas and ethical considerations.And I'm attempting to cover all of the XR ethical moral dilemmas within the next 15 to 20 minutes [obviously not all of them, but a high-level sampling]. And so it's pretty ambitious. I do have the slides available with lots of footnotes.`I've been doing the Voices of VR podcast since 2014. And so I've recorded over 2,000 interviews and published over 1,200 of them, so just over 2 thirds of them that I've recorded.[2]And in the process of talking to a lot of folks within the XR community, there's naturally been a lot of different ethical and moral dilemmas. And so this is like a broad overview of the landscape of XR ethical and moral dilemmas. And so I'll be diving into each of these, but this is just to give you a bit of a sense of the landscape.[3]And it actually takes me back to Laval Virtual back in 2019, where I was brought out to brainstorm with a group of folks…[4]some of the different ethical and moral dilemmas. And so we have lots of these post-it notes. And so we're struggling with how do we start to organize the whole landscape of all these different ethical and moral dilemmas.[5], [6]And so In SVVR in 2016, I had given a presentation trying to map out the ultimate potentials of virtual reality of all the different domains and industry verticals and potentials. And so I asked people at the end of every podcast, "What's the ultimate potential of VR?" And they'd say, "Well, it's education. It's entertainment. It's being able to connect with friends and family. It's empathy. It's doing stuff for your career." And so this was like a start of a cartography of the different domains of human experience…[7]which ended up being very helpful for starting to map out these ethical and moral dilemmas into all these different domains or contexts.[8]And so at the end of 2019, I did a whole talk on the XR Ethics Manifesto. In 2019, I was doing a lot of talks about privacy…
The contributing editor and co-founder of fxguide Mike Seymour invited me onto his fxpodcast to share some of my thoughts on the Apple Vision Pro, the ecosystem differences between the Quest and Vision Pro, the potential for different killer apps, and where we see it going in the future. This is a rebroadcast of fxpodast episode #368, but with some additional context about Seymour's work with digital humans as well as the training application that he's developing on the Apple Vision Pro.I still see the Vision Pro primarily as a developer kit, but there are certainly many productivity & screen replacement as well as media consumption use cases. I'm hoping to do some more coverage of the Vision Pro here soon, including airing an interview with Resolution Games' Tommy Palm about their development of the Game Room application produced by Apple. Apple announced yesterday that they'll be announcing some new products on May 7th likely including the Apple Pencil 3 given Tim Cook's X/Twitter post saying "Pencil us in for May 7! ✏️ #AppleEvent, and also "revamped versions of the iPad Pro and Air, according to people familiar with the matter" per Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. I expect more Apple Vision Pro updates and news to be given at WWDC on June 10-14, and a first-look at how the broader XR industry is adopting the Apple Vision Pro at Augmented World Expo (AWE) on June 18-20, which I unfortunately will not be able to attend due to a family medical situation. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
The OpenXR 1.1 minor release comes out today, which moves some of the more commonly used extensions into core and it also marks a new Khronos Group commitment to a yearly release cycle. It's been nearly five years since the initial release of OpenXR 1.0 on July 29, 2019, and Khronos Group President Neil Trevett tells me that it's been one of the most successful open standards they've ever published, and I had a chance to catch up with Trevett and OpenXR working group chair Alfredo Muniz to talk about the range of conformant XR devices, engines, programs, what's happening with Apple and OpenXR, next steps for where they plan to take the standard in the future, and how you can get more involved either through their OpenXR Discord channel, OpenXR Forums, or OpenXR GitHub Issue Tracker. Also, here's a link to the announcement slides for OpenXR 1.1, which have some really helpful overview information about how broadly OpenXR has been adopted, as well as a sneak peak at some of what is coming soon including "extending hand tracking, enhanced handling of spatial entities, expanded haptics support, controller render models (glTF), increased accessibility, and Metal (Mac OS) support."I posted a thread on X / Twitter that highlights some of these slides from the OpenXR 1.1 announcement page. Here's five previous interviews covering the evolution of OpenXR since 2015:My 2015 interview with Neil Trevett with some preliminary thoughts about an open standard for VRMy 2016 interview with Neil Trevett announcing the formation of what would become OpenXRMy 2017 GDC conversation with Joe Ludwig marking the announcement of OpenXR.My 2018 GDC conversation with OpenXR working group chair Nick Whiting with a first look at OpenXR.My 2019 SIGGRAPH conversation with Neil Trevett marking the official OpenXR 1.0 releaseAlso see some related topics within my interviews tagged with open standards.
I'm digging into my unpublished interview archives backlog to publish this conversation with Khronos Group President Neil Trevett marking the 1.0 release of OpenXR that happened during SIGGRAPH in July 2019. We talk about the intention of OpenXR as a specification, and I figured that it's worth looking back at the evolution of the specification as it has become quite a prominent open standard within the XR industry. Be sure to also see episodes #1382 that I just published from GDC 2018, #507 from GDC 2017, and #1385 with a current update on OpenXR 1.1.
OpenXR 1.1 is being released today, and so I'm digging into my archive of unpublished interviews to go back GDC 2018 when OpenXR working group chairman Nick Whiting presented some of the first information about the OpenXR specification, which wouldn't have it's initial release over a year later on July 29, 2019 (see episode #1384 for more on that). I'll also be publishing an update on OpenXR 1.1 in episode #1385, and so these next three episodes should provide a pretty comprehensive look at the evolution of OpenXR over the past 6+ years. Also be sure to check out episode #507 from GDC 2017 where I chat with Joe Ludwig about the initial announcement of OpenXR.
I interviewed The Golden Key co-directors Matthew Niederhauser & Marc Da Costa remotely during SXSW XR Experience 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.Here is all of my coverage of projects in and around SXSW XR Experience 2024:#1360: Sneak Peak of SXSW XR Experience Projects, Events, & Lounges with Programmer Blake Kammerdiener#1362: “The Tent” Tabletop AR Mixes Photogrammetry, Volumetric Capture, & Theatre in Modern-Day Fairytale about Unhoused Crisis#1363: DIY 360 Video for Perspective-Taking and Investigating Murder of Trans Woman in “Her Name Was Gisberta”#1364: Step into the Movies with “The Vortex Cinema” Blending Cinematic Storytelling, Gaming, & Escape Room Mechanics#1365: “We Speak Their Names in Hushed Tones” Explores Impact of Migration on Families Left Behind in Poetic Immersive Still Life & Audio Documentary#1366: Electric South’s Ingrid Kopp on Increasing Access to Immersive Production Resources to African XR Creators + Tribeca 2019 Program#1367: “Escape to Shanghai” Immersive Doc Tells the Story of Jewish Refugees who Fled to China to Escape the Holocaust#1368: “Walk to Westerbork” Immersive Doc Shares Remarkable Story about a Dutch Jewish Holocaust Survivor Who Defied the Odds#1369: Interactive UN Doc “Dreaming of Lebanon” Blends Interactive Oral History, 360 Video, and Speculative Worldbuilding#1370: “Madame Pirate: Code of Conduct” Blends Spatial Representations to Tell the Story of Most Powerful Pirate in History#1371: “Pirate Queen: The Forgotten Legend” Fuses Escape Room Mechanics with Environmental Storytelling & Embodied Gameplay#1372: “Last We Left Off” 360 Video Plays Switches Between D&D Imaginal Realms with Physical Reality, & Exhibiting with Apple Vision Pro#1373: Interactive Biopic Doc on Opera Singer “Joseph Rouleau: Final Encore” that Mixes Modalities#1374: Telling Stories of Indigenous Leaders with OurWorlds.io’s “Chief” on Apple Vision Pro#1375: Unique 2D Hand-Drawn Animation Technique with “Tadpole” Leads to a Provocative Immersive Story#1376: Indie Musician Roman Rappak’s Annual Mixed Reality Performance Experiments & Expansion into “Detachment” Immersive Story#1377: Immersive Producer Katayoun Dibamehr’s Journey to Becoming an Award-Winning Producer at Floréal#1378: Anagram’s Mental Health Series Continues with Preview of “Impulse” Mixed Reality Story about ADHD#1379: “Maya: The Birth of a Superhero” Evolves Storytelling Grammar with Magical Realism, Dream Logic, & Interactive Embodiment#1380: “Reimagined Volume III: Young Thang” Adapts a Nigerian Folktale while Refining the Grammar of Spatial Storytelling#1381: “Soul Paint” Wins SXSW Special Jury Prize for Innovative Body Mapping Technique to Spatially Draw Your Emotions#1382: Interactive Generative AI Storytelling Installation “The Golden Key” Wins Top Prize at SXSW Leveraging Archetypal Folklore MotifsPREVIOUSLY COVERED PROJECTS[PART 1 from Tribeca Immersive 2023 – Part 1 + Part 2 debuts at SXSW] #1244: “Maya: The Birth” Animation Uses Mythic Symbols & Magical Realism to Explore Menstrual Taboos[from Venice Immersive 2023] #1272: Kickoff of Venice Immersive 2023 Coverage with Winner “Songs by a Passerby” and Atmospheric Storytelling[from Venice Immersive 2023] #1276: Beautiful “Emperor” Explores Aphasia Communication Gaps with Compelling Interactions[from Venice Immersive 2023] #1287: “Letters from Drancy” is an Incredibly Emotional and Powerful Story About the Holocaust[from Venice Immersive 2023] #1292: Pioneering the VR Essay with “Shadowtime” Critiquing Sci-Fi Dystopic Aspirations of VR[from Venice Immersive 2023] #1293: The Personalized AI-Driven “Tulpamancer” VR Sandpaintings with AI Text to Audio & VR Workflow[from Venice Immersive 2023] #1303: A Deep Dive into Breaking Down the Experiential Design of “The Imaginary Friend”[from DocLab 2023] #1331: Recreating Spatial Presence in Caves ...
I interviewed Soul Paint co-directors Sarah Ticho & Niki Smit remotely ahead of the SXSW XR Experience 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Reimagined Volume III: Young Thang director Melissa Joyner and co-directors Julie Cavaliere & Michaela Ternasky-Holland remotely after the SXSW XR Experience 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Maya: The Birth of a Superhero co-directors Poulomi Basu & CJ Clarke remotely after the SXSW XR Experience 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Impulse (Preview) co-directors May Abdalla & Barry Gene Murphy remotely after the SXSW XR Experience 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Floréal director Katayoun Dibamehr during Tribeca 2023 about her journey into becoming an award-winning immersive producer. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Detachment director Roman Rappak remotely after the SXSW XR Experience 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Tadpole director Diane Catsburrow Linnet remotely after the SXSW XR Experience 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Chief co-director Catherine Eng remotely after the SXSW XR Experience 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Joseph Rouleau: Final Encore co-directors Émilie Rosas & Colas Wohlfahrt remotely ahead of the SXSW XR Experience 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Last We Left Off director Connor Illsley remotely during SXSW XR Experience 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Pirate Queen: The Forgotten Legend director Eloise Singer & writer Maja Bodenstein a few days after the launch of their game on March 7th. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Madame Pirate: Code of Conduct co-directors Morgan Ommer & Dan-Chi Huang remotely ahead of the SXSW XR Experience 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Dreaming of Lebanon co-directors Martin Waehlish & Cynthia Sawma remotely after SXSW XR Experience 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Walk to Westerbork director Mary Matheson remotely ahead of the SXSW XR Experience 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Escape to Shanghai director Charlotte Mikkelborg remotely during SXSW XR Experience 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Electric South director Ingrid Kopp during Tribeca Immersive 2019. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed We Speak Their Names in Hushed Tones director Omoregie Osakpolor remotely ahead of the SXSW XR Experience 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed The Vortex Cinema director Max Sacker as well as actors Christian Stotz & Brian Chase remotely ahead of the SXSW XR Experience 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Her Name Was Gisberta director Sérgio Galvão Roxo remotely ahead of the SXSW XR Experience 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed The Tent creator Rory Mitchell remotely ahead of the SXSW XR Experience 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
The Agog Immersive Media Institute officially launched today by Grist-founder Chip Giller and philanthropist / investor Wendy Schmit. They describe Agog as "a groundbreaking initiative at the intersection of technology, communications, and social impact. Agog, a philanthropic organization, will help creators and nonprofit leaders harness the power of extended reality (XR) technologies to spur positive social transformation, opening new avenues for empathy, understanding, and activism."I had a chance to get a bit more context on Agog from co-founder Giller as well as advisor / consultant Amy Seidenwurm, who ran Meta's VR for Good initiative for six years. We talk about their five main areas of focus that include social justice and equity, high-impact storytelling/world-building, research, education and outreach, and advocacy and policy. They've been operating in stealth for a number of months already having been involved in a number of projects, and I'm really quite excited to see how they can help fill in some of the gaps that are needed within the growing XR ecosystem as more and more non-profits and social change organizations start to wrap their minds around how to integrate immersive media within their missions. Be sure to check out the Agog.org website for more information, and check it out in the Quest browser to see the first WebXR and AR iterations for what they intend to develop into a fully-spatial brand. It's not launching with full iOS or visionOS support yet, and I am able to see the AR components on Android, but it isn't as fully interactive on Quest yet. Still early days for WebXR, but keep an eye on how they continue to develop their website with more immersive features.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I had a chance to speak with Blake Kammerdiener, the lead programmer of the SXSW XR Experience selection to get a sneak peak of the 36 projects that are being featured this year (14 projects in the XR Experience Competition, 18 projects in the XR Experience Spotlight, and 4 XR Experience Special Events). The XR Experience Exhibition will be running from Sunday March 10 to Tuesday March 12 from 11a to 6p CDT. New this year to the Exhibition Floor will be sponsor booths on the main exhibition on Floor 3 of the Fairmont (Arizona State University MIX Center, Meta, Taiwan Creative Content Agency (TAICCA)'s Taiwan Pavilion, and Xn Québec), as well as XR lounges in conference rooms including the Canadian Innovation Lounge, and L'Effet Québec on Fairmont's 3rd floor. There are also some XR Experience projects on the 4th and 5th Floors as well, and the XR Track also runs from March 10-12, and will be split between the Hilton Hotel and the 5th floor of the Fairmont. Here's an unofficial spreadsheet listing some XR parties and XR events happening during SXSW as well, and be sure to check out events at the Canada House & Ireland House.I will unfortunately not be in Austin, TX to attend SXSW physically this year due to a family medical issue, but I will be covering 1/2 to 2/3 of the SXSW XR Experience projects remotely. Here is a list of upcoming interviews as well as some previously covered projects at SXSW including 6 from Venice Immersive, 1 from Tribeca Immersive, and 1 from IDFA DocLab. #1360: Sneak Peak of SXSW XR Experience Projects, Events, & Lounges with Programmer Blake Kammerdiener#1362: “The Tent” Tabletop AR Mixes Photogrammetry, Volumetric Capture, & Theatre in Modern-Day Fairytale about Unhoused Crisis#1363: DIY 360 Video for Perspective-Taking and Investigating Murder of Trans Woman in “Her Name Was Gisberta”#1364: Step into the Movies with “The Vortex Cinema” Blending Cinematic Storytelling, Gaming, & Escape Room Mechanics#1365: “We Speak Their Names in Hushed Tones” Explores Impact of Migration on Families Left Behind in Poetic Immersive Still Life & Audio Documentary#1366: Electric South’s Ingrid Kopp on Increasing Access to Immersive Production Resources to African XR Creators + Tribeca 2019 Program#1367: “Escape to Shanghai” Immersive Doc Tells the Story of Jewish Refugees who Fled to China to Escape the Holocaust#1368: “Walk to Westerbork” Immersive Doc Shares Remarkable Story about a Dutch Jewish Holocaust Survivor Who Defied the Odds#1369: Interactive UN Doc “Dreaming of Lebanon” Blends Interactive Oral History, 360 Video, and Speculative Worldbuilding#1370: “Madame Pirate: Code of Conduct” Blends Spatial Representations to Tell the Story of Most Powerful Pirate in History#1371: “Pirate Queen: The Forgotten Legend” Fuses Escape Room Mechanics with Environmental Storytelling & Embodied Gameplay#1372: “Last We Left Off” 360 Video Plays Switches Between D&D Imaginal Realms with Physical Reality, & Exhibiting with Apple Vision Pro#1373: Interactive Biopic Doc on Opera Singer “Joseph Rouleau: Final Encore” that Mixes Modalities#1374: Telling Stories of Indigenous Leaders with OurWorlds.io’s “Chief” on Apple Vision Pro#1375: Unique 2D Hand-Drawn Animation Technique with “Tadpole” Leads to a Provocative Immersive Story#1376: Indie Musician Roman Rappak’s Annual Mixed Reality Performance Experiments & Expansion into “Detachment” Immersive Story#1377: Immersive Producer Katayoun Dibamehr’s Journey to Becoming an Award-Winning Producer at Floréal#1378: Anagram’s Mental Health Series Continues with Preview of “Impulse” Mixed Reality Story abou ADHD#1379: “Maya: The Birth of a Superhero” Evolves Storytelling Grammar with Magical Realism, Dream Logic, & Interactive Embodiment#1380: “Reimagined Volume III: Young Thang” Adapts a Nigerian Folktale while Refining the Grammar of Spatial Storytelling
Yale Anthropologist Lisa Messeri spent a year doing field work in Los Angeles in 2018 studying the political ecology of the VR community, and will be releasing her landmark book called In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles on Friday, March 8th. It's the best book about the culture of VR that I've read so far as it is pulling in many insights from Science and Technology Studies (STS), anthropology, social sciences, sci fi, pop culture, and philosophy. Making claims about reality is daunting for any working scholar in the 21st Century, and Messeri uses the feeling of "unreality" as a analytical tool to analyze not only virtual reality, but also the fracturing nature of our political context, but also the unreality of Los Angeles as the factory of dreams and façade-like architecture that blurs the boundary for what's deeply real vs what's surface scaffolding enough to transport you into another reality. Messeri uses the framing of fantasy to interrogate a number of claims being made by the VR community circa 2018. Fantasy by her definition could include both positive aspirational dreams, but they could also turn out to be deluded illusions. I personally prefer the using the phrase of potential since it is a bit more neutral for me, and includes both the promising positive potentials as well as the more perilous negative potentials. But she splits her book into three parts the Fantasy of Location exploring the unreality of Los Angeles as well as how VR transports you into another world per Mel Slaters place illusion. The second part is the Fantasy of Being deconstructs the VR as the ultimate empathy machine per Chris Milk's infamous 2015 TED Talk. Then the third part explores the Fantasy of Representation with the aspirations of the LA VR community to create a more diverse and equitable ecosystem that transcends the bias and power dynamics of Silicon Valley. In each one of these three sections, Messeri uses case studies and follows specific individuals over time to see whether or not some of these aspirations and potentials end up becoming grounded into physical reality, or whether they end up collapsing into a more deluded illusion.I was inspired to dig into my backlog of 800+ unpublished Voices of VR podcast episodes to publish some interviews that I conducted between 2017-2019 featuring some of the main characters and protagonists featured in Messeri's book:Marci Jastrow is featured in Chapter 3 letting Messeri become a scholar-in-residence at Technicolor Experience CenterCarrie Shaw of Embodied Labs is featured in Chapter 5, and radically opens up her business to Messeri to studyJackie Morie is featured in Chapter 6 as Messeri deconstructs some of the gender essentialist claims that VR is a medium that's a natural fit for women.And Joanna Popper is featured in Chapter 7 as Messeri breaks down the unique pathways into emerging technology that she was noting as an interesting trend from an anthropological perspective. I had a chance to read through an advanced copy of In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles, and it's already started to make a huge impact on the way that I think about the many dimensions of unreality in our present day realities ranging from the surreal experiences of VR presence to the fractured reality bubbles of our political discourse to the ways in which techno-utopian solutionism can impact the philosophies that are driving how technologies like AI are developed aspiring towards speculations of Artificial General Intelligence or Artificial Superintelligence. I even started applying Messeri's unreality analytic to make sense of some of what Alvin Wang Graylin was saying in our discussion about Our Next Reality. I said, "I found myself is this kind of unreality of a potential imaginal future of this post-scarcity, post-labor context where all of our problems have been solved,
Flashback to 2018 with Joanna Popper talking about the state of Location-Based VR. Popper is featured in the 7th chapter of Yale anthropologist Lisa Messeri's In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles field study conducted in 2018.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Flashback to VRLA 2017 with Jacki Morie talking about her patented Scent Collar and VR history. Morie is featured in the 6th chapter of Yale anthropologist Lisa Messeri's In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles field study conducted in 2018.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Flashback to VRLA 2018 with Carrie Shaw talking about the founding story of Embodied Labs, which provides VR training to care givers. Shaw is featured in the 5th chapter of Yale anthropologist Lisa Messeri's In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles field study conducted in 2018.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.zMusic: Fatality
Flashback to SXSW 2019 with Marcie Jastrow talking about the Technicolor Experience Center, and the Mars Home Planet location-based experience. Jastrow is featured in the 3rd chapter of Yale anthropologist Lisa Messeri's In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles field study conducted in 2018.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
The Polys Awards brought together all four winners of the Ombudsperson of the Year Award for a panel discussion in Engage XR on Human Rights Day, December 10, 2023, to talk about the tech policy and ethical implications of XR technologies. The panel included myself (2020 winner) along with Avi Bar-Zeev (2021 winner), Brittan Heller (2022 winner), and Micaela Mantegna (2023 winner). This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
The book Our Next Reality: How the AI-powered Metaverse Will Reshape the World is structured as a debate between Alvin Wang Graylin and Louis Rosenberg, who each have over 30 years of experience in XR and AI. Graylin embodies the eternal optimist and leans towards techno-utopian views while Rosenberg voices the more skeptical perspectives while leaning more towards cautious optimism and acknowledging the privacy hazards, control and alignment risks, as well as the ethical and moral dilemmas. The book is the strongest when it speaks about the near-term implications of how AI will impact XR in specific contexts, but starts to go off the rails for me when they start exploring the more distant-future implications of Artificial Superintelligence at the economic and political scales of society. At the same time, both sides acknowledge the positive and negative potential futures, and that neither path are necessarily guaranteed as it will be up to the tech companies, governments, and broader society which path of the future we go down.What I really appreciated about the book is that both Graylin and Rosenberg reference many personal examples and anecdotes around the intersection of XR and AI throughout each of their three decades of experience working with emerging technologies. Even though the book is structured as a debate, they also both agree on some fundamental premises that the Metaverse is inevitable (or rather spatial computing, XR, or mixed reality), and that AI has been and will continue to be a critical catalyst for it's growth and evolution. They both also wholeheartedly agree that it is a matter of time before we achieve either an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) or Artificial Superintelligence (ASI), but they differ on the implications of these technologies. Graylin believes that ASI has the potential to lead humanity into post-labor, post-scarcity, techno-utopian future reality where all of humanity has willingly given up all cultural, political, and economic control over to our ASI overlords who become these perfectly rationally-driven philosopher kings, but yet still see humans as their ancestors via an uncharacteristically anthropomorphized emotional connection with compassionate affinity. Rosenberg dismisses this as a sort of wishful thinking that humans would be able to exert any control over ASI, and that ASI would be anything other than cold-hearted, calculating, ruthless, and unpredictably alien. Rosenberg also cautions that humanity could be headed towards cultural stagnation if the production of all art, media, music, and creative endeavors is ceded over to ASI, and that unaligned and self-directed ASI could be more dangerous than nuclear weapons. Graylin acknowledges the duality of possible futures within the context of this interview, but also tends to be biased towards the more optimistic future within the actual book.There is also a specific undercurrent of ideas and philosophies about AI that are woven throughout Graylin's and Rosenberg's book. Philosopher and historian Dr. Émile P. Torres has coined the acronym "TESCREAL" in collaboration with AI Ethicist Dr. Timnit Gebru that stands for Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism and Longtermism. Torres wrote an article in Truthdig elaborating on these interconnected bundle of TESCREAL ideologies are the underpinnings of many of the debates about ASI and AGI (with links included in the original quote):At the heart of TESCREALism is a “techno-utopian” vision of the future. It anticipates a time when advanced technologies enable humanity to accomplish things like: producing radical abundance, reengineering ourselves, becoming immortal, colonizing the universe and creating a sprawling “post-human” civilization among the stars full of trillions and trillions of people. The most straightforward way to realize this utopia is by building superintelligent AGI.
On February 13, 2024, Felix & Paul studios announced that they had secured multi-million dollar financing for their next Location-Based Entertainment (LBE) VR experience that was their "most ambitious project yet" and based upon a brand-new IP that's set to launch in 2025. They had such a big success with their previous LBE of The Infinite (based upon documentary footage shot over the course of 2.5 years on the International Space Station) that they realized that LBE experiences were going to become a significant part of the future of their business. The press release didn't provide a lot of other details, and so I wanted to catch up with Felix & Paul Studios co-founder Paul Raphaël to share a bit more context for how this came about, more details on their LBE successes with The Infinite, and whatever else he could share about this new project. In the second half of this conversation, we talk about his experiences with the Apple Vision Pro, how Apple is emphasizing entertainment experiences and 180 videos, and how they want to eventually bring many of their 360-videos Felix & Paul Studios productions or potential adaptations to the platform. We also talk about how Felix & Paul is continuing to move beyond just cinematic 360 documentary video, and into CGI-based fiction projects like their Magic Leap 2 AR piece Jim Henson’s The Storyteller, which premiered at Venice Immersive.It's certainly an exciting time for the industry, and Felix & Paul Studios will be building their LBE experiences from the ground up taking what they've learned from cinematic 360 documentary videos and translating that into full, 6-DoF, fiction narrative VR experiences with social dimensions with even more immersive installation onboarding and offboarding plans as well.
Stranger Things VR is part action adventure, psychological thriller, and deep dive character study of Vecna, who the main villain of the Stranger Things tv show introduced in Season 4. I have only seen Season 1, and so there there parts where I had to watch a recap to get a bit more context but it definitely can still work as a standalone piece. Seasons 1 and 4 are apparently the ones that give the most context to this VR experience, but there are also other references that from throughout all of the seasons. If you've a fan of interactive VR narrative games, then there is plenty of interesting experimentations with pushing forward what's possible in telling stories in VR. There are also enough innovative VR mechanics to have some satisfying gameplay elements, but the story is clearly the main focus here.I had a chance to catch up with the co-founders of Tender Claws Samantha Gorman and Danny Cannizzaro in order to get a lot more context for how this project came about, how they pitched it, the development process of iterating between the story, character study, gameplay, and worldbuilding. I also get a bit more context for what people should know about the series before jumping in, and so there's a bit of a primer even within this conversation that should add additional context if you're completely new to the series. I'd recommend at least watching through the first season, and perhaps watch the beginning of the this recap to get a bit more of an introduction to the character of Henry, who ends up transforming into Vecna. I really enjoyed playing through this experience, and there are elements of psychological terror that sent chills down my spine, but it's not too much of a horror genre with cheap jump scares. Lots of innovative ways to use changes in lighting, flipping between reality filters, and sound design that are really well done. And I really enjoyed my overall playthrough with only getting caught up on a few chapters.
Last Wednesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a review of the Apple Vision Pro on his Instagram page where at the end he made the claim that Meta intends on being a much more open platform and ecosystem than Apple. While Meta has pushed forward standards like OpenXR and has an industry-leading implementation of WebXR, their curation strategy on the Quest store has been highly curated and much more similar to a closed, walled garden strategy of a gaming console. According to my informal count, Meta has only launched around 620 official Quest apps in 4.7 years since the Quest launched in May 2019, while the Apple Vision Pro already has over 1000 apps launched after 11 days.Sarah Hill was able to launch the Apple Vision Pro version of her Healium app onto the Apple Store on day 1 while they've been relegated to Meta's App Lab for over 3 years now with no hope to ever be promoted. App Lab was originally inspired by the success of SideQuest, which was an third-party method for apps that were rejected from Meta's official store to be side loaded onto a Quest device. But Meta launched their own alternative store competitor of App Lab in February 2021 and slowly made SideQuest harder and harder to use. Being App Lab is still not the same on being on the main store as Meta makes it much harder for consumers to organically search and discover her app. Despite all of the traction that Healium has found with enterprise customers, they still have not been promoted to the main Quest store. Given Hill's experiences with both Meta and Apple, then she does not buy Zuckerberg's claims that Meta will somehow prove to be the more open of a platform. I wanted to touch base with Hill to have her elaborate on her experiences with both ecosystems, and how she's been able to continue to thrive in delivering mediation experiences with biometric data integrations with different watches and EEG sensors by finding enterprise customers, integrating with other headsets, and making the most of their constrained access to the Quest ecosystem despite all of the disadvantages of being stuck on App Lab.
One of the more popular apps for the Apple Vision Pro is Juno for YouTube, which iOS developer Christian Selig created in a week using the emulator to have ready in time for the February 2nd launch. Mark Gurman reported on January 18th that Spotify and YouTube were joining Neflix in not having native visionOS apps at launch, and Selig saw an opportunity to port his previous YouTube API integrations from his Apollo Reddit app into a native app. I caught up with Selig on the same day that he pushed out a 1.1 version that fixed a lot of the differences between that the visionOS simulator felt like versus what the actual eye tracking and hand gestures felt like on the Apple Vision Pro hardware. There were many differences that we explore in this podcast, but also some of the existing operating system limitations of the 1.03 and 1.1 versions of visionOS that have launched so far in terms of multiple audio sessions, huge screen theatre modes not being available to developers yet, and the mixed reality limitations of the immersive modes.
Bert Nepveu is a co-founder of VRvana, which made a enterprise mixed reality headset that was acquired by Apple in 2017 and provided a number of key innovations that have now shipped with the Apple Vision Pro. I had a chance to sit down with Nepveu to capture a comprehensive founder's journey from the beginning inspiration in 2005, the first prototype in 2013, the failed Kickstarter in 2014 after the Crescent Bay prototype at Oculus Connect 1 stole their thunder, and then their pivot into more enterprise applications of AR via mixed reality passthrough that eventually led to their acquisition by Apple that started at GDC 2017 and closed in September 2017, and then was leaked to TechCrunch in November 2017. Nepveu was also able to talk about his experiences of working at Apple, the challenges of point-of-view correction to minimize warping for mixed reality, and how the multiple stakeholders of human interaction, industrial design, and secrecy dictated by legal departments ended up battling it out over a number of different design decisions. Nepveu left Apple around three years ago to become a general partner of a VC firm called TripTyq Capital that is funding content creation innovations, and he didn't know if the Apple Vision Pro would ever actually ship or if he'd ever be able to talk about his many aspects of his journey with VRvana. But now that it has finally launched, he's able to speak more about his journey and why it was so emotional for him to finally get a chance to do a demo of the consumer release of the Apple Vision Pro last week. Apple is notoriously secretive about so many technical details of their product development and business in general, and so this is a very unique and rare peak behind the scenes on a portion of the timeline for how the Apple Vision Pro came about through the lens of which parts of the VRvana mixed reality headset were able to be shipped with the Apple Vision Pro.
Tom Furness has been working on virtual reality technologies since 1966, but most of his early work with the United States Air Force has remained fairly secret (see my previous interviews in episodes #245 and #347). Ivan Sutherland and Mort Heileg are often cited as early VR pioneers, but Furness was also working secretly at Wright Patterson Air Force base on the first helmet-mounted displays, visually-coupled systems, and eventually The Super Cockpit. It wasn't until he was given permission to speak about The Super Cockpit project in the mid-80s that the world got to learn about the advances in VR technologies he'd been working on. I had a chance to catch up with Furness at the AWE 2023 on June 1st, just ahead of Apple's announcement of the Apple Vision Pro that happened a few days later on June 5th. We talk about the Virtual World Society, and the meeting of XR industry CEOs and leaders at AWE to have an off-the-record conversation about the impacts of AI and how to collaborate to help bring about a more exalted future of the XR industry.Furness also shares a bit more context of the early history of VR, as he's has been working continuously within for the past 57-58 years. I think it's really important to look back upon where these immersive and spatial computing technologies have come from in order to get a better idea for where they might be going. Furness also recently won the inaugural member's choice Ethical Values Award from the XR Guild for significant contributions to the XR industry, and continues to lead the Virtual World Society to promote the more pro-social uses of XR technologies.
The Apple Vision Pro launched on February 2nd, 2024, and I feel like it represents an inflection point in the XR industry where the screen resolution is high enough for it to be used as a viable screen replacement, the eye-tracking combined with pinch gestures is a paradigm shift in human-computer interaction reaching new levels of speed and intuitiveness to get into productivity flow states, and the software ecosystem of 600 visionOS apps with over one million 2D iOS and iPadOS apps makes a really compelling argument that this is a proper spatial computing device and not just the most advance virtual reality / mixed reality headset launched so far. The ergonomics and weight distribution for both default straps are inexcusably terrible in my own experience, and there's a growing consensus that they're suboptimal for most people with a minority of people feeling one of the straps are completely adequate. I expect DIY fixes and third-party strap solutions to start to fix this existing gap in comfort. At $3500, you'd expect to get something that feels better than most VR headsets on the market, but this is not the case.I had a chance to catch up with Road to VR co-founder and executive editor Ben Lang, who has had a number of demos in 2023, and has actually had early review access to the Apple Vision Pro for more than a week now (his full review should be landing either this week or next). We actually talked to each other using our Personas in Apple Vision Pro while recording external audio since I still need to still figure out how to record within the headset. But we share a lot of our first impressions of the Apple Vision Pro, some early technical feedback, and elaborate on many of the comparisons to Meta's Quest 3. Lang elaborates on how usability and ecosystem integration are some of the more qualitative differences that go beyond any of the quantitative specifications that ultimately creates a qualitatively different holistic experience that transcends anything that the Quest ecosystem has been able to achieve. Lang makes the pithy insight that it's the ergonomics that is the biggest bottleneck for more use and adoption of this device, and that at launch there are already enough things to see and do from a productivity perspective that the bottleneck for XR is no longer a matter of software or retention, but rather that the weight distribution is simply uncomfortable for extended use. The $3500 baseline cost is of course a barrier for the general public, but like many other Pro devices, most people will be writing off the Apple Vision Pro as a business expense if they can functionally use it within the context of their business (which many XR developers are using it a developer kit).But what has been the most surprising to me is how much utility this device can have out of the box -- caveat being that you really do need a Bluetooth keyboard and potentially a Magic Trackpad or Mac Laptop to truly use it the full capacity of a spatial computing device that replaces or augments your existing devices. The holistic integration of the Apple ecosystem is one of the biggest value propositions for people who are already either fully committed or even partially invested into the Apple ecosystem. I'm only half-way committed with an iPhone and iPad, but without a Magic Trackpad, MacBook Pro laptop, Airpods (for headphones since there is no headphone jack for the Apple Vision Pro), and I use Google Drive instead of iCloud. Even my Logitech K830 Bluetooth keyboard had some Bluetooth connectivity glitches that made me wonder if I should just get Apple's keyboard. But I won't be able to reach the full potential of the Apple Vision Pro until I more fully commit to all of Apple's ecosystem. I made a couple of Linkedin posts with more first impressions here and here.There are a lot of annoying operating system and software bugs in this first gen launch, but I expect all of this to get smoothed out over time.
I interviewed Being (the Digital Griot) creator Rashaad Newsome remotely during the Sundance 2024 Festival. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Turbulence: Jamais Vu creators Ben Joseph Andrews & Emma Roberts at IDFA DocLab 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.Here are my 19 episodes from IDFA DocLab 2023:#1328: Kickoff of IDFA DocLab 2023: Natalie's Trifecta is a Virtual Tour of Natalie Paneng's Digital Art, Identity, & Imagination#1325: End of Tung-Yen Chou’s Gay Sauna Trilogy with "Traversing the Mist"#1327: "Voice in My Head" Remixes Your Inner Monologue with AI#1329: Mixed Reality "PHANTOM" Installation Explores Dark Sides of Mental Illness with Gallows Humor#1330: Squeeker: The Mouse Coach Interspecies Fitness App Collaboration#1331: Recreating Spatial Presence in Caves with Point Clouds & Spatial Audio in "Buried in the Rock" Documentary#1332: Texada Tells the Story of Limestone Across Geologic Time With Animation and 360 Video#1333: AI Remix of 1982 Documentary "Koyaanisqatsi" with "The Vivid Unknown" Interactive Video Installation#1334: Anouschka Wins IDFA DocLab Digital Storytelling Award with AR Narrative Game about Cultural Heritage#1335: Retrospective on Lodz Film School's Visual Narratives Lab and "Whispers" with Jacek Nagłowski#1336: Close Uses Hand Gestures to Switch Between Audio Commentary Channels on Juitamai Dance Performance#1337: Using Night Vision Googles to Watch Viscerally Immersive Dance Performance "One Two" in Total Darkness#1338: Multi-Sensory Immersive Art Installation "Redemption" Deconstructs Brazil's History of Eugenics#1339: The School, a World uses Web Documentary to Profile Changes in the Small Polish Town of Chlebiotki#1340: Recreating the Social Dynamics of a Road Trip in "Yugo: The Non-Game"#1341: Performative Lecture "(this conversation is) Off the Record" uses AI & Theater to Critique Algorthmic Profiling#1342: Transforming a Book into an Interactive Experience with the Time-Based Edition of "Borderline Visible"#1343: Using 360 Video to Connect Women Prisoners in Chile with their Families in "Going Back Home: Mother VR"#1344: Turbulence: Jamais Vu Wins IDFA DocLab Immersive Non-Fiction Award with Embodied Mixed Reality Doc on Depersonalization & DerealizationThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Going Back Home Mother: VR creators Catalina Alarcon & Daniela Camino at IDFA DocLab 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Borderline Visible creator Ant Hampton at IDFA DocLab 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed (this conversation is) Off the Record creator Nirit Peled at IDFA DocLab 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Yugo : The Non-Game creator Petrit Hoxha at IDFA DocLab 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed The School, a World creators Iga Łapińska & Krzysztof Pijarski at IDFA DocLab 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below. Here's a link to the web documentary of The School, a World so that you can explore it yourself, run time is a bit over two and a half hours if you watch it all.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Redemption creator Mariana Luiza at IDFA DocLab 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed One Two creator Christian Bakalov at IDFA DocLab 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Close creator Hana Umeda at IDFA DocLab 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Lodz Film School's Visual Narratives Lab director Jacek Nagłowski at IDFA DocLab 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Anouschka creator Tamara Shogaolu at IDFA DocLab 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed The Vivid Unknown creator John Fitzgerald at IDFA DocLab 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Texada creators Josephine Anderson & Claire Sanford at IDFA DocLab 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Buried in the Rock creators Shehani Fernando & Anetta Jones at IDFA DocLab 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Squeeker: The Mouse Coach creator Jiabao Li at IDFA DocLab 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed PHANTOM creator Aluta Null at IDFA DocLab 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Natalie's Trifecta creator Natalie Paneng at IDFA DocLab 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.Here are my 19 interviews that I conducted at IDFA DocLab 2023:#1328: Kickoff of IDFA DocLab 2023 Coverage: Natalie's Trifecta is a Virtual Tour of Natalie Paneng's Digital Art, Identity, & Imagination#1325: End of Tung-Yen Chou’s Gay Sauna Trilogy with "Traversing the Mist"#1327: "Voice in My Head" Remixes Your Inner Monologue with AI#1329: Mixed Reality "PHANTOM" Installation Explores Dark Sides of Mental Illness with Gallows Humor#1330: Squeeker: The Mouse Coach Interspecies Fitness App Collaboration#1331: Recreating Spatial Presence in Caves with Point Clouds & Spatial Audio in "Buried in the Rock" Documentary#1332: Texada Tells the Story of Limestone Across Geologic Time With Animation and 360 Video#1333: AI Remix of 1982 Documentary "Koyaanisqatsi" with "The Vivid Unknown" Interactive Video Installation#1334: Anouschka Wins IDFA DocLab Digital Storytelling Award with AR Narrative Game about Cultural Heritage#1335: Retrospective on Lodz Film School's Visual Narratives Lab and "Whispers" with Jacek Nagłowski#1336: Close Uses Hand Gestures to Switch Between Audio Commentary Channels on Juitamai Dance Performance#1337: Using Night Vision Googles to Watch Viscerally Immersive Dance Performance "One Two" in Total Darkness#1338: Multi-Sensory Immersive Art Installation "Redemption" Deconstructs Brazil's History of Eugenics#1339: The School, a World uses Web Documentary to Profile Changes in the Small Polish Town of Chlebiotki#1340: Recreating the Social Dynamics of a Road Trip in "Yugo: The Non-Game"#1341: Performative Lecture "(this conversation is) Off the Record" uses AI & Theater to Critique Algorthmic Profiling#1342: Transforming a Book into an Interactive Experience with the Time-Based Edition of "Borderline Visible"#1343: Using 360 Video to Connect Women Prisoners in Chile with their Families in "Going Back Home: Mother VR"#1344: Turbulence: Jamais Vu Wins IDFA DocLab Immersive Non-Fiction Award with Embodied Mixed Reality Doc on Depersonalization & DerealizationThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Voice in My Head is a provocative immersive exploration by Kyle McDonald and Lauren Lee McCarthy that takes large language models the logical extreme of remixing and modulating your inner monologue. Audience participants are invited to customize ChatGPT character that clones your voice to speak to you via an ear bud as you walk around the DocLab festival in Amsterdam and have casual conversations with festival attendees for a half hour. The AI listens to everything you and your interlocutors say, and then pipes every minute or so with feedback based upon your instructions thereby creating a new modulated voice in your head.The piece made me reflect upon my own inner dialogue, and how surprisingly compelling of a piece this is in exploring both the social, ethical, and privacy boundaries of technology but also how art contexts like this create a safe space for earnest exploration for some of the new potentials of immersive technologies and contextually-aware AI. I had a chance to unpack it all with the creators McDonald and McCarthy in Amsterdam after a few days of their world premiere exhibition at IDFA DocLab.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Lauren Lee McCarthy showed Surrogate during the pandemic at Sundance 2022 as an experimental web documentary and immersive performance. Here’s the synopsis: “To become a surrogate. I offer my body to carry someone else’s baby while they use an app to monitor and control me for nine months… As Roe v. Wade is overturned and gene editing opens entirely new reproductive futures, this project asks: How much control should we have over a birthing person’s body, and over a life before it’s born? What does kin mean when rapidly developing reproductive technologies—including IVF, egg and sperm donation, embryo freezing, DNA testing, and gene editing—shift our relationships? What happens when our industrialized drive for control collides with the process of birth?”I interviewed McCarthy after the virtual Sundance screening of Surrogate in 2022 where we talked about her explorations of agency and surrender, and her history of other projects that blend the lines between virtual and physical. The medium of a web doc enabled McCarthy to break up her fragmented two-year journey of following these ideas to their logical extreme, to reflect upon the narrative themes that emerged, and then create an interactive live performance of a womb walk where she addresses the audience who virtually embody her unborn child as she walks through LA. The relationship between technology and humanity is a persistent theme in all of McCarthy's work, and this piece dives deep into the technologies involved in reproduction and is also a deeply personal journey exploring the potential of becoming a surrogate and the pushes the limits of control and agency in a speculative thought experiment that is documented across different media and represented through the format of an experimental web documentary.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Traversing the Mist premiered at IDFA DocLab 2023, and is the conclusion of the Mist trilogy by Taiwanese VR director Tung-Yen CHOU. In the Mist was a 360 video, Gazing, in the Mist was a mixed reality installation, and Traversing the Mist is an interactive, multiplayer 6-DoF VR installation. Here is a synopsis “Step into the body of a young Taiwanese man to roam the steamy rooms and red-lit corridors of a surreal gay sauna—with thin mattresses, shared showers and lockers holding secrets. Everywhere you go, you encounter the same nude men with identical faces. And when you look in the mirror in this animated VR, you see all your clothes—except for your underwear—vanish.“Walking further into this dimly lit network of corridors—watching, and being watched—you navigate your way through what feels like an erotic underground labyrinth. This concluding part of The Mist Trilogy by director Tung-yen Chou, following In the Mist (2020) and Gazing, In the Mist (2022) is a journey into a hidden world, from the graffiti-covered elevator to the darkrooms where you find the bodies with the help of a flashlight.“In the real world, meanwhile, you are walking around a large open area, enhancing the physical feeling of being in a real sauna.”I had a chance to catch up with Yen in Amsterdam at IDFA DocLab after his premiere of the conclusion of his trilogy to talk about his journey in producing these series of immersive experiences exploring the culture of gay saunas in Taiwan.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Tung-Yen CHOU’s In the Mist is a 360 video that premiered at Venice during the pandemic in 2021. The synopsis of the piece is “In a dim-lighted room filled with mist, blurred figures of men are sipping the desire and loneliness from each other. You seem to have entered a forbidden zone and fallen into a state between dreaming and being awake, gazing at someone and also being gazed at by them. Theatre and new media director Chou Tung-Yen once again touches on the unspeakable life experience of the gay community culture, exploring a male sauna through poetic lenses to take a peek into something that’s hidden under the desire—the love without love.”I had a chance to speak with Yen remotely in 2021 about his piece that actually kicked off what ended up being a trilogy series followed by a mixed reality performance called Gazing, in the Mist, and then Traversing the Mist which premiered at IDFA DocLab 2023 and is featured in the next episode. In the Mist faced some censorship from distribution platforms of Viveport and Oculus as it featured male nudity and adult themes, which made it difficult to watch alongside the other pieces that were showing during the virtual exhibition of Venice VR Expanded in 2021. We talk about the challenges of distribution, but also the process and journey of creating what ended up being the first chapter of a longer journey and poetic trilogy exploring the gay sauna culture in Taiwan.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Lance Weiler’s Where There’s Smoke is an immersive experience that he used to process his grief from losing his father, who was a volunteer firefighter and amateur photographer who would take pictures of fires and take Lance with him on these excursions. Weiler always wondered if his father had more involvement in any of these fires than merely observing and documenting them, and there was always some ambiguity in getting to the bottom of this question. As he says in his synopsis “Weiler unravels the secrets of his enigmatic father… and two devastating fires that struck the Weiler family in the early 1980s. In the final months of his battle with colon cancer, his father invites Lance to interview him, and these conversations reignite 30 years of wondering… were those fires more than tragic accidents?”The previous episode featured an interview with Weiler during his world premiere of the piece at Tribeca Immersive in 2019, and he has had three other major iterations of the project since then. It showed at IDFA DocLab in 2020 during the pandemic as a virtual grieving ritual within a Miro board, and then translated into a physical installation in New Jersey, and just recently Weiler showed an interactive and generative cinematic version at Portland Art Museum’s Center for an Untold Tomorrow’s (PAM CUT) new Tomorrow Theater space in November 2023.I had a chance to catch up Weiler just after his prototyping session at PAM CUT to catch up on how the piece has evolved over the past four and a half years of constant iteration.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
In 2019, Lance Weiler premiered Where There’s Smoke at Tribeca Immersive, which has since had four major iterations focusing on different innovations in immersive storytelling. It’s a very personal story where Weiler interviews his father about his life and passion of taking amateur photos of fires while his father was dying from stage four colon cancer. I had a chance to speak about his 17-year journey with this project after his world premiere in 2019, and then the next episode is an update after continually iterating on this project four and a half years later. It’s a piece that asks us to reflect upon our lives, our mortality, the most meaningful objects in our lives and how they often reflect our memories or identities in a unique way. Where There’s Smoke has had elements of a community grieving ritual that has evolved over the years, but the core seeds of that are also contained within the original installation that showed in New York City for Tribeca Immersive in 2019 where this conversation takes place.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Asgard's Wrath 2 is one of the most epic games I've had a chance to play, and I think it's fair to say that it's like Meta's Half-Life: Alyx in terms of a premium AAA game that could be a system seller for the Quest 3. I'm about 40 hours into the game, and I'm only on the 3rd of 7 total sagas. Meta reports that the main campaign is around 60 hours with 130 total hours if you try to achieve all of the side quests and other completionist tasks. Overall, there has been plenty of ways that I've found to play, and there is a really great balance between the different qualities of presence that leverages the many affordances of the virtual reality medium. Asgard's Wrath 2 has an amazing amount of depth and evolution of gameplay, incredible worldbuilding, challenging puzzles, and a story with a mythological context to weave it all together. It's core center of gravity is active presence with the rich embodied melee gameplay along with a secondary focus on environmental presence with exquisite environmental design and vast architectural spaces, and the third quality of mental and social presence with the god-scale puzzle solving, RPG strategy, and lots of backstory of the lore that you can read, and pro-social relationships with your followers and fellow characters, and finally the emotional presence of overall narrative leaning heavily into Egyptian and Norse mythology to tie everything together. The story is the least strong element of the game as it is interesting enough for me to engage me, but the story often seems to mostly function to set a broader context for the next quest adventure rather than developing deep characters with meaningful interactions or story elements. The context of story definitely benefits from leaning into existing Egyptian and Norse mythology, which deepens the symbols and iconography used in the environmental design and create a more nuanced worldbuilding. But that all said, the feeling of open world adventure and player agency is really strong with gameplay that feels like it's evolving (even if it can get a bit repetitive at times), and the environmental design is absolutely incredible, and the puzzles are challenging enough to feel satisfying when completed, and the story bits function to tie everything together into a deeper purpose. Overall, this is the most immersed I've been within a VR game in a long, long time, and there are enough aspects that can satisfy most of Bartle's taxonomy of player archetypes of the killer, achiever, explorer with the socializer being the least emphasized as it is a single-player game with some asynchronous social dimensions that can feel like digital graffiti and break the overall immersion. But overall, this is one of the most epic games I've had a chance to play in VR for a long time, and I was able to surrender to exploring the many different dimensions for how you can play through the main line and many of the different side quests that were availableI had a chance to speak with Oculus Studios producer Mari Kyle who provides a lot more context for some of the design intentions to make a complicated RPG easy for first-time users, and to not be too overly penalizing for dying. It's one of the deepest and most involved games that have been developed for VR so far, and worth tracking how it impacts Meta's overall strategy with VR and how to create compelling-enough content to sell more VR headsets and keep people coming back to play more. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
The co-founders of the first iPhoneDevCamp in 2007, Raven Zachary and Dom Sagolla, are planning on hosting the inaugural VisionDevCamp in the Bay Area a week or two after the Apple Vision Pro launch, which is currently expected sometime in the first quarter of 2024. I had a chance to get more context for the origin story of the iPhoneDevCamp, iPadDevCamp, and iOSDevCamp gatherings as well as how it has helped to facilitate innovation of mobile apps and development frameworks. They are hoping to bring together Apple iOS developers, web developers, react native developers, XR developers as well as immersive artists and storytellers to VisionDevCamp for a weekend hackthon to facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration and to catalyze innovations in spatial computing. It should be the largest gathering of Apple Vision Pro owners, but owning a device is not a requirement for attendance to encourage more collaboration and diversity of participation. Sign up to the email list on the VisionDevCamp website to get notified once registration opens up, join the VisionDevCamp Discord, let us know if you'd like to speak at a potential Vision Colloquium ahead of VisionDevCamp, and follow up with Raven if you know of a location in the Bay Area that could host 150-600 people. And tune into this podcast for more information and context on the VisionDevCamp and to hear some of Sagolla's hands-on impressions of the Apple Vision Pro and his friend's claim that it has improved his productivity levels by around 10x.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Raindance Immersive is back with 40 independent VR experiences across eight categories of Immersive World, Immersive Experience, Immersive Art Experience, Immersive Music Experience, Immersive Narrative, Immersive Game, and two new categories of Short Film of VR and Music Video of VR, which are 2D films that are shot within virtual reality. 75% of this year's selection has some connection to a social VR platform with 28 connected to VRChat with single experiences in EngageXR and Resonite (i.e. the spiritual successor to NeosVR.I had a chance to catch up with the co-curators of Raindance Immersive of Mária Rakušanová and Joe Hunting to get a rundown and sneak peak of all 40 experiences at this year's selection that runs online in VRChat from November 4th to December 3rd. Nearly all of the screenings are free (everything aside from the gaming selection) with free sign-ups for live performances, guided tours, and screenings listed on their website. Raindance is at the forefront of curating the trends that are at the bleeding edge of virtual culture and the best-in-class of worldbuilding, live performances, and musical experiences within these VRChat and social VR environments. It's always great to hear more about how they curate this festival by being deeply in tune with the VRChat community and actively participating in events throughout the year to build relationships and create a creative deadline for immersive artists, worldbuilders, and storytellers to share their latest works. I can highly recommend checking out this year's selection, particularly the immersive world selection and be sure to drop by one of the screenings of films that were shot within VR chat as that's a new and exciting trend. I get a bit more historical context in this development from Hunting as he shares some of the early film festivals in VR, and selections of 2D films shot in VR that he curated starting in 2020. Phia's The Virtual Reality Show Film Fest featured a selection of 14 films shot in VRChat on February 25th, 2023, which led to the founding of a VRChat filmmaker Discord and provided a catalyst for collaboration and knowledge sharing with other VRChat-based filmmakers. Hunting provides a bit more context as to how the community got to that point, and why it was the perfect time for the VRChat filmmaker community to self-organize and for Raindance to expand their selection this year to feature these 2D films. Raindance Immersive runs for a few more weeks until December 3rd, 2023, and so be sure to check out RaindanceImmersive.com for more information for how to check out this year's selection.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
On October 10, 2023 Andre Elijah Immersive filed a $353 million dollar lawsuit against Meta Platforms Technologies and Alo LLC (PDF & Exhibits via UploadVR) claiming both a breach of contract for how Meta terminated a fitness application that it was funding, but also for a broader pattern of anti-competitive behaviors and Sherman Act violations. Elijah is claiming that Meta is giving preference to their own first-party fitness application of Supernatural after the FTC failed to block the acquisition of Within in February 2023. Elijah says that Meta was hedging their bets in the fitness space by investing in other XR apps by taking an ownership stake in different XR projects like the yoga and pilates mixed reality fitness app that he was developing in collaboration Alo LLC. But after the Within sale finally went through, then Elijah claims that Meta found a way to kill off his app in way that breached their contract and represented a broader pattern of anti-competitive practices.The US Federal Trade Commissions (FTC) attempted to sue Meta for alleged anti-competitive behaviors of their 2012 Instagram acquisition, but it was 8 years after the fact in 2020. At the time were a number of indie VR developers who were claiming that Meta was still deploying different anti-competitive practices in how the VR ecosystem was developing. This included BigScreenVR's Darshan Shankar claiming that Meta was preventing his business model of movie screenings in VR while at the same time not preventing their own potential aspirations to do the same. Guy Goodin was forced to remove SteamVR streaming features from his Virtual Desktop application when Meta was working on their own competing product, and Cix Liv claimed that Meta was blocking his application from the app store when Meta had a competing first-party application. Then Meta changed their name from Facebook, and then a day later Meta announced they were acquiring popular fitness application Supernatural made by Within. Then the FTC announced on July 27, 2022 that they're seeking to "Block Virtual Reality Giant Meta’s Acquisition of Popular App Creator Within." It wasn't until February 1, 2023 that Bloomberg reported that "US District Judge Edward Davila in San Jose, California, denied the FTC’s request for a preliminary injunction to block the proposed transaction." This cleared the way for the Within acquisition to finally go through, and this sets the broader context for Elijah's interactions with Meta in the context of the fitness application space.I had a chance to sit down with Elijah to get a bit more context for what happened, why he believes that Meta is at a minimum in breach of their contract, but also why he's invoking the Sherman Act and alleging some deeper patterns of anti-competitive behaviors.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I got consent from Qualcomm to publish Hugo Swart's press briefing that he gave to journalists a week ahead of Meta Connect 2023 where he announced the new XR2 Gen 2 and AR1 Gen 1 chips for the first time. Here is the announcement video teaser that was the first video shown during the briefing. See more context in the rough transcript below.Here are links to all all 12 interviews from my series covering Meta Connect 2023 in looking at first impressions of Quest 3 and Rayban Meta Smartglasses, mixed reality trends, AI, Meta Horizon World Builders, WebXR and alternative production pipelines like React Native, Apple Vision Pro buzz, VR filmmaking, unpacking the changes in Unity's fees, and digging into Qualcomm's new chips with the XR2 Gen 2 and AR1 Gen 1.#1306: Kickoff of Meta Connect Series with CNET's Scott Stein Analyzing Meta's XR & AI Announcements#1307: Quest 3 First Impressions with YouTubers Naysy and VR with Jasmine#1308: Meta HorizonWorld Builder Paige Dansinger on Creating Art History Museum Tours#1309: Why JoyReignVR and JDun Chose Meta's Horizon Worlds as their Preferred Social VR Platform#1310: Ethereal Engine as an Open Source, WebXR Pipeline for Apple Vision Pro and Beyond#1311: Bringing React Native to Enterprise XR App Development with Matt Hargett#1312: VR Filmmaking Tips from Hugh Hou & Keeley Turner#1313: Veteran Games Journalist Dean Takahashi on Mixed Reality, AI, Sci-Fi, Unity vs Unreal, and Meta Connect#1314: Cloudhead Games CEO Denny Unger on the Need to Support Indie Devs to Push Limits of VR & Mixed Reality#1315: Latest Research on Innerworld VR Mental Health Peer Support Platform & Cognitive Behavioral Immersion#1316: I-Illusions Premieres Mixed Reality Game "Bam" at Meta Connect & "Space Pirate Trainer" History#1317: Qualcomm's XR2 Gen 2 and AR 1 Gen 1 Announcement by Hugo SwartThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Dirk Van Welden, Studio Lead and Creative Director at I-Illusions, at Meta Connect 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Noah Robinson, Founder and CEO of Innerworld VR, at Meta Connect 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Cloudhead Games CEO & Creative Director Denny Unger at Meta Connect 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Dean Takahashi, Lead Writer at Games Beat and Venture Beat, at Meta Connect 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed VR filmmakers Hugh Hou & Keeley Turner at Meta Connect 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed founder of Rebecker Specialties Matt Hargett at Meta Connect 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Ethereal Engine co-founder and CEO Liam Broza at Meta Connect 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Meta Horizon World Builders JoyReignVR & JDun at Meta Connect 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Meta Horizon World Builder Paige Dansinger at Meta Connect 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed VR YouTubers Jasmine Uniza (VR with Jasmine) & Naysy on their first impressions of the Quest 3 at Meta Connect 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed CNET writer Scott Stein at Meta Connect about his first impressions of the Quest 3, Rayban Meta Smartglasses, AI, and Meta's strategy as they move into Mixed Reality. See more context in the rough transcript below.Here are links to all all 12 interviews from my series covering Meta Connect 2023 in looking at first impressions of Quest 3 and Rayban Meta Smartglasses, mixed reality trends, AI, Meta Horizon World Builders, WebXR and alternative production pipelines like React Native, Apple Vision Pro buzz, VR filmmaking, unpacking the changes in Unity's fees, and digging into Qualcomm's new chips with the XR2 Gen 2 and AR1 Gen 1.#1306: Kickoff of Meta Connect Series with CNET's Scott Stein Analyzing Meta's XR & AI Announcements#1307: Quest 3 First Impressions with YouTubers Naysy and VR with Jasmine#1308: Meta HorizonWorld Builder Paige Dansinger on Creating Art History Museum Tours#1309: Why JoyReignVR and JDun Chose Meta's Horizon Worlds as their Preferred Social VR Platform#1310: Ethereal Engine as an Open Source, WebXR Pipeline for Apple Vision Pro and Beyond#1311: Bringing React Native to Enterprise XR App Development with Matt Hargett#1312: VR Filmmaking Tips from Hugh Hou & Keeley Turner#1313: Veteran Games Journalist Dean Takahashi on Mixed Reality, AI, Sci-Fi, Unity vs Unreal, and Meta Connect#1314: Cloudhead Games CEO Denny Unger on the Need to Support Indie Devs to Push Limits of VR & Mixed Reality#1315: Latest Research on Innerworld VR Mental Health Peer Support Platform & Cognitive Behavioral Immersion#1316: I-Illusions Premieres Mixed Reality Game "Bam" at Meta Connect & "Space Pirate Trainer" History#1317: Qualcomm's XR2 Gen 2 and AR 1 Gen 1 Announcement by Hugo SwartThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
This is a critics roundtable for Venice Immersive 2023 featuring Pola Weiß, a funding executive for XR and new technologies Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg, as well as Alina Mikhaleva who produces virtual events at EngageXR heads up a Creative XR Studio called Less Media Group, Agnese Pietrobon who is a writer at XR Must, storylistener and independent researcher, and myself, Kent Bye of the Voices of VR Podcast. See more context in the rough transcript below.Here's a list of all 35 podcasts in this Venice Immersive 2023 series (as well as 4 interviews of projects where I've previously interviewed the creators)#1270: Preview of Venice Immersive 2023 Selection with Co-Curators Liz Rosenthal & Michel Reilhac[SXSW] #1189: "Forager" Volumetric Timelapse of Mushroom Growth Hits a Sweet Spot of Touch, Smell, & Immersive Storytelling[SXSW] #1203: "Body of Mine VR" Uses Full-Body Tracking Embodiment to Explore Gender Dysphoria & Transgender Testimonies[Tribeca] #1243: Origin Story of "Pixel Ripped 1978" with ARVORE and Atari Team + Novel Game-Within-a-Game Mechanics[Tribeca] #1250: Translating 1:1 Experimental Theatre Encounters into 360 Video to Transcend Expectations with Craig Quintero#1272: Kickoff of Venice Immersive 2023 Coverage with Winner “Songs by a Passerby” and Atmospheric Storytelling#1273: Switching First and Third Person POV with “Finally Me” Coming Out Story#1274: “Queer Utopia: Act I Cruising” Explores Queer Identity, Exile, AIDS, & Sex in the 80s#1275: Translating 2D Paintings in Immersive Biography with “Frequency”#1276: Beautiful “Emperor” Explores Aphasia Communication Gaps with Compelling Interactions#1277: A Vocal Landscape is an Intimate Study of Authentic Conversation and Surrealism#1278: Visualizing the Invisible and Pushing Forward the Grammar of Visual Storytelling with “Flow”#1279: “Home” Explores Human Nature Relationship with Visceral Projection Mapped Installation#1280: Interactive Projection Mapped Installation “Populate” Poetically Explores the Human Nature Dialectic#1281: The Many Movie Magic Techniques Behind “David Attenborough’s Conquest of the Skies”#1282: Ethnographic Study of South Korean Studio Apartments with “Oneroom-Babel”#1283: The Exquisite Lighting in Fins’ “Complex 7” VRChat World#1284: Gina Kim’s Environmental Storytelling Innovations with “Comfortless”#1285: PK’s Break Series in VRChat Explores the Intersection of Shaders and Indie Music#1286: Capturing the Horrors of the Ukrainian War in “First Day” with High-Res Environmental Captures#1287: “Letters from Drancy” is an Incredibly Emotional and Powerful Story About the Holocaust#1288: “Tales of the March” Uses Durational Takes in 360 Video to Explore Death Marches#1289: “Sen” Is a Beautifully Transcendent Virtual Japanese Tea Ceremony Exploring Reincarnation#1290: “Floating with Spirits” Explores the Day of the Dead, Indigenous Transmissions, & Elemental Animism#1291: Excellent Redirected Wandering to Discover Indigenous Transmissions in “Origen”#1292: Pioneering the VR Essay with “Shadowtime” Critiquing Sci-Fi Dystopic Aspirations of VR#1293: The Personalized AI-Driven “Tulpamancer” VR Sandpaintings with AI Text to Audio & VR Workflow#1294: Buddy Comedy “Gargoyle Doyle” Pushes at the Edges of Mixed Reality Storytelling#1295: The AR Pop-Up Book Innovations of “Jim Henson’s The Storyteller” & Amazing Shot of Earth in “The Orbit”#1296: “Wallace & Gromit in the Grand Getaway” Translating Big IP Narrative & Animation Rules into VR#1297: Studio Syro’s Groundbreaking Quill Series “Tales from Soda Island”#1298: The Story Behind “Pepitos: the Beak Saga” Quill Piece#1299: Character-Driven Quill Animation Piece “Perennials” Explores Nostalgia and Family Dynamics#1300: Prolific Meta XR Producer Ryan Genji Thomas on VR Storytelling Innovations with Animation#1301: “Gaudi,
I interviewed Remember This Place: 31°20’46’’N 34°46’46’’E director Patricia Echeverria after Venice Immersive 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed The Imaginary Friend director Steye Hallema at Venice Immersive 2023 after passing along a recommendation to watch my Storycon keynote on Presence, Experiential Design, & Immersive Storytelling. We do a deep dive into applying some of these ideas around the different qualities of presence to his project. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Aufwind (Upwind) director Florian Siebert at Venice Immersive 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Gaudi, L’Atelier Du Divin producers Agnes Garaudel and Vincent Guttmann at Venice Immersive 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Meta XR producer Ryan Genji Thomas at Venice Immersive 2023. Check out all of the Quill pieces, narrative apps, and Horizon worlds that Ryan has produced down below and check out more context in the rough transcript below as well.Narrative animation experiencesYearTitleStudio/Creator2019The RemedyDaniel Martin Peixe2020Tales from Soda Island - Chapter 1: The Multiverse BakeryStudio Syro2020The ReservoirMaiden InteractiveRic Carrasquillo2020Cube Farm (ep 1)Two Trick PonyDir. Tory Stanton, Scott McCabe2020Cube Farm (ep 2)Two Trick PonyDir. Tory Stanton, Scott McCabe2020Cube Farm (ep 3)Two Trick PonyDir. Tory Stanton, Scott McCabe2020Tales from Soda Island - Chapter 2: The Neon JungleStudio Syro2020Goodbye Mr. OctopusAtlas V x Studio GepettoDir. Amaury Campion2020The BeastBlue Zoo AnimationDir. Grant Berry, Dave Winn2020Lifetime AchievementParade AnimationDir. Yonatan Tal2020Four StoriesNick Ladd2020Tales from Soda Island - Chapter 3: The Quantum RaceStudio Syro2021Peace of MindBlue Zoo AnimationDir. Ben Steer2021Kteer TayyebSamia Khalaf2021Tales from Soda Island - Chapter 4: The Golden RecordStudio Syro2021RebelsFederico Moreno Breser2021NightMara Ep.1So Meta StudiosDir. Gianpaolo Gonzalez2021_HELLOSamuel Klughertz, Nicolas Capitane2021Tales from Soda Island - Chapter 5: The School TripStudio Syro2021NamooBaobab StudiosDir. Eric Oh2022Lustration Ep.1New CanvasDir. Ryan Griffen2022Lustration Ep.2New CanvasDir. Ryan Griffen2022Lustration Ep.3New CanvasDir. Ryan Griffen2022Lustration Ep.4New CanvasDir. Ryan Griffen2022Mescaform HillEdward Madojemu2022NightMara Ep.2So Meta StudiosDir. Gianpaolo Gonzalez2022Tales from Soda Island - Chapter 6: SilenceStudio Syro2022Tales from Soda Island - Chapter 7: The First IngredientStudio Syro2023ReImagined - Volume I: NyssaVery CavaliereDir. Julie Cavaliere2023ReImagined - Volume II: MahalVery CavaliereDir. Michaela Ternasky HollandNARRATIVE APPSYearTitleCreator(s)2017Dear AngelicaOculus Story StudioDir. Saschka Unseld2017Baba YagaBaobab StudiosDir. Eric Darnell2023Wallace & Gromit in "The Grand Getaway"Atlas V x AardmanDir. Finbar Hawkins, Bram Ttwheam2023(confidential)(confidential)HORIZON WORLDSYearTitle2022Creepy Cabin2022Dead End Drive-In2022Neon Arena2022Shaqtacular Spectacular2023(confidential)2023(confidential)2023(confidential)This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Perennials director Zoe Roellin at Venice Immersive 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Pepitos: the Beak Saga director Ruxandra Popescu at Venice Immersive 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed The First Ingredient: Tales from Soda Island – Ch. 7 director and writer Simone 'Funi' Fougnier , producer Peter Ariet, animator & director Dan-Franke at Venice Immersive 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.Tales from Soda Island - Chapter 1: The Multiverse BakeryTales from Soda Island - Chapter 2: The Neon JungleTales from Soda Island - Chapter 3: The Quantum RaceTales from Soda Island - Chapter 4: The Golden RecordTales from Soda Island - Chapter 5: The School TripTales from Soda Island - Chapter 6: SilenceTales from Soda Island - Chapter 7: The First IngredientThis is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Wallace & Gromit in "The Grand Getaway" co-directors Finbar Hawkins and Bram Ttwheam, and No Ghost Creative Director Lawrence Bennett at Venice Immersive 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Jim Henson’s The Storyteller: The Seven Ravens + The Orbit director Paul Raphaël at Venice Immersive 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Gargoyle Doyle director Ethan Shaftel at Venice Immersive 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Tulpamancer co-directors Marc Da Costa and Matthew Niederhauser as well as AI Engineer Aaron Santiago at Venice Immersive 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Shadowtime co-directors Sister Sylvester (Kathryn Hamilton) and Deniz Tortum at Venice Immersive 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Origen director Emilia Sánchez Chiquetti at Venice Immersive 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Floating with Spirits director Juanita Onzaga at Venice Immersive 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Sen director Keisuke Itoh at Venice Immersive 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Tales of the March director Stefano Casertano at Venice Immersive 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Letters from Drancy director Darren Emerson at Venice Immersive 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed First Day director Valeriy Korshunov and producer Svitlana Korshunova at Venice Immersive 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Break #11 director PK after Venice Immersive 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Comfortless director Gina Kim at Venice Immersive 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Complex 7 director Fins at Venice Immersive 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Oneroom-Babel director Sanghee Lee and screenwriter Seoyeong Jo at Venice Immersive 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed David Attenborough’s Conquest of the Skies director Lewis Ball at Venice Immersive 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Peupler (Populate) co-directors Maya Mouawad and Cyril Laurier at Venice Immersive 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Home director Temsuyanger Longkumer at Venice Immersive 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Flow director Adriaan Lokman at Venice Immersive 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed A Vocal Landscape co-directors Omid Zarei and Anne Jeppesen at Venice Immersive 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Empereur (Emperor) co-directors Marion Burger and Ilan Cohen after Venice Immersive 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Syuhasuu (Frequency) director Ellie Omiya at Venice Immersive 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Queer Utopia: Act I Cruising director Lui Avallos at Venice Immersive 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I interviewed Finalmente Eu (Finally Me) director Marcio Sal at Venice Immersive 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
This is the kickoff of my Venice Immersive 2023 coverage that totals 35 episodes and over 30 hours worth of deep dive interviews with leading experiential designers who are breaking down their latest insights and innovations with the grammar of immersive storytelling. It is one of my most in-depth series yet, and there's a lot of keen insights and amazing stories spread throughout this series. You can the graphic below for an overview of all of the podcasts in the series, and also links to each of the episodes in the series.The series is kicking off with the winner of the top prize from Venice Immersive Songs for a Passerby director Celine Daemen, and you can also see more context in the rough transcript below.#1270: Preview of Venice Immersive 2023 Selection with Co-Curators Liz Rosenthal & Michel Reilhac[SXSW] #1189: "Forager" Volumetric Timelapse of Mushroom Growth Hits a Sweet Spot of Touch, Smell, & Immersive Storytelling[SXSW]# 1203: "Body of Mine VR" Uses Full-Body Tracking Embodiment to Explore Gender Dysphoria & Transgender Testimonies[Tribeca] #1243: Origin Story of "Pixel Ripped 1978" with ARVORE and Atari Team + Novel Game-Within-a-Game Mechanics[Tribeca] #1250: Translating 1:1 Experimental Theatre Encounters into 360 Video to Transcend Expectations with Craig Quintero#1272: Kickoff of Venice Immersive 2023 Coverage with Winner “Songs by a Passerby” and Atmospheric Storytelling#1273: Switching First and Third Person POV with “Finally Me” Coming Out Story#1274: “Queer Utopia: Act I Cruising” Explores Queer Identity, Exile, AIDS, & Sex in the 80s#1275: Translating 2D Paintings in Immersive Biography with “Frequency”#1276: Beautiful “Emperor” Explores Aphasia Communication Gaps with Compelling Interactions#1277: A Vocal Landscape is an Intimate Study of Authentic Conversation and Surrealism#1278: Visualizing the Invisible and Pushing Forward the Grammar of Visual Storytelling with “Flow”#1279: “Home” Explores Human Nature Relationship with Visceral Projection Mapped Installation#1280: Interactive Projection Mapped Installation “Populate” Poetically Explores the Human Nature Dialectic#1281: The Many Movie Magic Techniques Behind “David Attenborough’s Conquest of the Skies”#1282: Ethnographic Study of South Korean Studio Apartments with “Oneroom-Babel”#1283: The Exquisite Lighting in Fins’ “Complex 7” VRChat World#1284: Gina Kim’s Environmental Storytelling Innovations with “Comfortless”#1285: PK’s Break Series in VRChat Explores the Intersection of Shaders and Indie Music#1286: Capturing the Horrors of the Ukrainian War in “First Day” with High-Res Environmental Captures#1287: “Letters from Drancy” is an Incredibly Emotional and Powerful Story About the Holocaust#1288: “Tales of the March” Uses Durational Takes in 360 Video to Explore Death Marches#1289: “Sen” Is a Beautifully Transcendent Virtual Japanese Tea Ceremony Exploring Reincarnation#1290: “Floating with Spirits” Explores the Day of the Dead, Indigenous Transmissions, & Elemental Animism#1291: Excellent Redirected Wandering to Discover Indigenous Transmissions in “Origen”#1292: Pioneering the VR Essay with “Shadowtime” Critiquing Sci-Fi Dystopic Aspirations of VR#1293: The Personalized AI-Driven “Tulpamancer” VR Sandpaintings with AI Text to Audio & VR Workflow#1294: Buddy Comedy “Gargoyle Doyle” Pushes at the Edges of Mixed Reality Storytelling#1295: The AR Pop-Up Book Innovations of “Jim Henson’s The Storyteller” & Amazing Shot of Earth in “The Orbit”#1296: “Wallace & Gromit in the Grand Getaway” Translating Big IP Narrative & Animation Rules into VR#1297: Studio Syro’s Groundbreaking Quill Series “Tales from Soda Island”#1298: The Story Behind “Pepitos: the Beak Saga” Quill Piece#1299: Character-Driven Quill Animation Piece “Perennials” Explores Nostalgia and Family Dynamics
The latest Festival of International Virtual and Augmented Reality Stories (FIVARS) starts today in a hybrid exhibition of 65 immersive stories until September 19 in Toronto and until October 3 with an online exhibition of spherical video and cinematic VR. I had a chance to sit down with FIVARS founder Keram Malicki-Sánchez to get a little bit of a sneak peak of this year's selection. There is over 24 hours worth of content, which is too much to be able to cover in one conversation, but Malicki-Sánchez shares the deeper inspiration and motivation that's driving the underlying independent and experimental spirit of this festival. We also talk about the fragility of what it means to be an immersive creator in this day and age, especially in light of Unity's controversial runtime fees that were announced earlier this week raising a lot of deeper concerns for the long-term viability of using Unity in the eyes of VR content creators. We talk about the open source game engine alternatives like Godot, but also the broader challenges for producing, distributing, and receiving feedback on immersive narratives created with an independent spirit or experimental edge. If you're in the Toronto area, then be sure to get a ticket to check out the interactive portions of the 2023 program. And if you're remote, then be sure to check out the hybrid portion with 20-30 different 360 videos that should be made available to be seen within their WebXR theatre viewable with a Quest Browser. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
The Venice Immersive 2023 edition is set to take place from August 30 to September 9th featuring 43 immersive storytelling projects from 25 countries and 24 works in the Worlds Gallery section. There are 28 projects in competition this year, and Venice Immersive has established itself as having one of the deepest and most diverse and most robust selection of immersive stories and immersive worlds. They are featuring well over 21 hours of content in the main selections, and that's not even counting the 23 VRChat worlds (plus one from EngageXR) in the worlds gallery.
I had a chance to catch up with the co-curators of Venice Immersive Liz Rosenthal & Michel Reilhac to give a sneak peak of this year's main competition as well reflect upon some of the trends in immersive storytelling and emerging genres.
I'll be on site at Venice Immersive from August 28 to September 5, and I'm really looking to watching all of the work and interviewing as many of the creators as I can track down. Keep an eye on my @kentbye account on X (Twitter) as I give some of my first impressions of this year's selection. Here's a cheat sheet of this year's selection for as a quick reference guide:
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
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 recent projects that are at the intersection of XR and AI: Chomsky vs Chomsky (see my previous interview in episode #898), Sex, Desire, and Data Show at the Phi Centre, and Future Rites (see my previous interview in episode #1076).
We cover everything from large language models from GPT 2.0 to GPT 4.0, creating abstract art from an AI model that trained on millions of porn videos, and creating an AI autotune for embodied dance movements. Rodriguez has so many deep and profound insights about the intersection between XR and AI that I saw it fitting to conclude my 17-episode series with my latest interview with her.
Here is a list of the entire series of 17 interviews in this series:
1253: XR & AI Series Kickoff with Evo Heyning on a Promptcraft Guide to Generative Media
1254: Using AI to Upskill Creative Sovereignty with XR Arist Violeta Ayala
1255: Using GPT Chatbots to Bootstrap Social VR Spaces with “Quantum Bar” Demo
1256: Using GPT for Conversational Interface for Escape Room VR Game "The Unclaimed Masterpiece"
1257: Talk on Preliminary Thoughts on AI: History, Ethics, and Conceptual Frames
1258: Using XR & AI to Reclaim and Preserve Indigenous Languages with Michael Running Wolf
1259: AWE Panel on the Intersection of AI and the Metaverse
1260: Using ChatGPT for XR Education and Persistent Virtual Assistant via AR Headsets
1261: Using ChatGPT for Rapid Prototyping of Tilt Five AR Applications with CEO Jeri Ellsworth
1262: Using in AI in AR Filters & ChatGPT for Business Planning with Educator Don Allen Stevenson III
1263: MeetWol AI Agent with Niantic, Overbeast AR App, & Speculative Architecture Essays with Keiichi Matsuda
1264: Inworld.ai for Dynamic NPC Characters with Knowledge, Memory, & Robust Narrative Controls
1265: Integrating Generative AI into Live Theatre Performance in WebXR with OnBoardXR
1266: Converting Dance into Multi-Channel Generative AI Performance at 30FPS with "Kinectic Diffusion"
1267: Frontiers of XR & AI Integrations with ONX Studio Technical Directors & Sensorium Co-Founders
1268: Survey of Open Metaverse Technologies & AI Workflows by Adrian Biedrzycki
1269: Three XR & AI Projects: "Sex, Desire, and Data Show," "Chomsky vs Chomsky," and "Future Rites"
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
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 Metaverse Makers Hacker collective. I had a chance to catch up with Biedzyrcki to do a bit of a survey of what's catching his attention across off the open and closed Metaverse platforms, the state of XR interoperability, and all of the various ways that he's been exploring the potentials and perils of AI as a hardcore WebXR developer and Metaverse hacker.
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
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 language model technologies. It's a rapidly developing field, and they talk about their strategy of keeping up to date through the practice of making different creative technology and immersive storytelling projects.
Niederhauser spoke a bit about Tulpamancer, which has subsequently been announced as one of the 28 immersive stories in competition at Venice Immersive 2023. It uses AI to take input from each users based upon their questions exploring their memories, and then uses generative AI to create a unique immersive VR experience that is specific to that person. "Ultimately, every interaction produces a unique work that is deleted at the conclusion of its viewing, left only to resonate in the minds of each participant." I'll be on site in Venice, and I'm really looking forward to checking out this experience and following up with Niederhauser and co-director Marc Da Costa.
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
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 was titled Kinetic Diffusion. It was created in collaboration with Aaron Santiago, and featured three screens that were being filled with delayed generative AI footage in near real-time and 30 frames per second, which required eleven 4090 GPUs in the cloud to achieve.
Powers was recording his dance with a mirrorless camera, and then was applying a depth map AI model to extrapolate his embodied movements so that it could be input as a real-time feed into Stable Diffusion with a set of prompts that were precisely timed out. The AI generated images ended up having a 2-8 second delay, which gave the effect of Powers dancing in a duet with himself, but modulated through a series of style transfer prompts. Overall, it was a hypnotically impressive display of generative AI at the intersection of XR and dance. I had a chance to catch up with Powers after his performance to get more context for how it came about, and the long evolution from his previous explorations at the intersections of AI and dance with Frankenstein AI that premiered at Sundance 2019 (see our previous conversation about it in episode #728). You can see a brief explainer video of Kinetic Diffusion within from Powers' TikTok channel.
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
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-founded OnBoardXR, which has been embracing accessible technology like WebXR and social VR via Mozilla Hubs, which has enabled his immersive shows to be available on mobile phones, tablets, PCs, and virtual reality headsets.
Since the beginning, OnBoardXR has featured projects that have integrated AI systems for generating scripts, and most recently Bradley put on a show called Degenerate VR featuring generative AI images that audience members within a social VR context were able to prompt. Bradley takes more of a skeptical take on AI deconstructing the current state of generative AI in relation to human labor and creativity as well as some of the potentials and perils of the technology. OnBoardXR has been on the forefront of integrating open web and immersive technologies for live performance, and is pushing forward on what's possible in immersive and interactive theatre.
There is an experimental and avant-garde vibe to most of the shows I've attended, and AI has been thematically integrating into many of the recent segments. I had a chance to break it all down with Bradley at AWE, and we brainstorm a bit more on how generative AI could help facilitate group conversations and explorations on specific topics as long as there is a deliberate invitation or incisive question provided to the audience. There's a lot of potential for how some of these AI technologies could facilitate novel social social dynamics and interactions (see Frankenstein AI at Sundance 2019 and their subsequent AI-facilitated group discussions at DocLab 2019).
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
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 with inworld.ai seemed to go beyond the limitations of ChatGPT and existing tech demos of large language models. Their website elaborates on how they're taking NPCs to the next level by saying how they add, "configurable safety, knowledge, memory, narrative controls, multimodality, and more. Craft characters with distinct personalities and contextual awareness that stay in-world. Seamlessly integrate into real-time applications, with optimization for scale and performance built-in." The low-latency responses is one of the more noticeable features, which makes a huge difference. I had a chance to catch up with Kim at AWE to dig into a bit more of some of the features that they've built for NPCs on their inworld.ai platform.
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
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 creating speculative design film and written essays that give us a sneak peak at the future of immersive and spatial computing technologies. Matsuda created one of the most influence cautionary tales of augmented reality called HYPER-REALITY in 2016, which I did a deep dive with him back in 2018 in episode #639. He's currently working with Niantic on some more speculative film essays, which should be launching soon.
Matsuda was at AWE 2023 showing off a couple of recent projects including an AI agent named Wol in collaboration with Niantic's 8th Wall, that has the intention to explore the idea of personalized education. He was also showing off his really cool AR game called Overbeast, which is a highly-original and unique social AR game that combines farming with giant boss battles of AR beasts that fill the entire sky. We had a chance to unpack all of his latest projects, and do a deep dive into how they used inworld.ai to create Wol that has mix of magical glue of large language model technology that keeps interactions novel, fresh, but also bounded by the customized set of knowledge that you enter. I'll be diving in a bit deeper into inworld.ai in the next episode.
Also be sure to check out Matsuda's provocative essay on KamiOS that's uses pagan animism as a metaphor to describe how AI + XR will be infusing our lives. "KamiOS channels the spirit world using AR. When you put on your headset, you will be introduced to many different gods who will guide you through your virtual and physical life. Gods of navigation, communication, commerce. Gods who teach you, gods who learn from you. Gods who make their home in particular objects or places, and gods who accompany you on your journey."
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
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) with an educational angle. I had a chance to catch up with him at AWE to hear a bit more about how he navigates these liminal spaces of emerging technology as he consistently has to reinvent his self-identifying job description to keep up with the rapidly evolving field of technology. He also dives into the many ways that he's using different AI technology from ML models integrated into different AR filters to generative AI to the many ways he's been using ChatGPT throughout his day-to-day tasks of running his business as an independent content creator.
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
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, getting fire, and eventually being able to re-acquire the IP rights against all odds. At the time of this recording, Tilt Five had been shipping for six months, and I get a bit of an update for how their launch has been going, and their various efforts to promote a physical face-to-face use case for tabletop AR gaming.
Ellsworth also shared with me how she used ChatGPT in order to rapidly prototype an AR demo for Tilt Five that they were showing at AWE. She's emphasizes the benefits of being able to quickly discover the fun within AR interactions, and how ChatGPT has been revolutionizing her own rapid prototyping processes by feeding in the Tilt Five API code as an input prompt, and then asking it how a senior Unity developer would go about solving how to visualize a specific data set of live satellite data.
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
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 children's book co-author. We also talk about how he sees how AI will continued to be integrated into virtual worlds within an educational context. Fadul has gone all in with creating casual conversation and educational dialects large language models via AR, and so he shares some of his initial insights and aspirations for where this could all go in the future.
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
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 (Managing Partner of WXR Fund), and also featured Tony Parisi (Chief Product Officer, Lamina1), Alvin Graylin (Global VP of Corporate Development , HTC and President of China for HTC). Graylin and I engaged in a bit of a dialectal debate on a number of issues at the end, which was a bit of a continuation of our lively conversation in episode #1185 at the start of SXSW 2023 exploring our differing perspectives about AI. You can check out the video recording our AWE panel, or tune into the podcast version which provides some additional context and the beginning and end (or also check out the rough transcript below).
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
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 education and to reclaim and preserve indigenous languages. The biggest blocker is that most natural language processing approaches have a hard to dealing with the infinite words that come from polysynthetic languages like many North American indigenous languages.
I had a chance to catch up with Running Wolf at Augmented World Expo where he talked about his aspirations for researching solutions to these open problems, and eventually creating immersive experiences that can create a dynamic relational context that alters how indigenous languages are spoken. Also be sure to check out Running Wolf on a panel discussion about "New Technology, Old Property Laws" at the Existing Law and Extended Reality Symposium at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center along with fellow panelists including Mark Lemley, Tiffany Li, and Micaela Mantegna.
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
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 titled it "Some Preliminary Thoughts on Artificial Intelligence" (video version and slides) as it was an opportunity to put down some of my initial thoughts on the history of AI, the different ethical perspectives on AI, as well some conceptual frames that I use to help makes sense of the field of AI based upon my experiences at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Also, a lot of the conversations that I've had with XR artists and developers about AI tend to be primarily focused on the immediate utility of the tools rather than the broader ethical and moral implications of the technology. This talk starts to flesh out that aspect a bit more, but I'd also recommend checking out my interview with Access Now's Daniel Leufer about the European Union's AI Act from Voices of VR episode #1177.
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
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 from a mult-floor gallery. The project was created by Alizée Calet, William Plessis and Maël Sellier, who are all students in the Master MTI 3D at Arts et Métiers Laval. I spoke with Calet and Sellier about their process of creating this escape room VR experience, and the range of different AI integrations that include Whisper, ChatGPT 3.5, and Stable Diffusion to create the paintings in the experience via generative AI.
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
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 via Google services in order to interface with GPT 3.0 in order to create a real-time conversational interface with an AI agent. I had a chance to catch up with Kinne and lead AI engineer Guillermo Valle Perez (aka Guillefix) at Laval Virtual 2023 where their experience premiered. We talk about the development process, the MetaGen.ai community that Valle Perez co-founded in order to facilitate the combination of AI with VR, and some of the theories for how deep learning works (see Stephen Wolfram's article on ChatGPT and talk on Wolfram's "AI Will Shape Our Existence" talk and videos from the Philosophy of Deep Learning conference at NYU). We also talk a bit about some of the open ethical questions around AI, and how AI will continue to be integrated into the production and experience of social VR worlds.
https://quantumbar.ai/
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
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 completely revolutionized her creative process as someone who identifies as being on the autistic spectrum, she talks about how AI has enabled her to find new ways to close the gap between her imagination and creative coding projects and immersive art.
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
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 integrating AI into their workflow in creating virtual and augmented reality projects.
I'm starting the series off with Evo Heyning, how has done a deep dive into dozens of generative AI programs, and she wrote an entire book called Promptcraft: Guidebook for Generative Media in Creative Work that explores our relationship to generative media. I had a chance to talk to her about her book at AWE where we talk about her journey into generative AI, her world in virtual worlds and the Open Metaverse Interoperability Group, and her various projects that live at the intersection of immersive media and AI.
Here is a list of the 17 episodes in this series on the intersection of XR and AI:
1253: XR & AI Series Kickoff with Evo Heyning on a Promptcraft Guide to Generative Media
1254: Using AI to Upskill Creative Sovereignty with XR Arist Violeta Ayala
1255: Using GPT Chatbots to Bootstrap Social VR Spaces with “Quantum Bar” Demo
1256: Using GPT for Conversational Interface for Escape Room VR Game "The Unclaimed Masterpiece"
1257: Talk on Preliminary Thoughts on AI: History, Ethics, and Conceptual Frames
1258: Using XR & AI to Reclaim and Preserve Indigenous Languages with Michael Running Wolf
1259: AWE Panel on the Intersection of AI and the Metaverse
1260: Using ChatGPT for XR Education and Persistent Virtual Assistant via AR Headsets
1261: Using ChatGPT for Rapid Prototyping of Tilt Five AR Applications with CEO Jeri Ellsworth
1262: Using in AI in AR Filters & ChatGPT for Business Planning with Educator Don Allen Stevenson III
1263: MeetWol AI Agent with Niantic, Overbeast AR App, & Speculative Architecture Essays with Keiichi Matsuda
1264: Inworld.ai for Dynamic NPC Characters with Knowledge, Memory, & Robust Narrative Controls
1265: Integrating Generative AI into Live Theatre Performance in WebXR with OnBoardXR
1266: Converting Dance into Multi-Channel Generative AI Performance at 30FPS with "Kinectic Diffusion"
1267: Frontiers of XR & AI Integrations with ONX Studio Technical Directors & Sensorium Co-Founders
1268: Survey of Open Metaverse Technologies & AI Workflows by Adrian Biedrzycki
1269: Three XR & AI Projects: "Sex, Desire, and Data Show," "Chomsky vs Chomsky," and "Future Rites"
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
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 past and connect those with the present and the future." It's an application that features over 20 prominent figures from Black History including digital monuments and statues that you can place in your home or local outdoor environments.
There are also a number of public spaces of historical importance that have site-specific AR installations to engage audiences in the places where these histories occurred. I've covered a previous incarnation of Kinfold when it was Movers and Shakers back in episode #656 with Glenn Cantave when it was focused on recontextualizing the Christopher Columbus monument in New York City with augmented reality art.
I had a chance to catch up with Idris at Tribeca Immersive 2023 to unpack the current state of the their Kinfolk project as well as Kinfolk app for iOS and Kinfolk app for Android, each with native AR features. We also dig into some future plans for their continued content expansion, looking into more immersive and volumetric work, and the potentials for more speculative future art that taps into the Black Imagination and Afrofuturism potentialities.
Kinfolk earned a special jury mention for Tribeca Immersive Storyscapes with a jury comment saying, "A profound and authentic representation of the Black experience in America, KINFOLK’s mission to bring history to contemporary audiences through AR technology not only celebrates the richness of Black culture and history in New York City and beyond, but also serves as a powerful tool for education and understanding, making it a standout contender deserving of recognition."
This is the final episode of my interviews with creators featured at Tribeca Immersive 2023, and here's a full list of all 16 episodes in this series:
1220: Tribeca Immersive 2023 Preview with Curator Ana Brzezińska
1238: "The Fury" Combines Two-Channel Video Installation with 360 Video to Explore Memories of Sexual Assault
1239: "Fortune" Uses AR Filters to Tell Spatial Stories about Money and Facilitate Social Media Conversations
1240: "Meneath: The Mirrors of Ethics" Uses Pepper's Ghost Technique to Represent Indigenous Ancestors
1241: "Monstrorama" Narrative Game Uses Mixed Reality to Explore Inner and Outer Monsters
1242: Poetic Generative AI Film "In Search of Time" Uses Style Transfer To Explore Childhood Memories
1243: Origin Story of "Pixel Ripped 1978" with Avore and Atari Team + Novel Game-Within-a-Game Mechanics
1244: "Maya: The Birth" Animation Uses Mythic Symbols & Magical Realism to Explore Menstrual Taboos
1245: "The Pirate Queen" Narrative Game Wins Tribeca Storyscapes Prize with Exquisite Environmental Storytelling
1246: Smartphone Orchestra's "Emojiii" Cultivates Playful & Novel Group Social Dynamics
1247: The Branching Narrative Architecture of "The Expanse: A Telltale Series" Featured at Tribeca Games
1248: Tribeca Games Curator Casey Baltes Recaps the 2023 Selection of 2D Indie Games
1249: Experiential Design Breakdown of "Reimagined Vol II: Mahal," A Stylized & Mythic Story of Personal Grief
1250: Translating 1:1 Experimental Theatre Encounters into 360 Video to Transcend Expectations with Craig Quintero
1251: From Book to Play to AR Installation, "Colored" Explores the Forgotten Segregation History of Claudette Colvin
1252: "Kinfolk" App is Cultivating an AR Archive of Black History with Digital Monuments & Speculative Futures
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
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 that journey, we meet the young Claudette Colvin, 15 years old who, on March 2, 1955, refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger. Nine months later, Rosa Parks repeated this act of defiance and became the icon that history remembers to this day."
Writer Tania de Montaigne discovered Colvin's story, and wrote a book named "Noire: La vie méconnue de Claudette Colvin - collection "Nos héroïnes" (The Unknown Life of Claudette Colvin: "Our Heroines" Collection). Then Stéphane Foenkinos discovered the story and adapted into a play, and then Pierre-Alain Giraud joined with Foenkinos to co-direct and co-produce an immersive AR story adaptation with them.
This is one of the more compelling AR stories that I've seen so far since they're using a series of benches in a stark black space that is transformed by AR point-cloud overlays to change contexts into a bus, into a church, and then into a courtroom. They used Volumetric capture studio in Taiwan to asynchronously capture each of the performances, and then added spatial sound, additional archival film footage, added theatrical lighting effects, and wind machines to add additional haptic feedback. Overall, it was really compelling use of mixed reality to go on a spatial journey with two other people at the Tribeca screening (up to 10 people could see it at a time at it's initial showing at World Premiere of "Noire" at the Centre Pompidou in Paris from April 21 to May 29.
I had a chance to speak with de Montaigne, Foenkinos, and Alain-Giraud at Tribeca Immersive to talk about the translations from book to play to AR installation, their experiential design process, and interdisciplinary fusion of storytelling techniques to tell this forgotten history of Claudette Colvin.
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Music: Fatality
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-on-1 experimental theatre shows. Quintero has been translating these 1-on-1 shows into 360 videos in a way that transcends the audience's expectations, in a way that is very much inspired by the performance work of Marilyn Arsem. I had a chance to catch up with Quintero to talk about his philosophy of storytelling, the influence of Arsem on his work, and the role of associative memories.
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
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 environmental and character design, a personal story that's very well-told through the lens of mythology. The synopsis says, "Inspired by Philippine mythology, the story focuses on Apolaki, Mayari, Tala, and Hanan, the four immortal children of the recently passed creator god, Bathala. As each of these deities wrestle with the grief of losing Bathala, their all-powerful actions create ripples throughout the universe."
I had a chance to catch up with the co-creators of the Reimagined series Michaela Ternasky-Holland (director of Volume II) and Julie Cavaliere (producer of Volume II) to unpack the experiential design process, their shared connections of grief, and innovations in visual and spatial storytelling.
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
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 serves as the Vice President of Tribeca Games & Immersive at Tribeca Enterprises. We talk about the narrative innovations, novel gameplay mechanics, and expression of artistic excellence included in the seven games including Nightscape, Despelote, A Highland Song, The Expanse: A Telltale Series, Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical, Goodbye Volcano High, and Chants of Sennaar.
The winner of the Tribeca games was Goodbye Volcano High with the jury statement saying, “For how much this game felt of the moment and questions whether you should still care about anything when everything sucks — complete with doom scrolling, dinosaurs and high school band drama.”
Special Jury Mention for Tribeca Games was Despelote with the jury comment saying, “For how it offers a dreamlike portal into a soccer-obsessed child’s everyday life, and shows how cultural expression—whether through sports or creative pursuit—can make our lives richer.”
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
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 of Deck Nine Games. It's published by Telltale, which is well-known for their interactive narrative games where there are consequential decisions that impact how the story unfolds in later episodes in a "broomstick" narrative architecture where episodes 3, 4, and 5 should have the most variance. The first episode was released on July 27th with each subsequent episode being released two weeks afterwards.
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Music: Fatality
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 emojis. Steye Hallema is the founder of the Smartphone Orchestra, which aims to "unlock new possibilities for telling stories and creating unforgettable, large-scale experiences." Hallema identifies as a multi-hyphenate creative director, artist, storytelling, experience designer, and musician, and I had a chance to catch up with him after experiencing Emojiii to get the origin story of the Smartphone Orchestra, how it evolved from distributed spatial musical experiments into exploring group social dynamics and ice breaker experiments that are creating new rituals for connecting.
https://player.vimeo.com/video/830975364?h=c59b6ba66b
Emojiii from Smartphone Orchestra on Vimeo.
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
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 powerful pirates in history. Singer Studios premiered the first 30 minutes of the experience, and it won the Tribeca Immersive Storyscapes award. The jury statement says, “For its outstanding technical execution, immersive user experience, and unique and untold story of a nearly forgotten woman in history.”
I had a chance to catch up with the founder and CEO of Singer Studios, Eloise Singer, who directed The Pirate Queen as well as producer Siobhan McDonnell, who looks after the immersive wing at Singer Studios. Singer Studios specializes in telling transmedia stories across film, TV, games, and podcasts. They're also working on a podcast series and TV series of The Pirate Queen starring Lucy Liu. Liu also executive produced and narrated the VR game. They're also adapting their Venice 2022 narrative game Mrs. Benz into a film version. We talk about the affordances of these different media, and how they're changing how they tell these stories across these different mediums.
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
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. The piece was created by Poulomi Basu and CJ Clarke, who are both artists working across a number of different media. Basu is an Indian artist and activist working across contemporary art, photography, book formats, installation, movement, sculpture, time-based media, as well as immersive media. Clarke is a British artist working across film, photography, virtual reality, and everything in between.
Their piece pushes on grammar of immersive storytelling with this combination of magical realism and dream logic blended with more traditional diegetic scenes. Basu says, "I wanted something that felt like they were literally paintings moving so a lot of the work that you see in the piece are a very magical realist way of telling the story so where you feel you're in the real world, but then there's something dystopian, something twisted, something magical happening within that. And then there's also these dream-like worlds, you know, where you enter Maya's own, like, dreams when she's sleeping and she gets the visions." The end result is spectacular spatial journey that's exploring a vitally important topic of the "restrictive traditions of her conservative family, and a world of hidden shame, stigma and taboo" around menstruation. This is chapter one that sets the broader context, and the second chapter will be diving more explicitly into transforming this shame, stigma and taboo into a superhero power.
Maya: The Birth (Chapter 1) picked up a special jury mention in the Tribeca Immersive category of New Voices. The jury statement says, "An imaginative way to tell an everyday story in a vivid world. Presenting a shift in perspective, the project opens new imaginaries with under-told narratives. This project left us on a hook and the jury is excited to see its next steps and continued development."
Basu and Clarke are certainly pushing the boundaries of spatial storytelling with this unique blend of dream logic and magical realism fused with more traditionally staged scenes. Clarke says, "It's playing with these layers and levels of perception, these levels of reality, these kind of layers and shades and nuance to make you kind of look beyond and make you feel this transportation and this journey from real, magical, and actually make you look at your reality differently."
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
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 ages. Pixel Ripped has continued their fusion of mixing 2D platformer games with embodied gameplay mechanics in VR, but also adding a whole new level of multi-dimensional puzzles and time travel storytelling.
Ana Ribeiro is the creator and creative director of Pixel Ripped, and she's been working on this series for over a decade now, and I had a chance to catch up with her and the two co-founders of ARVORE Rodrigo Terra and Ricardo Justus (CEO) at Tribeca Immersive. They talk about the history and evolution of the Pixel Ripped series, the evolution of ARVORE, and how they serendipitously connected with Atari, who came on as a publisher. Ethan Sterns is VP of Games at Atari running publishing and gaming side of business, and he was also on-hand to talk about why Atari came onboard to help produce and publish Pixel Ripped 1978.
Pixel Ripped 1978 released on June 14th, 2023 and is available on Steam, Meta Quest, and PSVR, and I very much enjoyed my full playthrough after Tribeca Immersive. There's some innovative 2D + embodied gameplay mechanics, a light-hearted and playful narrative, and some awesome music with nostalgic environments along the time travel narrative.
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Music: Fatality
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 portals in order to battle both inner and outer monsters. I had a chance catch up with director Clement Deneux (previously directed Missing Pictures) at Tribeca Immersive to break down the design process, mixed reality considerations, future plans, and collaborating with Andy Serkis as a voice actor and narrator for the piece.
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Music: Fatality
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 angle between them that reflects the image from the monitor facing up, giving it a ghostly apparition appearance.
Terril Calder is an Métis from Fort Frances, Ontario, and she said that her piece is "presented as a political puppet theater experience that uses this old school technology to expose hidden truths." She is using the Pepper's ghost technique to represent her indigenous grandmother, and she says, "there's a hidden character when you're an outsider to the prominent culture, which is Christianity and colonialism. You always have another person whispering in your ear, so it was a way to show or to expose that other character."
Calder wanted to ground this clash of cultures by looking at different ethical systems. She uses her stop-motion animation to compare and contrast the Seven Deadly Sins with the Seven Sacred Teachings from Indigenous culture. In her piece, the deadly sin of Wrath is paired with the sacred teaching of Courage, Envy is paired with Wisdom, Pride is paired with Humility, Greed is paired with Honesty, Gluttony is paired with Respect, Sloth is paired with Truth, and Lust is paired with Love. She's presented with the mainstream culture's ethics, and then you hear her indigenous grandmother whispering the countervailing sacred teachings while there is some ghostly visual representation that uses the Pepper's ghost technique.
Calder's piece won the Tribeca New Voices Award, and the jury statement reads: “Both a dream and a nightmare, the work incites a necessary conversation with exceptional use of craft, storytelling and unexpected use of technology with the potential to iterate in a way that undoubtedly will empower future work.”
I had a chance to catch up with Calder at Tribeca to talk about her process of creating this piece, the inspiration behind using the Pepper's ghost, the clash of cultures, ethics, and how art can be used to reflect upon and heal from trauma.
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
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 animation to interactive facial filters to experiences AR-enabled interactions. At the end of each episode is a question designed to kick off a broader social media engagement campaign and group discussion about money. It should be premiering on Arte's social media channels later in the fall, and I had a chance to speak to the production team at Tribeca Immersive including Emilie Valentin (Writer of Fortune), Claire Meinhard (Director of Fortune), and Aurélie Leduc (Producer of Fortune working at Atlas V).
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Music: Fatality
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 Neshat is an established visual artist, photographer, video artist, and filmmaker who collaborated with Khora CTO and co-founder Peter Fisher who led the 360 video production. The two-channel video installation is told in three different parts, and the VR puts you in the middle part of the story.
I had a chance to catch up with Neshat and Fisher at Tribeca Immersive to unpack their process of producing the piece, how a two-channel video installation invites a view to choose how to edit the piece, how Neshat prefers that audiences will see the film to get the full context of the piece, and the preferred order to watch it. Tribeca was showing the VR portion before the video installation, and I found it to be a really powerful piece and combination of being immersed within the VR portion, and then being able to reference my own embodied memories in watching the full context of the two-channel video installation.
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
The VOID was a location-based entertainment company that shut down during the pandemic and maybe coming back at some point. The VOID Co-founder & Chief Creative Officer Curtis Hickman convinced his partners to allow him to reflect upon and share the many experiential design lessons in a book titled Hyper-Reality: The Art of Designing Impossible Experiences. The book launched on June 15, 2023, and does an amazing job of sharing a ton of theoretical design insights that are grounded in specific examples and anecdotes from The VOID's backlog of experiences.
Hickman is a big fan of lists and frameworks, and he includes lots of theoretical reflections with the primary structure of his 52 Laws of Hyper-Reality Design spanning four categories of Story Laws, World Laws, Guest Laws, and Magic Laws. These were the underlying principles of designing impossible experiences that The VOID would share all of the content partners, and he manages to seamlessly weave them together in digestible and fun-to-read book. Hickman is also a professional magician, and spends the second half of the book unpacking how he applied magic design theory to creating awe and wonder within the experiential design of the VOID.
I had a chance to talk with Hickman about his book unpacking his experiential design process, the four categories of Hyper-Reality Design, unpacking the mimetic storytelling affordances of VR, and the VR genres of action, adventure, and "Hyper-Reality." which he defines as "the practical Illusion of an impossible reality so convincing the mind accepts it as reality itself." We chat a bit about presence in VR, and a bit about how my elemental theory of presence relates to his four categories of Hyper-Reality with Story Laws focusing on emotional presence, World Laws focusing on environmental presence and embodied presence, and Guest Laws focusing on active presence, and Magic Laws focusing on Mental Presence.
Before I wrap up, I wanted to make a quick comment on a definition of experience that Hickman uses from Disney Imagineering legend Joe Rohde:
Experience is a record of relationships. Relationships between things that happen in the world, your body's reception of the impulses created by that thing that happened, and the formation in your brain of the story you tell yourself about what happened. Since the last part of that sequence is the main part you are aware of, that means experience is a narrative event. It is what we tell ourselves happened. This means that a lot of the principles that you would apply in crafting narrative, say a play, a novel, a poem… Hickman, Curtis (2023, June 15) "Hyper-Reality: The Art of Designing Impossible Experiences." page 65. Independently Published.
I love this definition of experience because it is very much aligned with process-relational philosophy, which the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Process Philosophy says that "If we admit that the basic entities of our world are processes, we can generate better philosophical descriptions of all the kinds of entities and relationships we are committed to when we reason about our world in common sense and in science." As Mesle says in his book on process-relational philosophy:
Just look at your own experience. Isn’t that exactly what your own experience is like? New drops of experience pop into being one after another like “buds or drops of perception” ([Whitehead's Process & Reality page] 68, quoting William James). Each new drop of awareness is incredibly complex, composed of thoughts, feelings, sensory experiences, and deeper feelings of being surrounded by a world of causal forces. You can never make thoughts stand still. Your own flow of experience is a paradigm for the process-relational vision of reality laid out in Whitehead’s work and in the book you are currently reading.
Mesle, C. Robert (2018, March 1). Process-Relational Philosophy: An Introduction to Alfred North Whitehead. page 7.
Sean Dougherty and Jeffrey Colon are Access Technology Experts who work for the LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired non-profit, and they were very active at the XR Access Symposium during a number of sessions focusing on the NSF-grant funded SocialSense XR: Making the Invisible Visible program, doing a review of Vision Accessibility with AR+AI Tools, and facilitating a group discussion about Exploring Accessible VR for Blind Users.
This was the final interview from my trip to XR Access Symposium, and a fitting end to my 15-part series on XR Accessibility because we explore both the many challenges of making XR accessible for blind and low-vision users, but also some of the many exciting possibilities for how XR can be used as assistive technologies to help solve real problems. Mobile-phone based AR apps that integrate AI and computer vision features are already seeing a lot of early adoption within their communities, and there's lots of work that's happening on the VR and virtual meeting front (including Zoom) that has the potential to feed into more AR assistive technology features in the future that help make the physical world more accessible.
There's still lots of work yet to be done with XR Accessibility, but hopefully this 15-part and 8-hour series has helped to map out out the landscape and contextualize the work that has already been done and also what is yet to be done in the future. Again, here is all 15-episodes of this Voices of VR podcast series on XR Accessibility:
Shiri Azenkot on founding XR Access
Christine Hemphill on defining disability through difference
Reginé Gilbert on her book about Accessibility & XR Heuristics
Christian Vogler on captions in VR & potential of haptics
Six interviews from the XR Access Symposium poster session
Dylan Fox on the journey towards XR Accessibility
Liz Hyman on the public policy POV on XR Accessibility
Mark Steelman on accessible XR for career exploration
W3C's Michael Cooper on customizable captions in XR
Joel Ward on challenges with government contracting for accessibility and live captioning with XREAL glasses
Jazmin Cano & Peter Galbraith on Owlchemy Labs' pioneering low-vision features for Cosmonious High
Liv Erickson on intersection between AI & Spatial Computing for Accessibility
Ohan Oda on upcoming accessibility AR features in Google Maps
Yvonne Felix on using AR HMDs as an assistive technology for blind and low-vision users
Sean Dougherty & Jeffrey Colon on the challenges and opportunities in making XR accessible for blind & low-vision users
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
Yvonne Felix has been using augmented reality as an assistive technology since 2012. They tell me, "I actually wear an augmented reality device that allows me to see. I'm legally blind, so that means that I have about 2% of my vision left. And I use something called eSight Eyewear that actually gives me access to 100% of my vision, depending on the situation."
I recorded this interview with Felix the VRTO conference back in 2018, and I wanted to include it in this series because I heard a lot of excitement from attendees at the XR Access Symposium 2023 on the assistive technology potential of XR. Felix told me, "Because we are actually the first people who are mobile with an AR device, using it for a specific application, I think we're actually going to start the trend that it's okay to wear AR in society and that it's accepted because look at the impact it's making."
XR Access co-founder Shiri Azenkot told me, "There's a very exciting opportunity to take these technologies, especially augmented reality, and to use them as accessibility tools. So to look at how we can use these new platforms to solve current unsolved problems that specifically people with disabilities experience... There's so many other potential applications out there. It's a very exciting opportunity."
Some of the most compelling applications of Augmented Reality are likely to going to be in the realm of assistive technologies like Felix explores in this interview. The endgame of XR Accessibility is not just to make VR and AR technologies more accessible, but to make physical reality itself more accessible. Again, Azenkot told me, "You need to think more about how we make the physical world accessible and think about how that can be incorporated into these experiences rather than trying to take a two-dimensional accessibility framework and trying to kind of fit it, squash it into this new paradigm."
Making the physical world more accessible is going to be a long journey as there are a lot of problems yet to be solved. But the consensus from the XR Access Symposium 2023 gathering seemed to be that solving accessibility problems for low-vision users within virtual reality like Owlchemy Labs has done with Cosmonious High, is likely going to provide design inspiration for helping to solve some of the more intractable problems in helping make the physical world more accessible through AR technologies. As the pioneering work of Felix shows, then there is certainly a huge amount of potential for XR to be used as an assistive technology.
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Music: Fatality
Ohan Oda works at Google on an AR feature in Google Maps called Live View that he was showing off during the demo session at the XR Access Symposium. It adds some screenreader support for geospatial browsing where users can search for nearby landmarks and businesses, and Oda wanted to get some feedback and raise awareness for these accessibility features in Google Maps.
I had a chance to catch up with Oda where he elaborated on how his team's finding that most sighted users were not returning to some of the Google Maps features that had implemented the Virtual Positioning System (VPS) technologies. VPS extrapolate features from Google Streetmaps and translate it into an AR feature via computer vision that serves as a more precise version of GPS. They found internally that it was blind and low-vision users who were returning to these features more frequently because they were using them as an essential assistive technology whereas it was less useful for sighted users who could use other landmarks and street crossings as a way to orient.
Oda is wanting to lean more into the accessibility use cases of these XR features in order to be a technological driver of innovation with AR. He speaks about the default utilitarian design approach of developing new features to address the largest potential target audience, which means has meant that accessibility functionality has traditionally been deprioritized by management. He wanted to show off these features to the XR Access community, and give a heads up that these features may be coming soon. The features still have to work their way through the beta testing process before being deployed, and he's hoping that applying these universal design principles to these XR features in phone-based AR will create new assistive technology use cases that drive more feature development in the future.
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
Liv Erickson is the ecosystem development lead at Mozilla focusing on innovation in spatial computing and AI technologies, and they are the former director of the Mozilla Hubs team. They gave a presentation at the XR Access Symposium that they summarizes in their blog post on "Multidimensional computing accessibility in the age of XR and AI," and they also facilitated a break-out session on Spatial Computing, Data, and AI. I had a chance to catch up with them at the start of the second day to talk about their talk, highlights from the break-out group, and their other blog post exploring how "In the Era of Multi-Dimensional Computing, XR is the Future of Front-End; AI is the Future of Back-End." There is a lot of potential in the future of AI and personalized assistants for accessibility, but also how this intersects with the increased communication capacities and collaborative sensemaking potentials of spatial computing and immersive storytelling. Erikson suggests that perhaps we should think about AI as more as "Augmented Intelligence" rather than "Artificial Intelligence" as a semantic shift that contextualizes AI as a human-centered technology in the spirit of the 10 principles of in Mozilla's Manifesto with 4 addendums towards a healthy Internet. We explore all of that and more within this brief discussion.
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Music: Fatality
Owlchemy Labs has been on the leading edge of accessible VR game design since 2016. starting with Job Simulator, and then following up with key accessibility features for Vacation Simulator, and Cosmonious High. They were at XR Access Symposium showing off their pioneering work on low-vision VR features for Cosmonious High launched last March, and I had a chance to sit down with their Accessibility Product Manager Jazmin Cano and Senior Accessibility Engineer Peter Galbraith to unpack their journey into XR Accessibility since 2016, and some of their key innovations along the way as well as a deep dive into their low-vision VR features.
Owlchemy Labs shipped a Smaller Human mode to Job Simulator on May 3, 2016 saying, "We've received a ton of requests from some of the less vertically-gifted players to build in a way to reach all of the areas of Job Simulator that may have been previously out of reach. We've delivered!" This allowed kids to play the game, but also had a number of accessibility implications for folks who not able to stand up. Owlchemy Lab's senior accessibility engineer Galbraith told me in this interview, "It allowed players who were shorter or seated to reach things that were higher up. And that was sort of our first foray into this. We understood that VR is a very physical medium, so we had to make considerations for the different physicalities that people have. That was one of our first things. We also, at that time, we didn't necessarily realize we were making some accessibility features, but to combat things like the screen door effect that was present on a lot of headsets at the time, it was important that we made our text large and clear."
Owlchemy Labs announced a one-handed mode in Vacation Simulator on June 2, 2019 saying, "We strive to create interactions that feel natural, and we understand that not all players may not be able to use two arms simultaneously. We now fully support one handed play for 100 percent of the game!"
Owlchemy Labs announced their subtitle update for Vacation Simulator on October 28, 2019 saying, "The elements of space and presence in virtual reality added a whole new dimension to the challenge that demanded we tackle things with a fresh perspective. After a boat load of research, prototyping, and user feedback, our subtitle system defines a new standard for VR... Our subtitles are both functional and playful. No matter where you look, the subtitles are always visible and can help guide you back to the speaker. Transparency helps keep them unobtrusive and integrated into the world, while high contrast ensures they’re legible no matter what you’re looking at. Step away from the speaker and they’ll enlarge; turn your back and icons ensure you know exactly who’s saying what."
Owlchemy Labs' next title of Cosmonious High launched on March 31, 2022, and then later shipped their first accessibility update on June 09, 2022 that featured One-Handed Mode, Play Seated, Enhanced Object Interactions, Tutorials, and More Icons.
On March 23, 2023, Owlchemy Labs announced their first-of-a-kind VR features for low-vision users that included a vision assistance mode with high contrast object highlighting, haptic feedback for object selection and teleporting, cancelable audio of audio description, grab and release confirmation of objects, and audio descriptions of objects, environments, areas, and tutorials. Owlchemy Labs told me that they didn't do any user testing with any blind users for these features, and in my brief testing these accessibility features felt much more optimized for low-vision users than for folks who are blind. But given how visual of a medium virtual reality is, then these are pioneering features that will no doubt provide inspiration for other features and implementations for blind and low-vision users.
Owlchemy Labs' Cano and Galbraith gave an amazing presentation at XR Access Symposium going through some of the pioneering work on low-vision access...
Joel Ward is an Emerging Technology Manager at Booz Allen Hamilton who has been working within Web Accessibility since around the time Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act was enacted on August 7, 1998 and the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines came out (WCAG version 1.0 was published on May 5, 1999). Ward spoke on a XR Access Symposium panel discussion about Empowering the Workforce through Accessible XR, and also brought a pair of XREAL Air glasses with live captioning to show off the power of AR as an assistive technology to other attendees.
I had a chance to speak with Ward about the pending work that has to be done in order to specify XR accessibility experimentation within government contracts. Right now XR accessibility is in a bit of a Catch-22, because if something is not specified within a contract to be worked on, then it most likely won't happen. However, XR Accessibility features and functionality are still too nascent to be clearly specified and scoping out within these contracts.
As I covered in the unpacking of public policy and XR accessibility write-up of my interview with XR Association's Liz Hyman, then the emerging nature of XR technologies means that they're not clearly specified within legislation like Section 508 or the American's with Disability Act to be enforced. We talk what needs to be done at the federal government contracting level so that his group at Booz Allen Hamilton can have the freedom and resources to develop more XR Accessibility features that feeds into the type of Darwinian experimentation that Neil Trevett says is a crucial phase of the standards development process.
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Music: Fatality
Michael Cooper works for the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Accessibility Initiative, and he was attending the XR Access Symposium to learn more about the existing XR accessibility efforts but also to moderate a break-out session about captions in XR. One of Cooper's big takeaways is that there is no magical, one-size-fits-all solution to captioning in XR because people have different needs, different preferences, and different contexts that means that there is a need for frameworks to help make captions easily customizable. There are a lot of potential customizable options for spatial captions that include distance from the speaker, text size, text color, weight, layout, the size of the box, whether or not they have transparent boxes, preventing occlusion of objects by the captions, whether it moves with the speaker or not, and how to handle off-screen speakers.
Gallaudet University's Christian Vogler warned XR Access participants about the dangers of doing a one-to-one translation for how captions are handled in 2D into how they're handled in 3D since there different modalities like haptics that could help reduce information overload. One of the demos that was being shown at the XR Access Symposium implemented a wide range of these different spatial caption options, and so there is a need to develop an framework for the different game engines and the open web with WebXR as well as an opportunity at the platform level like with the Apple Vision Pro or Meta Quest ecosystem to implement a captioning framework.
Cooper told me in this interview, "I do think that we need design guidance. There are a lot of good ways to do captions in XR. There are some bad ways to do it, and so we need people to know about that. Going down the road, I think that we are going to need to develop semantic formats for the captions and for the objects that they represent. So there's a lot of excitement about that. But again, there's a big sense of caution that the space is so early that we don't want to overstandardize. And as a person who works for a standards organization, that's a big takeaway that I have to take."
It's again worth bringing up what Khronos Group President Neil Trevett told to me about the process of standardization, “The number one golden rule of standardization is don’t do R&D by standardization committee… Until we have multiple folks doing the awesome necessary work of Darwinian experimentation, until we have multiple examples of a needed technology and everyone is agreeing that it’s needed and how we would do it, but we’re just doing it in annoyingly different ways. That’s the point at which standardization can help.”
It's still very early days for this type of Darwinian experimentation with Owlchemy Labs' innovations of captioning starting with Vacation Simulator in October 2019 as well as the captioning experiments and accessibility features by ILM Immersive (formerly ILMxLAB) within Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge. The live captioning within social VR platform of AltSpaceVR was also pretty groundbreaking (RIP AltSpaceVR), and VRChat has had a number of Speech-to-Text implementations including ones that can be integrated into an avatar including VRCstt (and their RabidCrab's TTS Patreon), VRCWizard's TTS-Voice-Wizard, and VRC STT System. There were also a number of unofficial, community-made accessibility mods before VRChat's Easy Anti-Cheat change eliminated all quality-of-life mods such as VRC-CC and VRC Live Captions Mod. There have also been a number of different strategies within 360 videos over the years that would burn in captions at either 1, 2, or 3 different locations. The more locations the captions, then more ability one has to to look around without missing any action within the environment and still be able to read the captions. At Laval Virtual 2023, I saw some integrations of OpenAI's Whisper to do live transcription and captioning as they were feeding text into ChatGPT 3.5.
Mark Steelman is a XR Access Working Group Member and Senior Unity Engineer at Transfr, which uses virtual reality to "train people for well-paying careers available now in high-demand fields." Steelman was at XR Access showing off some of the accessibility features of their VR training software that includes captions, height adjustments, spatial audio, and arrows as audio cues or a way to direct attention. He was soliciting feedback from XR Access attendees to add even more features to ensure that people of all abilities are able to get employed. He also facilitated a group discussion about the potential of using virtual reality for career exploration explicitly for folks who have a variety of different disabilities to be able to explore whether or not certain jobs would be accessible to them, as well as the potential future where VR training or practice-based embodied experiences could help assess someone's ability to do a job that would allow some folks with disabilities to demonstrate their competency without having to disclose their disability and potentially face discrimination. Steelman also shares some of the feedback and insights from the XR Access break-out session on using XR for career exploration that he moderated.
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Music: Fatality
Liz Hyman President and the CEO of the XR Association (XRA), which is a non-profit, industry trade association representing 47 XR companies including major players like Meta, Google, Microsoft, HTC, Sony Interactive Entertainment, Unity, and HTC. XRA has been collaborating with XR Access from the beginning, and they collaborated on Chapter 3 of their an XR Developer's Guide Series focusing on Accessibility & Inclusive Design in Immersive Experiences.
At the XR Access Symposium, Hyman moderated a breakout session focused on public policy. I had a chance to unpack the three major points from the group discussion that included educating policy makers about accessibility, brainstorming bluesky legislation to lift up accessibility tech, and identify gaps in public policy so that they can be addressed.
A common theme that I heard at the XR Access Symposium again and again is that accessibility hardly ever is prioritized with emerging technology platforms. XR Access co-founder Shiri Azenkot told me "But it was always a retroactive thing. So that's a pattern that we've seen with technology a lot, many times -- every time there's a new technology."
There are laws on the books like the American Disabilities Act and Section 508, but this doesn't always apply to XR technologies. "Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act requires federal agencies to ensure that their information and communication technology (ICT) is accessible to people with disabilities." Section 508 would only apply to XR experiences produced by the federal government.
And Hyman told me, "I will say the thing is that I notice is [that XR] is an emerging technology. And I think even within a program like 508, there's an acknowledgment of the emerging nature of technology that should not be something that is a permanent barrier. We need to make steady progress." She is likely referencing some recent rulings about Section 508 to bring it more up to date since it was originally passed in 1998 and 2000.
I was able to find a couple of relevant passages that support Hyman's interpretation on the Section 508 website which says, "The U.S. Access Board is responsible for developing Information and Communication Technology (ICT) accessibility standards to incorporate into regulations that govern Federal procurement practices. On January 18, 2017, the Access Board issued a final rule that updated accessibility requirements covered by Section 508, and refreshed guidelines for telecommunications equipment subject to Section 255 of the Communications Act. The final rule went into effect on January 18, 2018."
I found a copy of the final rule from the Access Board ICT in the Federal Register from January 18th, 2017 and there is a mention of virtual reality that says, "The Board expects that an agency that decides to use a conforming alternate version of a Web page as opposed to making the main page accessible will typically do so when, as the W3C® explains, certain limited circumstances warrant or mandate their use. For example, W3C® has noted that a conforming alternate version may be necessary: (1) When a new emerging technology is used on a Web page, but the new technology cannot be designed in a way that allows assistive technologies to access all the information needed to present the content to the user (e.g., virtual reality or computer-simulated reality); (2) when it is not possible to modify some content on a Web page because the Web site owner is legally prohibited from modifying the Web content; or (3) to provide the best experience for users with certain types of disabilities by tailoring a Web page specifically to accommodate those disabilities."
The bottom line is that the 2D web is a mature platform relative to paradigm shift into VR, 3D, and spatial computing, which means that the US government can more heavily lean upon established guidelines from organizations like the W3C that has produced a number of different Web Content Accessibility Guideline...
Dylan Fox is the Director of Operations for the XR Access Initiative, where he focuses on outreach and advocacy for making virtual and augmented reality accessible for people who have disabilities. I previously interviewed Fox for the white paper on Accessibility that he co-wrote for the IEEE Global Initiative on the Ethics of Extended Reality.
I had a chance to catch up with Fox at the XR Access Symposium to get an overview of the event, the latest excitement about the accessibility features on the Apple Vision Pro, the XR Accessibility resources page from XR Association and XR Access, the Virtual Experience Research Accelerator, the potential of using AI for assistive technologies like phone-based computer vision projects like Be My Eyes, and the perils of over relying upon AI to fix all accessibility problems, and the potential of beyond computing within rectangles into data that's physical and within our environment and engaging with objects in our spaces, and computing into naturalistic interfaces. There's still a lot of work yet to be done to make XR completely accessible, and the XR Access Initiative is on the bleeding edge of doing the preliminary research, participating in interdisciplinary projects, forging relationships with industry partners, and bringing the community together to talk about these issues.
XR Access Initiative collaborated with the XR Association on Chapter 3 of XRA's XR Developer's Guide Series that was released on October 27, 2020 that focused on Accessibility & Inclusive Design in Immersive Experiences. The following table is a quick reference guide that cross-references the Accessibility Techniques with the spectrum of disabilities including sight disabilities, auditory disabilities, non-speaking / speech impairments, mobility disabilities, and cognitive disabilities. You can get the full Accessibility Developer's Guide report here (email required).
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Music: Fatality
I had a chance to do six brief interviews during the poster session of XR Access Symposium 2023 that I've compiled into this single podcast episode. This gives a great overview of some of the emerging topics for XR accessibility including XR accessibility heuristics, representing disabilities through avatars, audio descriptions for 360 videos, using AR glasses for live captioning, accessibility implications of augmented reality art, and the assistive technology potential of digital twins.
Below I'll highlight each of the posters with an image as well as as the representative I was able to speak to, the co-authors, and be sure to check the alt image information for more information on what the poster says.
I spoke to Spandita Sarmah about the poster titled "Formulating Inclusive and Accessible Heuristics: A Developmental Approach." Here is a Google Doc copy of the poster.
I spoke to Ria Gualano about the poster titled "Expanding Inclusive Avatar Design: Understanding Invisible Disability Representation and Disclosure on Social VR Platforms"
I spoke Lucy Jiang about the poster titled "Beyond Audio Description: Exploring 360° Video Accessibility with Blind and Low-Vision Users Through Collaborative Creation"
I spoke to Su Chen from LLVision about the poster titled "AR Subtitle Glasses: Breaking Down Communication Barriers"
I spoke to $NP Designs' Denise Coke about the accessibility implications of her augmented reality art.
And I spoke to WINNIIO's Nicolas Waern about the assistive technology potentials of digital twins.
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
Christian Vogler leads the Technical Access Program at Gallaudet University, and has been looking into captions for VR and 3D spatial environments for folks who are deaf and hard of hearing. I had a chance to catch up with him at the XR Access Symposium where he was providing warnings about translating of 2D accessibility paradigms into the new realities and potentials of 3D volumes and spatial computing. He was talking about some of the concerns for folks who are deaf and hard of hearing including the challenges of splitting visual attention, the challenges of information overload, and the potential to communicate new channels of information through the modality of haptics. (Also don't miss my deep dive into captioning for VR discussion with W3C's Michael Cooper in episode #1230 where I do an audit of different captioning experiments across the VR landscape in the write-up.)
Vogler also talked about how all of the existing virtual reality headsets interfere with his cochlear implants that means that he often has to either take off his cochlear implants and not be able to hear any sound or deal with the uncomfortable strain that VR headsets have for folks with cochlear implants.
A rough transcript of our conversation is down below (as well as rough transcripts for the all 1200+ episodes of the Voices of VR podcast), and I was also able to record a video with the sign language of both my questions and Vogler's answers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wavOOCRRQC0
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
Christine Hemphill started Open Inclusion in 2018 as a disability-inclusive research and design organization that is working at the intersection between accessibility and emerging technologies. She makes sense of the broad spectrum of disabilities by saying, "I talk about people that think, feel, move, sense or communicate significantly enough differently that they're excluded from the way design works today. So to me that's disability."
Hemphill's phenomenological framing of disability reminds me of Bernd Schmitt's 1999 article on Experiential Marketing where he defines the "strategic experiential modules" as being "sense, feel, think, act, and relate." VR researcher Dustin Chertoff drew upon this experiential marketing research to expand VR presence theory into the domains of "sensory, cognitive, affective, active, and relational." In my own elemental approach of presence theory, I conceive of it in terms of Embodied Presence from sensory experiences, Active Presence of agency and interactivity, Emotional Presence of emotional immersion, and Mental Presence including the cognitive plausibility and sensemaking aspects as well as the Social Presence and communication dynamics with other people.
Each of these approaches have commonalities that seen when juxtaposing the frameworks from Hemphill, Schmitt, Chertoff, and Bye together:
Sense, Sense, Sensory, or Embodied Presence
Think, Think, Cognitive, or Mental Presence
Feel, Feel, Affective, or Emotional Presence
Move, Act, Active, or Active Presence
Communicate, Relate, Relational, or Social Presence
There are experiential design implications for how to accommodate for a broader spectrum of thinking, feeling, moving, sensing, or communicating differently. Hemphill's slide shown at XR Access lists more details of this spectrum including move differently (mobility, dexterity), sense differently (hearing, sight, touch), feel differently (mental health), think differently (memory, learning), communicate differently (social, communications), and other access needs (mental health, chronic health, neurodivergence, neurodiversity).
Hemphill also lists out contextual dimensions to consider including finances, social resources, education, digital literacy, and just access to that technology in general. In addition, there is also a spectrum of how adaptable folks are given the novel nature of emerging technologies. But defining the spectrum of these variations and differences helps to identify the experiential design considerations when thinking about providing multiple options to users. We'll be diving into some of those universal principles of design and emerging XR heuristics in the next interview with Reginé Gilbert as well as throughout the course of this series on XR Accessibility.
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
This is the first of fifteen in a Voices of VR podcast series on XR Accessibility based upon my coverage from the XR Access Symposium 2023 that happened in New York City on June 15th and 16th. I'm kicking off my 8 hours of coverage with an interview with XR Access co-founder Shiri Azenkot, who is an associate professor at Cornell Tech researching accessibility. She is focusing on making augmented and virtual reality technologies accessible as well as trying to leverage XR to solve accessibility problems. XR Access was started in 2019, which was an opportunity to bring the community together and highlight some of the pioneering accessibility research such as SeeingVR: A Set of Tools to Make Virtual Reality More Accessible to People with Low Vision.
Here is an overview of the 15 episodes in my XR Accessibility series:
Shiri Azenkot on founding XR Access
Christine Hemphill on defining disability through difference
Reginé Gilbert on her book about Accessibility & XR Heuristics
Christian Vogler on captions in VR & potential of haptics
Six interviews from the XR Access Symposium poster session
Dylan Fox on the journey towards XR Accessibility
Liz Hyman on the public policy POV on XR Accessibility
Mark Steelman on accessible XR for career exploration
W3C's Michael Cooper on customizable captions in XR
Joel Ward on challenges with government contracting for accessibility and live captioning with XREAL glasses
Jazmin Cano & Peter Galbraith on Owlchemy Labs' pioneering low-vision features for Cosmonious High
Liv Erickson on intersection between AI & Spatial Computing for Accessibility
Ohan Oda on upcoming accessibility AR features in Google Maps
Yvonne Felix on using AR HMDs as an assistive technology for blind and low-vision users
Sean Dougherty & Jeffrey Colon on the challenges and opportunities in making XR accessible for blind & low-vision users
I'm also including rough transcripts for all episodes in this series as well as for my entire backlog of more than 1200 Voices of VR podcast interviews. I'm also in the process of adding categories to my episodes, which you can explore on this overview page showing the different categories. There's still more work to be done in order to make my website fully accessible, and feel to reach out to accessibility@drawtheskies.com. if you have any specific requests, feedback, questions, or comments.
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
Wagner James Au's latest book Making a Metaverse that Matters: From Snow Crash & Second Life to A Virtual World Worth Fighting For releases on June 27 after the 20th anniversary of Second Life is on June 23, 2023. Au started as an embedded journalist employed by Second Life to cover the evolving trends of digital culture within their virtual world, and he's continued to be an intrepid reporter of this space on his New World Notes blog tracking the evolution of various different Metaverse platforms.
I had a chance to take an early look of Au's book, and do an in-depth interview with him this week to unpack some of his deep insights into the industry. He goes back to the source material of the Metaverse of Snow Crash, providing the following strict definition of the Metaverse that is justified by associated passages from Neal Stephenson's classic sci-fi novel that coined the term. He says, "The Metaverse is a vast, immersive virtual world simultaneously accessible by millions of people through highly customizable avatars and powerful experience creation tools integrated with the offline world through its virtual economy and external technology." By this definition there are already well over 500 million active monthly users on Metaverse platforms including Roblox, Minecraft, Fortnite, ZEPETO, Rec Room, VRChat, Avankin Life, IMVU, Second Life, and Horizon Worlds.
The book starts off with a retrospective look at Second Life, and some of the reasons why it never hit an inflection point to go mainstream. It also digs more into the philosophical origins of the Metaverse via Snow Crash, with a deep dive with author Neal Stephenson in the second part unpacking the Metaverse as product road map and how Stephenson's Lamina1 is attempting to fuse aspects of the cryptocurrency and blockchain with the Metaverse complete with literary citations and inspirations from Stephenson's body of sci-fi work. It digs into some of the limitations of Meta's approach with Horizon Worlds as well as some of why Au is skeptical that VR will ever take off as a mainstream consumer technology. More on those critiques here in a bit.
The second part of the book does a more in-depth deep dive into some of the leading Metaverse platforms including Roblox, Minecraft, Fortnite, and VRChat. Au speaks to leading world building and experiential design developers from each of these platforms, and in some cases speaks to executives when he is able to get ahold of them. A common theme throughout this book is that Au comes back to many Second Life veterans who offer their reflections on the different dynamics of each of these platforms, and he is able to usually pull out some little known, obscure, or under reported fact tying back each Metaverse development back to Second Life.
The third portion of the book is where Au is able to tie up a lot of loose ends in terms of countering different Metaverse hype, but also unpacking the promises of pragmatic Metaverse applications as well as digging into the Metaverse perils and the variety of ethical and moral dilemmas. He lays out some trends and future paths moving forward including AI, cloud rendering, and up and coming platforms including how Discord and Value's Steam platform could be some spaces to keep an eye on.
I really appreciated how much original reporting Au did for this book in gathering quotes from a broad range of Metaverse developers, industry insiders, and academics, and the tone is similar to his blog in the sense that he's either pulling quotes from his prior reporting or he was able to get the latest perspectives on the industry over the past year and a half. This is a quickly moving industry, and so his Afterword at the end is able to fill in the gaps to bring us mostly up to speed on a variety of different new develops that he was not able to cover in the main chapters.
Au does is skeptical that virtual reality has the viability to become a mainstream technology,
I had a chance to speak with Tribeca Immersive curator Ana Brzezińska to break down each one of this year's selection of 13 immersive stories. I'll be in NYC from June 7-16th covering the festival, and so stay tuned for more coverage coming soon.
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
I speak to CNET editor at large Scott Stein about his hands-on impression of the Apple Vision Pro that he had on Tuesday, June 6, 2023. Check out his full article: "Apple Vision Pro Hands-On: Far Better Than I Was Ready For." Also see my Twitter thread live coverage of #WWDC23
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
I speak with UploadVR Editor Ian Hamilton about his hands-on impression of the Apple Vision Pro that he had on Tuesday, June 6, 2023. Check out his full article: "Apple Vision Pro Hands-On: Way Ahead of Meta In Critical Ways." Also see my Twitter thread live coverage of #WWDC23.
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
I speak with Road to VR Editor Ben Lang about his hands-on impression of the Apple Vision Pro that he had on Monday, June 5, 2023. Check out his full article: "Hands-on: Apple Vision Pro isn’t for Gaming, But it Does Everything Else Better." Also see my Twitter thread live coverage of #WWDC23.
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
Apple finally announced their mixed reality headset called the Apple Vision Pro at Apple's WWDC keynote on June 5, 2023. It's a $3500 device that by accounts is the most advanced XR headset produced up to this point that's largely driven by eye tracking, hand gestures, and speaking. I was not able to score an invite to be at WWDC myself, and so I was closely tracking all of the news in my WWDC23 Twitter thread. But I wanted to get some first-hand testimonies from XR developers who were on the ground at Apple Headquarters during the big announcements to get their perspectives, reflections, and insights after being able to speak with Apple employees who were there. I had a chance to speak with Sarah Hill, CEO of Healium, and Raven Zachary, COO of ARound on Monday evening after the big announcements. Neither one were able to get a hands-on demo, but they were able to lay eyes on the device and were able to bear witness to this historic announcement first-hand.
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
Engage XR produced a 45-minute “Eat Sleep VR Repeat” – Immersive Metaverse Concert in collaboration with Fatboy Slim’s Norman Cook that showed in a limited screening on March 30, 2023. It was an incredibly, mind-bending and groundbreaking VR concert experience that combined novel interactions and social dynamics, but also a trippy and psychedelic journey through the mind and music of Norman Cook. I had a chance to catch a press preview of this virtual concert on March 28th, and then unpack the creative process with Engage XR’s Head of Studio David McDermott and Fatboy Slim’s own Norman Cook on March 31, 2023 after they had finished all of their screenings. No news of upcoming shows has been released yet, and I’ll try to keep these show notes updated with more information on future concerts, as this was certainly an experience not to be missed.
The Engage XR platform holds a mix of different types of gatherings in VR ranging from educational meetings, corporate communications, and virtual events and conferences. With the onset of the pandemic in 2020, then HTC started holding a number of their conferences and announcements on the Engage platform, and eventually became an investor. I had a chance to speak with the CEO David Whelan back in May of 2021 to get a bit more context and history of the Engage Platform.
Engage has continued to develop and evolve as a platform, and it’s worth making a couple of notes including that they changed their name from “VR Education Holdings PLC to “ENGAGE XR Holdings PLC” on November 4, 2021, and their ENGAGE Link platform launched on November 7, 2022, which is how they presented their Fatboy Slim concert in March 2023 (more on that in the next episode).
But Engage XR has continued to innovate in the social VR platform space with their cross-platform support, and optimizations for Quest VR. This conversation with CEO Whelan from May 2021 should provide a lot more context for the history and evolution of their platform, and set the context for how they’re continue to evolve and innovate in the space.
WebGPU shipped in Chrome 113, which brings high-performance 3D graphics & parallel compute capabilities to the web. I was able to chat with Google Chrome software Engineer Brandon Jones, who is a W3C specification editor for both WebGPU and WebXR Device API. We talk about the history of WebGPU, some his speculations as to how Apple may be actively working on support both WebGPU and WebXR (spec editor Ada Rose Cannon works at Apple), the future of WebXR, the new WebGPU Shading Language (WGSL), nascent ecosystem WebGPU support from Babylon.js and three.js and Play Canvas, and some of the AI and Machine Learning capabilities that will become available on the web, which Jones refers to as the “compatibility layer for the world’s computing devices.” It’ll be open standards like WebGPU, WebXR, glTF, and WebAssembly that start to define what an open and interoperable metaverse might look like, and WebGPU will start to close the gap on bringing the web closer to native performance. Though Jones believes the web will always lag behind trading off performance for more interoperability and cross-compatibility on a broader spectrum of devices.Here are some links with more information on WebGPU:Chrome Ships WebGPUIntroducing WebGPU: Unlocking modern GPU access for JavaScript from Google I/O featuring JonesWebGPU SamplesAndy McClure’s Co-Host post on WebGPU history: “I want to talk about WebGPU”Compute.toys WebGPU and WGSL examples in the vein of Shadertoy
The immersive documentary Reeducated won a Peabody Award as well as the Outstanding Interactive Media winner of the New Approaches category of the New & Documentary Emmy in 2022. I had a chance to record this interview with the co-directors Ben Mauk and Sam Wolson just after it’s world premiere at SXSW 2021 (where it picked up a Special Jury Recognition for Immersive Journalism). This 360-video was based upon oral history testimony of 3 different prisoners within one of China’s reeducation centers within the Xinjiang region, and it was translated into an interactive component of the investigative journalism piece by Mauk published in the New Yorker titled “Inside Xinjiang’s Prison State: Survivors of China’s campaign of persecution reveal the scope of the devastation,” I had a chance to break down the creative process and story with both Mauk and Wolson back on March 18, 2021 exploring how this same story is told across these different formats using the unique affordances of print media, immersive 360 video, and an interactive translation of this spatial content embedded on the web.
I did an interview with Jay Graber back in 2019 at the Decentralized Web (DWeb) Camp a few years before she officially became the Bluesky CEO, which is currently the new hot social media platform that's a Twitter clone built on top a decentralized architecture using the Authenticated Transfer (AT) Protocol. At the time, Graber was working on a decentralized events application called Happening, but she had a lot aspirations to build out a fully-fledged decentralized social media platform. The challenge was the bootstrapping problem of getting a critical mass of users, which was a bit too much to overcome with all of the friction involved in making the onboarding and overall user experience of DWeb systems easy and intuitive. At the time, her solution was to start with a centralized onboarding process, and eventually integrate more decentralized aspects over time, which happens to be a very similar strategy to what Bluesky is currently doing.I wanted to dig up this July 19, 2019 interview with Graber from my archives of unpublished interviews because she articulates a lot of the deeper philosophical inspirations and motivations she had back in 2019 that are being carried to their logical conclusions at her current position as CEO of Bluesky. The Facebook Cambridge Analytica scandal from March 2018 was a turning point for Graber that motivated her to start to working towards decentralized social networks that have better privacy protections and stronger agency over data, but also to work on peer-to-peer models that can be more resilient to censorship and natural disasters where our supercomputer phones are often bricked without working cell service or Internet connectivity.In this conversation, we were able to talk abstractly about the tradeoffs between centralization versus decentralization, and how a hybrid approach is needed in order to successfully launch a DWeb applications. At the DWeb Summit 2018, I had a chance to interview one of the co-inventors of the Internet Vint Cerf, who was very bearish about the potentials of a completely decentralized web for a variety of reasons. The biggest one was probably how the economies of scale from centralized systems are just so much more efficient, more reliable, less complicated, and cheaper. Graber acknowledges some of the benefits of centralization include drastic protocol upgrades are easier when things are centralized, you can move faster in development, and it's easier to streamline the overall UX. Looking forward to the present day for how Bluesky is rolling out in a mostly centralized fashion, then all of these benefits seem to be holding true as they're still creating a critical mass of engagement. But the real goal of decentralization is robust federation, which has the opportunity to be more resilient to single points of failure. There are challenges of avoiding the service from becoming corrupted, but there are also many opportunities to separate the data layer from the application layer as well as to create a robust and diverse number of ways that folks could interact within their ecosystem of people and content. Fast forward to today, and many of Graber's predictions as coming to pass as there is a ton of innovation happening with developers playing with Bluesky's AT Protocol API, which is a throwback to the early days of Twitter when access to the API was more readily available for developers who helped bring lots of innovation to the social media ecosystem. It's been a really exciting time to see a similar level of excitement and enthusiasm from independent developers who are developing apps ranging from a real-time Bluesky firehose chat streaming visualizations with Firesky.tv or Skypulse, customized clients, an assortment of chatbots, and an interactive social network graph analysis tool.The AT Protocol also has the potential to solve some of the more intractable challenges of verifiable identity using some of the Decentralized Identifi...
Immers Space implements the ActivityPub open standard in order to add a federated social graph to the open Metaverse. I had a chance to try a prototype back in December 2022 where I went from a modified Mozilla Hubs WebXR space (that had the Immers Space open source tools integrated into it) into a FrameVR.io WebXR space by clicking on a persistent interface tracking my connected friends. Just as many virtual worlds allow you join in your friends, this method starts to add a distributed social graph to the open web and therefore the open Metaverse using the ActivityPub standard...I had a chance to unpack it all with William Murphy, who is part of the Immers Space worker cooperative and social.coop Mastodon instance run on the principles of Platform Cooperativism as well as Gabe Baker, who is the Project Manager for the FrameVR.io team working on a browser-based 3D and communication platform. Many of the most compelling social VR experiences and communities are still locked behind walled gardens, but this is one of the more robust efforts to start to build some of the required foundations to have a distributed social graph across the open Metaverse.
The Metaverse Standards Forum announced today that they are "incorporated as an independent non-profit industry consortium." The Khronos Group has been financially bootstrapping the Metaverse Standards Forum's efforts to see if there was enough interest, and they went from 37 founding members in June 2022 to now having over "2,400 members and multiple active Working and Exploratory Groups focused on driving pragmatic interoperability advances." Now that they've incorporated as a 501(c)6 industry trade organization, they have "organized its own governance, finances, and operations. Working Group activities remain freely accessible to any member, while new paid membership tiers enable members to be elected to leadership roles in the Forum while funding Forum projects."I had a chance to chat with Metaverse Standards Forum Chair and the President of the Khronos Group Neil Trevett about the latest developments, and we dive into some updates on the latest member-driven approved Working Groups including:Metaverse Standards Register building a public database mapping the landscape of metaverse-related standardization activities and open standards.Digital Asset Management [PDF] exploring the digital rights standards landscape for identity, ownership, protection, transport, exchange, and monetization of digital virtual assets.3D Asset Interoperability using USD and glTF [PDF] enabling alignment and cooperation between the USD and glTF™ 3D file formats.Real/Virtual World Integration [PDF] examining and encouraging interoperability for use cases such as digital twins and visual positioningWe also cover some of the Exploratory Working Groups that are in the pipeline for approval to becoming a full Working Group that includes:Digital Fashion Wearables for Avatars [PDF]Interoperable Characters/Avatars [PDF]Privacy, Cybersecurity & Identity [PDF]3D Web Interoperability [PDF]Network Requirements and Capabilities [PDF]Technical Interoperability and End-User Troubleshooting [PDF]Again, the Metaverse Standards Forum is not developing these standards, but they're facilitating discussions amongst other Standards Development Organizations and open source formats in order to facilitating interoperability with however the future of the Metaverse continues to unfold. I was able to get a much clearer idea for what's been happening since June of 2022 when they launched to the pipeline of various different working groups, thousands of participating members, and coming soon a searchable database of the Metaverse Standards Register that is keeping track of the various open standards that may be relevant to the continued development of the Open Metaverse. You can find out how to join the Metaverse Standards Forum if you'd like to participating in helping to shape the future of the open Metaverse, and be sure to check out this presentation PDF for even more context.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
In my final SXSW interview, I had a chance to catch up with SXSW Immersive Programmer Blake Kammerdiener to do a retrospective look at this year’s program, some of the challenges for VR exhibition, his design intentions for how to intermingle the technologists, storytellers, and musicians who attend SXSW, how there’s a larger music selection this year, the emerging mixed reality experiences that are starting to crop up, the range of unique haptic experiences from Symbiosis to In the Pursuit of Repetitive Beats, which is one of my personal favorites in the festival circuit over the last year, as well as some of his other personal highlights from the festival. We only had about an hour to cover as much as we could, and it would’ve taken 2-3 hours to do them all justice. Luckily, I recorded over dozens of hours of interviews with creators in addition to having had covered 9 of the experiences at previous conferences.I’ll add a comprehensive list of experiences down below in case you’d like to unpack some of the experiences that you may have had at SXSW.
Chloé Lee’s immersive art piece Temporal World: A Haptisonic Virtual Reality Memory World uses a custom-made haptic vest that is intimately integrated into the ambient sound design of this point-cloud, spatial exploration around memory. Lee wanted to incorporate open-world wandering, but also explore the fragmented nature of her own immigrant identity and disjunctive blending of memories across multiple cultures. She uses the sparse point clouds to mirror aspects of this immigrant experience, while also innovating on hand-gesture driven locomotion schemes and an overall “haptisonic” fusion that’s incredibly immersive and compelling in a way that amplifies the experience beyond just the visuals or sound design alone. There are more coherent audio spheres connected to the memories that you can portal into via discovering objects, and my biggest complaint was feeling a bit too lost in the second portion where I felt like I was not succeeding in discovering everything. But Lee seems content in preferring this mode of open world exploration without being connected to the desire to be a completionist. Perhaps this feeling of being lost or aimless wandering also serves to replicate dimensions of a sort of exile that immigrants may face, and so thematically it may be resonant with her deeper design intentions and intuitions for how this all came together.
Another World VR developers Ioulia Isserlis and Max Sacker thought it was a prank when German Hip Hop legend Dennis Lisk (aka Denyo) reached out via email to collaborate on developing a social VR and a completely virtualized live DJ performance toolkit. But it wasn’t a prank, and they’ve been building a real-time audio engine compatible with Unreal Engine in order to meet the live performance standards of professional DJs to mix, sync, and modulate music in real-time. Most DJ sets in social VR either rely upon external hardware where the audio is streamed in, or they just play back a recording of a set. But for Lisk, he wanted to be able to perform live in order to more dynamically respond to the audience without having to split his attention between the physical hardware and any virtual representation of it. The end result is The District VR, which is an ambitious fusion of all of these live DJ mixing tools with aspirational plans to build out social VR clubs and create new monetization opportunities for DJs and musical artists.
The Ferryman Collective were back at SXSW presenting another immersive theatre piece in virtual reality, but this time they were translating an adapted a piece called Find WiiLii that was originally produced in South Korea by GiiÖii Immersive Studio. Set in a far-future, science-fiction VRChat world, the creators wanted to invite participants to do more open world explorations this section of a nostalgic city that recreates architecture from a section of Seoul. This piece also explore staging of immersive characters that are much more dynamic in how they move through a space to the point where there are some literal chase scenes and elevation changes that mirror a building and culmination of dramatic tension. Overall, Find WiiLii is a synthesis of best practices from immersive theatre, but is also start to explore the types of interactive, participatory, and immersive qualities of a story that could only happen within VR.I had a chance to catch up with Whitton Frank, who is the director of the English-version of Find WiiLii, as well as an Immersive Producer, Performer, and member of Ferryman Collective. Also joining us were Jay Kim & Hyewon Lee, Executive Producers from GiiÖii Immersive Studio. We talk about the unique international collaboration between the Ferryman Collective and GiiÖii Immersive Studio as GiiÖii licensed Welcome to Respite as announced back on April 6, 2022. This lead to an international collaboration of translating immersive experiences across cultures, and then GiiÖii invited the Ferryman Collective to help translate Find WiiLii from it’s original Korean version into English as it was accepted into SXSW. We talk about this unique collaboration, design process, and their further innovations of the immersive theatre format in VR in this discussion.
Body of Mine VR won a special jury prize for the SXSW Immersive Competition for it’s potent use of virtual embodiment to explore gender dysphoria and testimonies from a number of different transgender folks. Director Cameron Kostopoulos leaned upon his own queer-identify story of being exiled from his family due to his queerness, and wanted to create a safe refuge in a virtual space to explore stories from the LGTBQIA+ community, and particularly from trans-identified folks.The experience uses a seven-point tracking system to give the audience a full embodied experience, and you spend the majority of the experience in front of a mirror as you’re able to track your embodied movements as they shuffle through nearly a dozen different trans-identified avatar representations. Kostopoulos leans heavily into the slight offsets in the trackers or the proprioceptive differences of the different shapes and sizes in the avatars across a broad spectrum of avatars in order to evoke a certain amount of either gender dysphoria or body dysmorphia that is thematically mirroring the themes of the the trans-identified testimonies that Kostopoulos collected and that you hear in the experience that are by touching different parts of your body that these clips are related to. Overall this was a really powerful use of embodiment within VR, and was rightly honored by the jurors with a special jury mention.I had a chance to catch up with Kostopoulos at SXSW where we talked about his journey into VR, his design process, some of the technical difficulties of Bluetooth interference with the Vive trackers in the context of an exhibition space, and some of the underlying financial constraints and costs for exhibiting a piece like this.
Roman Rappak's Miro Shot band returned to SXSW again this year for an updated mixed reality, live concert performance with a much needed upgrade from the high-latency and outdated GearVR headsets to the much more cutting-edge HTC Elite mixed reality headsets. There was a capacity drop from around the 100 GearVR headsets that he had for his MR performance last year down to just 7 HTC Elite headsets where Miro Shot played the same song on repeat for a couple of hours inducing a trance-like vibe where you listen to the same some on repeat. He's been able to really streamline the experience and find a real sweet spot in live mixing this juxtaposition between short VR journey vignettes and mixed reality passthrough moments where you can see a modulated version of the live band performing on stage. Live music has it's own compelling experience, and I feel like Miro Shot was able to find a good mix of preserving what makes a live performance compelling versus exploring the affordances of virtually-mediated embodied experiences. Most immersive concert experiences are far from having any live performative aspect at all, and even if it is live, then sometimes it is indistinguishable from it playing back in a canned, pre-recorded version. The liveness of the live of a musical performance is preserved in this mixed reality context, and Rappak continues to explore the more digitally-mediated domains on the Ristband platform that I covered in it's launch last year in my conversation with Rappak and conversation with his co-founder Anne McKinnon.There was an interesting time-constrained exploratory aspect in this latest Ristband translation of this experience, which created a digital twin of the SXSW venue where he played, which happens to be called "The Venue" in Austin. You're on a quest to find some character who will give you the chance to buy an NFT you find him, but you also explore this sci-fi cityscape that has a radio broadcast that's playing some of Miro Shot's latest songs -- especially the one that they performed over and over again during their intimate, immersive preview experience that they would play to make available to certain fans ahead of their concerts. Within the virtual experience, I found myself loitering around the speakers to hear the music, but then realized that I could move around a bit more once I found the main virtual music venue, which again was a digital twin copy of The Venue.Overall, Rappak, Miro Shot, and Ristband continue to tinker and experiment with this fusion of virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality. I feel like there are some really compelling dimensions to this fusion and juxtaposition of virtual reality and mixed reality, especially coming from a touring band that is prioritizing different live elements. Rappak has a monitor where he watch what the audience is doing and paying attention to, and then dynamically alter the pacing and sequence of immersive vignettes based upon that feedback. Sort of metaphorically similar to a DJ reading the energetic vibes of a crowd that would provide intuitive omens for what experiential dimensions to fuse in next. This type of attention towards the unique character of live performance is something that I have not seen a lot of other innovation around. There's a tendency to want to just automated it at that point, and then what live performative element does the human have to offer at that point? These are the types of questions that Rappak is continuing to interrogate and explore in these types of explorations, and this latest iteration is a huge leap in quality and coherence of the experience and on the bleeding edge of the next generation of headsets with the HTC Elite. Incidentally, while the diopter on the HTC Elite is really cool, it also introduced quite a bit of onboarding friction and potential confusion for new headset users who may not be familiar with the need to twist the diopter until what you see is clear.
Jessie Cohen started representing immersive stories back at Sundance 2013 when she was working for the Sundance Film Festival for the New Frontier section. She eventually transitioned from trying to represent every New Frontier project through the festival into working directly with virtual reality directors and artists who were exhibiting their work through Jessie Cohen PR and Consulting. She then came back to represent festivals like Sundance New Frontier, Venice Immersive, and London International Film Festival while also representing immersive storytellers as well as working with Chris Milk and Supernatural to represent the emerging market of VR fitness.Cohen spoke up at the Art of Reviewing Immersive Art and Entertainment panel at Venice Immersive that I was speaking at, and we had set an intention to find a time to capture more about her insights from having a front-row seat of navigating the relationship to the press and emerging artists and storytellers for the past decade. I had a chance to catch up with Cohen at SXSW where she recounts some of the highlights of coverage that she’s been able to help facilitate, as well as reflect on how ultimately it comes down the stories and creative processes of these artists that keeps her engaged in this emerging market and ecosystem for immersive art and entertainment.
Andreea Ion CojoCaru is a unique blend of VR developer and practicing architect in both virtual and physical spaces, but who is also driven by deep philosophical questions and her own embodied curiosities exploring the boundaries between the virtual and the physical. These embodied experiences in virtual reality have actually catalyzed a pretty significant paradigm shift in CojoCaru's own philosophical thinking. I first met CojoCaru at VR Now in Germany in 2018 in a serendipitous collision that led to a deep dive discussion into the phenomenology of architecture. We then crossed paths again in London for the Immersive Architecture of the Internet Symposium organized by Space Popular where she was talking about using VR to hack her sensory perceptions. During the pandemic, I invited CojoCaru to participate in a discussion unpacking the immersive architecture of Valve's Half-Life: Alyx. By the time I had a chance to catch up with her CojoCaru again at SXSW in 2023, it had been nearly three years since we last did a deep dive in anything. I had sent her a conversation about Process Philosophy with Matt Segall at the end of 2020, and again with Grant Maxwell covering 13 process-relational philosophers in 2021, and passed along my recent discussion with Segall about his upcoming book unpacking an organic view of reality and contextualizing Whitehead's and Schelling's Process Philosophy with Kant as a guardian of the epistemological threshold. What's striking about this is that while she was not very receptive to this process-relational mode of thinking through the podcast medium of philosophical discourse, she was actually in the process of her own philosophical paradigm shift towards Eastern philosophy via Orthodox Hinduism and process-relational thinking catalyzed from her own embodied experiences of VR and completely independent of these other conversations.In the process of working on this concept of an open source city project called Spectra Cities, which she announced on March 7 as having received a 2 million Euro grantb where here design shop of numena will "work on behavioral analysis & participatory design using VR +Spectra Cities." CojoCaru has been also deeply inspired by Stanislavski's system of improve and has been translating her architectural and spatial design process into a piece of embodied performance not only for herself, but for others as well. It's through this more dynamic and participatory relationship to a more fluid and "rubbery" experience of architectural forms that she started to search for an alternative metaphysical grounding that went beyond Mel Slater's "presence as illusionary framing" that Chalmers argues against in his book Reality+. She started to find some deep inspiration from the Vedantas, but was also still in the sensemaking process for how to more fully contextualize this more dynamic and relational dimension of design that goes beyond the more static framing of Western substance metaphysics.On March 5th, CojoCaru had privately expressed some skepticism towards my claims in my two conversations with Segall that embodied VR experiences could start to catalyze a philosophical paradigm shift towards process-relational thinking. But by the time I had a chance to speak with her on March 14th at SXSW, she had the sudden realization during this conversation that she herself had in fact gone through a radical philosophical transformation towards a more process-relational mode of thinking that was catalyzed by her embodied experiences within VR. Then in this conversation we decide to coin the term "process-relational architecture" to describe this interactive, dynamic, improvisational, performative, and participatory design process that's she's been doing with virtual architecture. So rather than focus on the materiality of substance as a static metaphysical foundation, then process-relational metaphysics that I think this passage from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy enca...
Departure Lounge is volumetric studio based in Vancouver, Canada that is collaborating with the Monstercat music label to experiment with XR technologies in making both 2D music videos and more volumetric immersive experiences that they were showing at SXSW. The 2D music video for WHIPPED CREAM, Jasiah & Crimson Child - The Dark debuted on February 1st, 2023, and there was a more immersive and interactive translation of this video that debuted at SXSW this year.It was only after I had watched the 2D video when I got home from SXSW that I fully realized why they made some of the experiential design choices in the immersive that they did. As an example, there is a stream of rose pedals that you're instructed to follow in the VR translation, but at one point the volumetric captured performances start showing up behind you and it's ends up being a better experience if you ignore the rose petals. It was only after watching the 2D music video that I realized that they were creating those pedals more as a background context for the 2D video rather than optimized for what would make the most sense in the immersive experience. Also, the more interactive experience tries to make a delicate balance between user agency to move around where ever they'd like versus guiding attention towards the pre-recorded performances that are showing up in specific locations. In many ways, the music video is able to more deliberately guide attention through cutting in a way that was more emotionally-evocative than my immersive experience where I had to navigate being slightly confused, lost, or feeling like I had missed some important story beats that would help to contextualize what was happening. The affordances of film cutting allowed for some more robust and deliberate worldbuilding that I had missed within the immersive translation.So overall, this piece is an experiment in user agency, environmental exploration, and how to seamlessly tie in some of these volumetric assets into a more embodied experience. In some ways, using this type of volumetric capture is a bit overkill for a 2D video production, especially as sometimes the fidelity or quality of those 3D captures projected into a 2D space have even lower resolution and fidelity than what a dedicated 2D-optimized capture pipeline would produce. But the upside is that you have an even more powerful volumetric experience of these performances within the virtual context. So there are a number of tradeoffs between embodiment, agency, emotional valency from more deliberate direction, as well as how to handle the user choices. For the most part there were not very many interesting things to explore in this experience outside of the performances, but I also experienced the immersive version before fully understanding that there was a 2D version that had already been published. There were some behind-the-scenes types of objects laid out in the house before the music video began that I had little to no context for what those objects were or why I should be interested in looking at them. Again, it wasn't until I saw the 2D music video that I realized why they had constructed it in the way that they had. Also, some of the decisions made in the immersive version of the experience made a lot more sense after seeing how they were reusing some of the assets. It's actually a really interesting use case in exploring the affordances of the film medium of the music video versus the immersive version, and how one or the other mediums are prioritized in how it was all put together.I was able to break down the design and creative design of this piece with Brenda Medina (Virtual Producer at Departure Lounge), Yie Hua Chee (Art Director at Departure Lounge), and Will Selviz (immersive director and Partner at RENDRD Media). This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Last year, AmazeVR launched their Into the Hottiverse virtual concert experience at SXSW featuring Megan Thee Stallion before taking it on a VR concert tour at AMC theaters around the United States. This year AmazeVR is back with an even more streamlined production and production process with a K-Pop band named Aespa that their aiming to launch their own VR application with later this summer.They continue to push the fidelity and resolution up higher and higher as they use bespoke and proprietary pipeline with some AI secret sauce that seamlessly integrates their stereoscopic footage into a spatialized environment. It’s a 2D billboarded process that still manages to convey enough volumetric cues as to create a super compelling volumetric experience.These types of intimate VR concert and musical experiences shows the power of 360 video technologies, especially for the more non-gaming or non-technical audiences who are searching for new and novel ways to connect with their favorite artists and musicians. So AmazeVR is looking to carve out a unique niche for bringing more and more musical artists into VR through their platform starting with their own custom app slated to launch later this year.I had a chance to catch up with Lance Drake, Creative Director & Director of Content at AmazeVR as well as with Seth Kwon, Head of Business at AmazeVR at SXSW to hear about their latest production and upcoming plans for where they’re planning to take the AmazeVR platform in the future. Keep an eye on their app as it launches later this year as it could be a catalyst to start to bring even more people in to VR.
Myriam Achard is the Chief of New Media Partnership as well as PR Officer at Montreal's Phi Centre. Part of Achard's job is to travel around the work searching for the best immersive storytelling, art, music at festivals and gatherings around the world. She's on the lookout for new talent to bring to the Phi Centre, but also help make connections for immersive artists who are trying to find a viable pathway from immersive festivals into the broader consumer market via location-based experiences and museum contexts like the ones that Achard has been helping to create. It's a vital bridge from the immersive festival circuit into a more bespoke phase of LBEs and museums before these pieces can be more fully optimized, ported, and marketed to a broader consumer audience in the process that Astrea's Danielle Giroux broke down to me in a previous episode.Phi Studio was a key collaborator with Felix & Paul in bringing The Infinite location-based experience to audiences in Montreal, Houston, Tacoma/Seattle, and San Francisco as I explored in a conversation with Phi Studio executive producer Julie Tremblay. Achard was also instrumental in bringing Punchdrunk's Believe Your Eyes to an Phi Gallery exhibition in Venice during Venice VR Expanded (now Venice Immersive) in 2019. She said that the pandemic slowed down a number of other location-based experiences they were planning on launching in 2020, and so their LBE has slowed down a little bit, but they continue to travel with The Infinite and continue to travel with Alejandro G. Iñárritu's CARNE y ARENA. Overall, Archard is one of the leading immersive storytelling curators in the world as the Phi Centre continues to bring some of the most cutting-edge and award winning immersive art to Montreal and increasingly other locations around the world. She is proving that audiences are hungry for and really resonate with these types of immersive stories, immersive art, and immersive experiences outside of the festival context, and I'm really exited to hear more about their plans to expand their physical footprint in 2026 and continue to produce experiences, cultivate emerging talent, and curate the best of from the festival circuit.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Eggscape is a mixed reality, table top platformer game similar to Lucky’s Tale, but since it’s mixed reality then there’s a lot more of moving your body through space as a control dynamic. I previously got the whole backstory about Eggscape from director German Heller at Venice Immersive, where it picked up a third place price. Now that the Meta Quest Pro has been released, they’ve ported it to take full advantage of the color passthrough, which I have to admit has been the most immersive and compelling implementation of mixed reality that I’ve seen yet. It was so incredibly immersive to see how they utilized their physical installation as a context grounded in physical reality in order to overlay and alchemically transmute this physical installation waypoints into an entire dynamic playground for these cute and tiny little egg characters. I had many moments of experiencing the VR giggles where the piece is melding elements of the physical reality into this magical alternative domain of existence that starts to blend together in a way that feels completely plausible.There were moments where my little egg character was floating in the air with a balloon that my mind completely bought into that I was somehow controlling it’s movement as it were a remote controlled balloon-like drone object. It’s these glimmers of believing the alchemical blending of digital and physical reality where my mind seamlessly integrates the different domains into a coherent and plausible reality that makes me realize the transformative power of mixed reality as companies like Meta, Apple, Samsung, Google, and Qualcomm are all working towards this vision of bringing the next paradigm of computing out of our hands and onto our face where we will have a magical lens that allows us to blend the digital and physical realms through our visual, auditory, haptic perceptual inputs.
Figural Bodies is a research project out of Goldsmiths college that uses motion captured dance with disabled, non-disabled, and neurodivergent dancers in order to explore non-normative avatar representations as well as the accessibility challenges for immersive technologies. Their installation at SXSW included a dance performance where audience members could hear an experimental audio sound track while watching Kat Hawkins dance in physical reality while seeing them puppeteer a range of abstract, flowing, and non-humanoid avatar representations in collaboration with another dancer sharing this virtual space, but performing remotely in London. There was also a VR component of his experience that allowed you a closer look at the recordings of these non-normative avatar representations being puppeteered while you listened to an autoethnographic audio essay exploring themes of embodiment, challenges with accessibility, and centering disabled bodies into the experiential design process. The authors of this piece granted permission for me to air this autoethnographic essay at the beginning of interview with Clarice Hilton, who is a creative technologist and researcher and co-director of Figural Bodies as well as with Kat Hawkins, who is an artist working with dance and film, and is doing their Ph.D. research with Candoco dance company of disabled and non-disabled dancers. We explore the multi-faceted themes of embodiment, dance, accessibility, and some of the resonant connections between non-normative VR avatars and non-binary gender identity.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
Jailbirds is a really well-told, three-part episodic animated VR piece that uses the spatial affordances of VR to tell a compelling metaphoric story about the escapist qualities of virtual reality. It’s a character-driven story set within a prison, and it explores themes of liberation in similar ways that virtually-mediated experiences in VR help transport us into another realm. The piece continues to evolve it’s cinematic storytelling style that encourages a 180-degree viewing experience of looking forward as there are many dolly shots and fast-past cut scenes that start to penalize the view if you look behind you too much. The series has been produced over a number of years, and it’s clear that this type of hyperstylized camera movements develop over the series as they received feedback from the audiences that they not only could handle the movement, but also quite enjoyed it. The end result is a delightful journey into this magical realistic realm of story that director Thomas Villepoux does an excellent job guiding.I had a chance to catch up with him at SXSW where he unpacks many dimensions of the story and it’s development process (warning that this conversation contains a fair amount of spoilers), but also the process of working with voice actors who were also theatre performers and how they created a new hybrid workflow of embodied performance with voice acting that was used to create this style that has a unique blend of motion capture and performance capture, but with a distinct amount of stylization in the end result for how these 3-4 characters are able to carry the throughline of the story. Overall, this was the strongest immersive story in competition this year, and is a solid reference point that explores what a story like this is a lot more powerful when you’re immersed within the spatial context of these characters. I previously had a chance to chat with Villepoux at Venice for a piece called Mandala that he directed, and I will certainly be keeping an eye out for his future projects as he’s got a very distinct idea about how to use the affordances of virtual reality for immersive storytelling.
Consensus Gentium is took him the Grand Jury prize for SXSW Immersive 2023, and it’s the most immersive phone-based experience that I’ve ever had. The Latin title translated means that “If everyone believes it, it must be true,” and it’s a near-term speculative sci-fi piece that explores what China’s social scoring system might look like in the context of the United States where mobility is restricted by algorithms but can be expanding if citizens agree to be surveilled by a phone app. The experience shifts automatically shifts between mobile app videos onboarding you into a surveillance state juxtaposed with Facetime calls where your face appears in the lower right corner, and text messages are seamlessly popping throughout the experience as you jump in between different tasks and cut scenes that build up the world and immerse you deeper into what director Karen Palmer describes as a “reality simulator” that feels entirely plausible near future.The piece is also tagged with the logline of “the film that watches you back” as it integrates facial tracking technologies and an eye gaze mechanic that allows you make a few conscious and unconscious choices throughout the piece. Some of the themes of the piece are around algorithmic bias in facial detection algorithms and how that impacts marginalized communities (and why the EU’s AI Act bans facial detection in certain contexts like police enforcement). It also explores agency, self-determination, and biometric threats to freedom of thought as you are scored on a spectrum between how compliant you are to the state versus any deviant or resistant behaviors.Overall, using the multi-channel communication affordances of the phone is able to create an entirely plausible portal into this near-future world that Palmer is creating for us which I found deeply, deeply immersive. It’s no wonder that this piece took home the top prize as the SXSW jurors seemed to agree with that sentiment, while this piece also presciently covers many relevant topics around AI, bias, and threats to our cognitive liberty — notably I spoke to Palmer on the same day that Nita Farahany’s book officially released titled The Battle for Your Brain, which I had a chance to unpack with Farahany ahead of SXSW.
AltSpaceVR closed it’s doors for the second time on March 10th, 2023 at 10:08pm, and Athena Demos was there to bear witness to it all until the very last moments. She shared an eulogy again that she had first shared during The Polys livestream, and I had her read through what she had said. I had a chance to catch up with Demos to hear about her journey into social VR through the Burning Man community and helping to produce and translate the 2015 scan of Black Rock City into a virtual Burning Man during that pandemic in 2020 that I unpacked with developer Greg Edwards and Demos in 2020. She went on to found Big Rock Creative XR and produce a number of different virtual events with AltSpaceVR throughout the pandemic.She’s working on producing an AltSpaceVR social VR alternative tentatively titled BCRvr Immersive that features the scan of Burning Man with a series of different stereoscopic footage vignettes to give you an immersive documentary vibe of the Burning Man experience. She shares both her grief of loosing her digital home and community within the the context of AltSpaceVR as well as her gratitude for Microsoft for providing this free service so long. It’s still a bit of a mystery even to AltSpaceVR’s staunchest community members as to the exact reason why Microsoft decided to pull the plug on AltSpace, and she shares inside scoops for how she first heard about the news. Demos is at cutting edge of developing new grief rituals and social VR community organizing dynamics as she continues to produce virtual events and experiences as she shares her surprising journey into VR in this emotionally authentic debriefing interview that we were able to have at the end of day on Monday, March 10, 2023.
Astrea is the publishing arm of Atlas V that aims to close the current gap in distribution for immersive stories that debut on the film festival circuit, but then often don’t make it wider distribution. There’s a lot of optimization, porting, and marketing involved in this process, and I had a chance to catch up with Astrea’s head of distribution Danielle Giroux to talk about their curation and publishing process as well as some selections from their full lineup. We also talk about other distribution options for immersive stories including projection mapped experiences and location-based entertainment. Distribution is one of the biggest open problems for these immersive stories, and Giroux talks about how the festival debut is just the very beginning of the life cycle for an immersive story and how they’re taking a bespoke process for each story that’s in their line-up.
Targo Stories continues to innovate with novel spatial storytelling techniques in both of the projects that were submitted and selected to SXSW. The Behind the Dish series uses micro lenses to give a uniquely fresh and giant look at food being produced by female chefs. And then JFK: Memento is experimenting will all types of translations of spatial footage from 2D into 3D, that's then juxtaposed within a volumetric representation. It steps you through the Kennedy assassination, and gives you a much deeper spatial context of the events as they unfolded. I had a chance to break it all down with Victor Agulhon (co-founder of Targo, producer of projects) as well as Chloe Rochereuil (co-founder of Targo, director and creative director of projects)
Forager is a short immersive story that shows the four stages of development of a mushroom through a groundbreaking volumetric timelapse that takes place within a game engine. They had to innovate on automating their photogrammetry timelapse pipeline both in the capturing and rendering side, and they ultimately decided to go with a voxel-based approach for representing and optimizing these volumetric timelapse processes.I had a chance to chat with Winslow-Porter, co-creator, producer, and creative director of Forager as well as Elie Zananiri, co-creator and technical director on the project about their creative process, the influence of creative coder communities, how mushroom inspire them, their epic mushroom-based installation, where to use audience interaction and where to dial it back, as well as their multi-sensory integrations with smells, wind haptics, and SubPac haptics.
Fresh Memories: The Look is a 360-video about the war in Ukraine that takes the deceptively simple idea of having Ukrainian citizens gaze into a 360-degree camera within the context of a bombed out home, workplace, or school that's juxtaposed against an audio design of that space when it would be at it's most flourishing moment. The experience of straightforward concept is extremely powerful, emotional, and evocative idea. The use of a traditional Ukrainian folk song at the end was specifically recorded for this piece to great effect. I had a chance to catch up with Ondrej Moravec, who is the co-director on the Czech side and producer, as well as Volodymyr Kolbasa, who is the co-director on the Ukrainian side.
MLK: Now is the Time was originally released on the Meta Quest platform on January 12, 2023, and was selected to show at SXSW as a part of the 2023 XR Experience Spotlight. It’s master class of immersive storytelling and a brilliant use of the affordances of VR to create an interactive, embodied, and immersive experience of some of the lesser known and discussed parts of Dr. Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech on August 28, 1963. This is the second part of a series on MLK with the first experience being The March, which was converted into a 360-degree experience that is also available on the Quest platform.I had a chance to catch up with MLK: Now is the Time director Limbert Fabian, as well as the writer Andrina Wekontash Smith at SXSW to break down their experiential design process of creating this piece, which was personally my favorite story coming out all 30+ experiences this year. I wasn’t the only one who thought that as well as it won the SXSW XR Experience Spotlight Audience Award as well. So I highly, highly recommend checking out MLK: Now is the Time on the Quest, and then listen to us break it all down.
I had a chance to catch up with Eddie Lou, who is the Founder of Sandman Studios and Director of Sandbox Immersive Festival that's based in China. I get an update as to what's happening with the Chinese ecosystem for immersive stories, how he's bring Western stories to China within a location-based entertainment context, his plans for bringing back the Sandbox Immersive Festival as a physical exhibition with international presence, their work on a social VR platform based on Unreal Engine called Vast (which was used on Mandala that premiered at Venice 2022), and their work on bringing Chinese musical acts into immersive spaces with the browser-based, pixel-streaming experience called Neo-Wulin: The Era of Black Ark that was showing as a special exhibition at SXSW.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
I speak with HTC’s Alvin Wang Graylin, who is the President of HTC China & Global VP of Corporate Development at HTC about HTC’s investment strategy and what’s happening in the enterprise XR space. We talk about how hardware subsidies have distorted the overall XR hardware ecosystem, and how Meta has largely skipped over the enterprise market in favor of the consumer market while HTC continues to find compelling use cases across training, medical XR, architecture, and spatial design. We also talk about the imminent TikTok ban, how that might impact Pico VR, which is also owned by ByteDance, as well as how this might impact HTC.At the end of the podcast, we end up having a debate about the future of AI where Alvin is very bullish in where AI will be in the next 5, 10, and 20 years while I remain a bit skeptical that we’re anywhere close to moving beyond narrow applications into more generalizable AGI systems that demonstrate a fusion of deeper understanding, knowledge representation, planning, world modelling, multimodal sensory sensemaking capabilities, symbolic reasoning, common sense reasoning, and storytelling.
Nita Farahany argues that we need to establish a new human right of Cognitive Liberty in order to address the threats of Neurotech like VR, AR, BCIs, & non-invasive neural interfaces in her new book Battle for the Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology (releasing on March 14th). Cognitive Liberty is a umbrella term that includes a complex of other human rights including mental privacy, freedom of thought, and self-determination, but clearly defining this novel concept of cognitive liberty will hopefully provide a pathway for creating the philosophical, legal, and ethical foundations to create viable regulations around these new forms of sensitive brain data, physiological data, and biometric data as well as the inferences that can be made from it.Farahany’s book is a tour de force of scholarship that is not only catching everyone up on the last decade’s worth of neurotechnology research and enterprise industry developments, and it was actually Meta’s acquisition of CTRL-Labs & their wrist-based EMG interface into VR and AR (see my previous coverage in episodes #814 & #987) that was a catalyst for her to write this book as we’re on the threshold of these neurotechnologies starting to be deployed at a much broader consumer scale. She does a comprehensive audit of both the promises and perils of these neurotech applications across multiple contexts in order to develop of the novel concept of a new human right of Cognitive Liberty and it’s associated rights in order to address the threats from these technologies.
Virtual Reality represents a paradigm shift for how I’ve come to understand the nature of reality, and there’s a corresponding paradigm shift in philosophy in the move from substance metaphysics to process-relational metaphysics that I’ve previously explored with Alfred North Whitehead scholar Matt Segall, in a discussion about 13 process-relational philosophers with Grant Maxwell, and in a talk that I gave on Process Philosophy & VR to The Virginia Philosophy Reality Lab. I invited Segall back on for a Part 2 of discussion to help build some metaphoric scaffolding to help understand this paradigm shift to Process Philosophy, and to talk about his latest book Crossing the Threshold: Etheric Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead (releasing on April 22, but available for pre-order). Segall frames Kant as a guardian of the threshold, explains how both the German Idealists and Whitehead found inspiration for a more organic philosophy coming out of Kant’s work, and picks up some loose threads about how to understand the role of imagination as a crucial organ to interfacing with the underlying creative processes that form underlying fabric reality according to Whitehead’s cosmology.
Andrew Kissel has been recreating moral dilemmas like the Trolley Problem in VR at his Virginia Philosophy Reality Lab at Old Dominion University. I had a chance to talk about his work in moral philosophy around catalyzed by Morgan Luck’s paper “The gamer’s dilemma: An analysis of the arguments for the moral distinction between virtual murder and virtual paedophilia” that tries to define the ethical threshold between different types of virtual wrongdoing. We may have an intuition for why virtual murder in video games is morally justifiable while virtual paedophilia is not, but we explore how the variety of ethical frameworks like Consequentialism, Virtue Ethics, or Deontology break down this problem. Kissel invited me to give a keynote talk at a Exploring the Humanities through VR Workshop held on December 10, 2021 where I presented on “Process Philosophy & VR: The Foundations of Experiential Design.” We debate process relational metaphysics vs substance metaphysics in the last part of this interview, and I’d recommend checking out my conversations with Whitehead scholar Matt Segall here and here as well as with Grant Maxell for more of a deep dive on the nuances of a process-relational perspective and why I think it’s so useful for thinking about VR.
Moral philosopher Erick J. Ramirez writes that we "we are now in the beginning stages of a methodological VR renaissance in moral psychology" in his book "The Ethics of Virtual and Augmented Worlds: Building Worlds." He argues that our imagination is too limited for perspectival thought experiments like the trolley problem where we're asked to put ourselves into a specific situation and make a prediction for what action we'd take. He's been experimenting with VR at the intersection of experimental moral psychology and philosophy, and also exploring the potentials and limitations of empathy in VR, which he splits up the generic concept of empathy into terms like "empathic contagion" describing the mirroring response of empathy, "descriptive or normative mind-reading" regarding the theory of mind, as well as "in-their-shoes experiences, and “what-it’s-like” experiences." We explore what he means by "virtually real" experiences and how he looks at the qualities of VR in terms of "perspectival fidelity, context-realism, and psychological features unique to each user."
President Joe Biden wrote an Wall Street Journal op-ed on January 11, 2023 calling for “serious federal protections for Americans’ privacy.” Digital Content Next CEO Jason Kint tweeted out that “I’ll sit down with anyone to explain why privacy integrated with antitrust is the critical issue of our time” and I took him up on his offer. Kint serves as a sort of industry watchdog for surveillance capitalism companies like Google and Facebook/Meta digging through anti-trust court transcripts, depositions, and other buried legal obscurities as he keeps close tabs on the relationship between the dominant players of advertising and their associated data practices.I wanted to get some of Kint’s takes on the latest privacy frontiers of US law at the federal and state level, some of the recent $400M GDPR enforcement actions against Meta by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission, and why he’s keeping so close tabs on the anti-trust and the potential anti-competitive practices of Google and Facebook/Meta’s ad businesses. Digital Content Next is a trade organization that represents the future News and Entertainment companies who are advancing the future of trusted content. He has been tracking how the advertising ecosystem has been steadily growing over many years, but mostly to the benefits Google and Facebook/Meta, which he identified was connected to their surveillance capitalism data collection methods that has been providing deep challenges to the fundamental nature of consumer privacy.
On September 8, 2020, the XR Safety Initiative launched their XR Privacy Framework 1.0 which is a set of self-directed, privacy guidelines aimed to empower “individuals and organizations with a common language and a practical tool that is flexible enough to address diverse privacy needs and is understood by technical and non-technical audiences.” It is “inspired by the NIST privacy framework’s approach” with the five functions of “Identify, Govern, Control, Communicate, and Protect” while the XRSI Privacy Framework modifies it to be “Assess, Inform, Manage, Prevent.” XRSI is in the process of developing a 2.0 version of their Privacy and Safety Framework that’s aiming to be released by the end of 2023.
The European Union’s AI Act is pending legislation that is classifying different AI applications across different tiers of risk, and there are a number of ways that this legislation could shape the future of how the Metaverse unfolds, especially as there could be XR privacy implications depending upon how biometric data may be redefined and what types of inferences could be made by this data. I talk with Daniel Leufer of Access Now about the human rights approach for regulating AI applications, and how some of the pending legislation drafts of the AI Act (as of January 17, 2023) may have rippling effects for GDPR and ultimately what type of biometric privacy inferences could be made from XR data.We cover the hierarchy of different AI risks, and how the AI Act is taking a tiered approach to legislating product safety of AI platforms with different requirements at different levels. He’s unpacked some of the common AI Myths as a Mozilla Fellow, and is on the frontlines of tracking the latest AI Act trilogue deliberative processes between the European Parliament, the Council of the European Union and the European Commission (which he breaks down in further detail in this interview).The EU is anywhere between 5, 10, 15, or 20 years ahead of the United States when it comes to technology regulation, and so we reflect on the impacts and gaps within GDPR when it comes to XR Privacy, how the AI Act may or may not fill those gaps, and getting an in-depth sneak peak into how the AI Act may “become a global standard, determining to what extent AI has a positive rather than negative effect on your life wherever you may be.” There are many extensive implications about the AI Act that will likely impact the future development of XR technologies, how AI is deployed in virtual worlds, and how the Metaverse continues to develop and unfold.
I interview Jameson Spivack, who is a senior policy analyst at the Future of Privacy Forum leading their work on Immersive [XR] Technologies of VR/AR/MR, neurotech, BCIs, biometrics, ad practices, and regulatory frameworks. We talk about how there are gaps in existing privacy frameworks here in the United States, and the work that he’s doing to help educate consumers, and technology companies of the current policy debates. The Future of Privacy Forum isn’t advocating for any specific legislation, but sits as an intermediary between technology companies like Meta who are funders, and the rest of civil society and academics keeping tabs on privacy discussions. They end up doing lots of consumer education efforts like this infographic that maps out XR technology data flows, and blog posts that elaborate on XR functions and various privacy and data protection risks and mitigation strategies.
There was an Existing Law and Extended Reality: A Research Symposium held at Stanford Law School on Friday, January 6th, 2023, that brought together legal scholars, industry experts, civil society researchers, and academics to look at how immersive technologies and virtual worlds may bring about new interpretations of existing laws or the need to write new laws that better cover harms from the “Metaverse.” I had a chance to talk with organizer Brittan Heller, who has previously been featured in Voices of VR podcast episodes #789 & #988. We cover the major highlights from the Symposium in this episode, and you can find all of the talks in this YouTube playlist here.I was invited to give a lightening talk on the “Philosophical Reflections on Privacy from an XR Journalist,” which lays out an argument for how there aren’t any privacy existing protections that cover the types of physiological or biometric data from XR or the Neuro-Rights types of inferences that could made from that data. This episode is the first in a 9-episode series digging into the landscape of XR privacy, what’s happening on the US front, what’s happening in the European Union, and what’s happening in terms of moral philosophy and ethics to start to address some of these potential gaps. Stay tuned as we do a deep dive into what’s happening at the frontiers of XR privacy.
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 Facebook. Anduril is working on creating immersive virtual reality user interfaces, custom VR headsets, and some cutting-edge perception augmentation beyond sight. We cover what he's working on now in VR now, where he sees XR and human augmentation going in the future, and also reflect on some of the early days of consumer VR as we start to hit various 10-year anniversaries and dig into some interesting oral history elaborations of VR regarding Valve, Sony, and what ultimately led to Luckey getting fired from Facebook.
I dig into my interview backlog archive from April 2019 at F8 (a month before the Quest launch) to publish this conversation with Sonya Haskins, who shares her journey into VR through eSports and the Echo VR community. Haskins is a writer who published a couple of guest editorials on UploadVR starting in 2017 about how VR changed her perspective on gaming, and then a recent piece titled "Echo VR’s Loss Reverberates In Reality" reacting to the shut down announcement on the previous day. On January 31, Ready at Dawn announced that "after many discussions internally and with our partners at Meta, we have made the difficult decision to shut down Echo VR." Meta CTO Andrew "Boz" Bosworth explained in an Instagram AMA on February 2nd that "The user base is small. It’s loyal as all get-out, but it’s small. It’s measured in the low 10 thousands. And unfortunately keeping things alive takes work. This is not like a return on investment money standpoint, it’s just those resources could be put to other uses that I think will be useful to the now tens of millions of people who are in VR."Even though John Carmack is no long a consulting CTO for Meta, Carmack still shared some in-depth thoughts with UploadVR saying, "Even if there are only ten thousand active users, destroying that user value should be avoided if possible. Your company suffers more harm when you take away something dear to a user than you gain in benefit by providing something equally valuable to them or others. User value is my number one talking point by far, but “focus” is pretty high up there as well, and opportunity cost is a real thing."I wanted to share this archival interview that I did with Haskins in 2019 since she talks about her journey into VR through Echo VR (originally titled Echo Arena, but rebranded in 2018), reflects on what VR and eSports has meant to her, especially as she's gone on over the past 3+ years to work within the XR industry as a key community organizer and she's currently the Head of Programming for the Augmented World Expo. And the community of Echo VR players have a number of campaigns ongoing in their attempts to #SaveEchoVR.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
There's a new book about the future potentials of challenges of the Metaverse called "Metaversed: See Beyond the Hype" by Luis Bravo Martins (CMO Kit AR) and Samantha G. Wolfe (Founder of PitchFWD) that is releasing today, February 7th, 2023. It's an ambitious look at the broad spectrum of technologies behind the Metaverse that's split up into five chapters with the first three chapters laying out the technological innovations driving a 3D and immersive Internet, with the fourth chapter laying out some of the open challenges, and a final chapter providing advice for preparing for these challenges.
On November 1st, 2022 the XR Association (XRA) trade association for VR, AR, and Mixed Reality companies announced the formation of the XR for All Foundation at XRA’s Limitless Future Conference. The press release says, “The XR for All Foundation’s main priority will be supporting the development of a diverse and equitable workforce for the immersive technology industry through broad-based research and impactful partnerships for generations to come.” I had a chance to speak with XRA President and CEO Liz Hyman and XR for All Foundation Chair, Jessica Lindl, who also heads up the education and social impact work at Unity Technologies. I was able to get more context on this new 501(c)(3) non-profit, and the various Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts that the XR for All Foundation has planned starting with conducting focus group research with aspiring and transitioning workers.
Niantic's Lightship Augmented Reality Developer Kit celebrated it's one-year anniversary in November 2022, and I had a chance to catch up Caitlin Lacey, a senior director of AR platform marketing at Niantic to talk about the evolution of the Lightship ARDK. Their Virtual Positioning System has the ability to "determine a user’s position and orientation with centimeter-level accuracy", and their free Unity SDK enable's third-party AR developers to build site-specific apps using the same systems that Niantic has built for AR games like Ingress and Pokémon GO. We talk about some of the other major features, and their intention to help build what they call the "real-world metaverse."This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
In my final interview from IDFA DocLab 2022, I had a chance to catch up with DocLab founder Caspar Sonnen to reflect on the 2022 program and the ecological points made by the piece Okawari, to comment on the "Nervous System" in this phase of the global pandemic, to share his insights for why immersive documentarians are on the bleeding edge of innovation, and to elaborate on various distribution challenges with the type of immersive stories being shown at DocLab 2022. We also cover the many variety of different IDFA programs from the selected pieces of XR work and digital stories, the planetarium, The IDFA Market and DocLab Forum, the R&D Summit, Roundtable Discussions, the research collaboration with MIT Open DocLab, the commissioning of immersive works, the ONX + DocLab MoCap Stage, different industry talks, and some of the other DocLab staff helping to pull it all off including Wotienke Vermeer, Annabel Troost, and Yorinde Segal.That's a wrap on my 15 hours and 39 minutes worth of coverage about the 2022 edition of IDFA DocLab. Lots of amazing pieces and interesting themes and trends emerging in the coverage. Thanks for joining in, and be sure to support this type of work over at Patreon here. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
After suffering a paralyzing viral infection, XR Director Naima Karim started to notice the natural world around her in a more visceral way, She “experienced the monsoon even more intensely than usual: the initial gusts of wind, the rapidly darkening sky, the oppressive humidity and finally the downpour of rain, which washes everything clean and leaves behind a fresh scent.” A painter by trade, she took up virtual reality painting with Open Brush, and created a romantic and poetic sim tribute to Monsoons with a multi-sensory piece called “The Anticipation of Rain.”I had a chance to briefly catch up with Karim at IDFA DocLab 2022 to hear more about her journey into VR & immersive storytelling. I also wanted to learn a bit more about what’s happening with VR in Saudi Arabia, as she was one of five selected projects amongst a tout of 231 in a competition there.
Missing 10 Hours VR is an interactive immersive narrative designed to counter the bystander effect by recreating different social dynamics and peer pressure as your virtual friend attempts to spike a woman’s drink with a date rape drug GHB and then isolate her by the end of the night. Here’s a description of the piece:In this interactive VR piece, the viewer is led on a night out by Greg, a big-headed guy with bad intentions. He spikes 22-year-old Mara’s drink with the drug GHB, and she gradually loses control of her actions. A walk through the night ends in a backstreet, where Greg maneuvers Mara into a dark corner. The choices the viewer makes during the evening—go along with Greg, watch passively or intervene—determine the outcome: a safe ending, or arrest and questioning at the police station. -- Missing 10 Hours VR Synopsis
Sarah Wolozin is the director of the MIT Open Documentary Lab, and I had a chance to catch up with her at the IDFA DocLab 2022 in order to record her journey from being a storytelling to working at MIT’s Open DocLab. Here’s the mission statement of the Open DocLab: “Drawing on MIT’s legacy of media innovation and its deep commitment to open and accessible information, the MIT Open Documentary Lab brings storytellers, technologists, and scholars together to explore new documentary forms with a particular focus on collaborative and interactive storytelling.”I was able to capture some of the history of MIT’s Open DocLab in my three previous conversations with it’s founder William Uricchio (#855, #1042, & #1160), and Wolozin mentioned the inaugural New Arts of Documentary, one-day summit on March 20, 2012 as being a key turning point for her after seeing the energy and excitement from the community of creators exploring new documentary forms.
Ikhet (Sound Pyramid) is a 14-channel spatial audio installation that included ButtKicker Haptics, LED tubes with diffractive glasses giving a ghostly, analog Holographic effect, experimental field recordings, and a harsh electronic music track that reflected the artist Ali Santana’s strained emotions throughout the pandemic. I had a chance to chat with Santana to unpack his journey and process in creating this piece. Here’s his description of his immersive installation, which details more of the technology and emotional intention for the piece:This installation inspired by the ‘Glorious Light’ integrates a multi-channel sound collage with audio-reactive LEDs to create an experience that engages viewers via light, spatial sound, and haptic feedback (vibration). The dynamic lighting which changes color and pattern in sync with the experimental sound piece, immerses the audience in a multi-sensory experience that they will see, hear and feel.Field recordings made between 2019 and 2022 along with experimentations in analog audio synthesis and hardware samplers were combined to create textures, noise, beats, and tones that reflect the artist’s personal feelings of resilience, anxiety, grief, and frustration, during a period of unprecedented change. Ali Santana’s description of Ikhet (Sound Pyramid)
Bag of Worms is a live XR sketch comedy performance developed by Matt Romein in collaboration with Peter Mills Weiss and Julia Mounsey that showed as a part of the ONX + DocLab MoCap Stage at IDFA DocLab 2022. It’s difficult to fully describe the surreal quality of Bag of Worms, but their synopsis does a pretty good job of summarizing the key points, “Wearing motion capture suits, Bag of Worms uses technology to create a new kind of hybrid performance, with the performers constructing and manipulating a digital playground viewable to the audience in real-time. The lines between the physical and the digital become blurred, challenging the audience’s perception of where the actual performance is taking place.” Because the audience can see the physical bodies of both performers, Bag of Worms plays with “creative violence” in the context of the virtual avatar representations of their motion captured embodiments that are being projected onto the back of the stage. I had a chance to catch up with Romein at the IDFA DocLab to get more of the backstory of how this project came about, how they’re translating some of the language of theatre into rules for this project, and the quality of attention within a theatrical proscenium stage with adding video screens and hybrid performance.
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 these projects are exploring how to blend aspects of the virtual and physical in the context of a live performance. I had a chance to get the backstory and more details on all of the featured projects from Matthew Niederhauser and John Fitzgerald, who are both from Sensorium & ONX Studio.
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 capture technology either in the display, production, and live performance of their piece. [Video of this talk is coming soon]. There was also a 5-minute introduction to this session by Sandra Rodriguez (Creative Director & MIT Open DocLab Fellow), but unfortunately it was not recorded.The second half of this is a panel discussion moderated by Rodriguez and featuring Avinash Changa (We Make VR), Matthew Niederhauser (Sensorium & ONX Studio), and myself. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
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 into the 1989 Underground Acid Rave Scene in Coventry and West Midlands where you go on an epic journey retracing the convoluted steps to avoid detection by the police in order to make it to a warehouse of dancing bodies. Director Darren Emerson from East City Films gives us a masterclass of techniques including impeccable set design of filled with media artifacts of that era, hybrid drone shots, projection mapping, 6DoF interactions, Haptic suit design, volumetric capture, wind effects, a well-considered 4m x 6m location-based entertainment design space with streamlined onboarding and offboarding, multi-modal media integration from diegetic archival video footage, fliers, and photos, a climatic psychedelic and vaporwave dance scene, and innovative integration of interviews that projected as silkscreen projections on fliers. Not only were they able to cover everything you’d want and expect within a 2D documentary covering the topic, but this piece managed to recreate the key components of the visceral an embodied experience of going on a musical adventure. All while using the medium of VR to provide additional historical context every step of the way.
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 DocLab as well as a couple of different sessions, and I had a chance to catch up with Cizek and Uricchio in Amsterdam on the day of the launch party to get an overview of what they’re covering in their book.This definition of Co-Creation that they provide in the book gives a great overview of some of the themes they’re covering:Co-creation offers alternatives to a single-author vision, and involves a constellation of media production methods, frameworks, and feedback systems. In co-creation, projects emerge from a process, and evolve from within communities and with people, rather than for or about them. Cocreation also spans across and beyond disciplines and organizations, and can also involve non-human or beyond human systems. The concept of co-creation reframes the ethics of who creates, how, and why. Our research shows that cocreation interprets the world, and seeks to changeCizek, K., & Uricchio, W. (2022). Collective wisdom: Co-creating Media for Equity and Justice. page 19. The MIT Press.Many emerging technologies like virtual and augmented reality naturally lead towards co-creative strategies because it’s such a novel medium that requires a lot of interdisciplinary collaboration. At the beginning of their chapter on co-creation within communities, they point out how the non-fiction and documentary genres are typically early adopters of technology, and how this spirit of innovation often requires a degree of co-creative and collaborative strategies.
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 produced by Tessa Ratuszynska in collaboration with Survivors Leading Essential Education & Change (SLEEC), which is a “survivor-run organization that changes systems, supports survivors and dismantles the roots of male violence.” The primary mode the narrative is delivered is through voice-over narration where you listen to survivors of sexual violence or other members of SLEEC as they share their own experiences. The piece uses hand tracking technologies so that you can embody the hands of speaker as they share their story, whilst also being in a mostly void VR space aside from a small table-top installation. If the audience member puts their hand on the table, then the narrative will pause, which allows the audience to have more agency in how the VR experience is delivered to them. The first of three segments of the VR installation was based upon this article by SLEEC member Naroa Hammerson, which was published on SLEEC’s Disobedient Survivor blog.I had a chance to catch up Tessa at the IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam where we talked about this VR installation, as well as some of the unique approaches to consent that she’s using that is modeled after the idea that consent should be ongoing and enthusiastic. This type of co-creative strategy was also featured in the recent book MIT Co-Creation Studio book, Collective Wisdom: Co-Creating Media with Equity and Justice, which I will be covering in the next episode of this series (Voices of VR episode #1160).
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 search for his post-colonial Ghanaian identity, and he’s interested in exploring unique modes of sound design to capture what he refers to as “oral knowledge.”There was a lot that I did not quite understand when I first listened to this piece, and I got a lot more context and information from the interview that I did with Adam in Amsterdam. So I’d recommend either listening to the episodic series either before and/or after this interview since the narrative is deliberately sparse and self-described as “incoherent” (see below).Adam says, “I refrain from describing Ghana Airways as a single entity (audio piece, website, installation, research work) [links added].” I also found it helpful to read the associated show notes and research, which wasn’t shown in the context of the IDFA DocLab installation, but perhaps could have been in some fashion as it did provide a lot of additional context for the piece.I wanted to highlight a couple of quotes from Adam’s writing about Ghana Airways to provide a bit more context:
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 gather together within a virtual space in Metaverse with avatars in all in order to get their weekly computer questions answered. It's a unique approach of capturing a segment of digital culture that asks the user to reflect upon a time in the future when they may need help getting their own technology questions answered. The experience takes place over a single session as people log on and eventually log out at the end, and so the narrative structure is more about documenting the communal process and relationship dynamics within this community that is recontextualized by setting the time in the distant future. A fun dimension of this piece is being able to watch the activities of a couple of peers in this help session as they relive their nostalgic moments of Internet culture, which happens to be the bleeding edge of digital culture today. I had a chance to unpack this experience with director Jeroen van Loon at IDFA DocLab 2022. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.Music: Fatality
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 Game Boy aesthetics, graphic novel, narrative game walking simulator, with structural inspirations from Bagenzo’s Madotsuki’s Closet, which a fan fiction game of Yume Nikki.I found it to be a deeply moving piece and unlike any other interactive narrative piece I’ve ever experienced before, and so I naturally wanted to interview McCue in Amsterdam unpacking their journey and process in creating this. The game has a lot of different content warnings, and I’ll include a subset of those warnings that apply to our conversation here: Trauma, Gender Dysphoria, Suicidal Ideation, Blood, and Themes of Sex Work. Here’s another excerpt from the trigger warning page: “Trauma is a part of life. Everyone has trauma. Trauma is common in trans people. This game is made of memories. Those memories are about sex work. I’ve fictionalized them. That is the only way that I can get close to the truth without getting messy.”
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 in Portland, Oregon from November 12 to February 12 at the Portland Art Museum's Center for an Untold Tomorrow (PAM CUT). There are 6 different characters that you can embody in this "speculative fabulation" inspired by the last chapter of Donna Haraway's Staying with the Trouble book where she suggests that humans start to combine the DNA of endangered species into humans in order to cultivate a deeper kinship with the world around us. Polymorf takes this idea to the logical extreme as you embodied these human animal/hybrids in the distant future. I had a chance to experience 3 of the 6 different characters at the PAM CUT press preview, and then catch up with the co-creators Marcel van Brakel and Mark Meeuwenoord during my trip to IDFA DocLab 2022 in Amsterdam to unpack their journey, process, and some of my experiential design feedback and critiques.
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 + DocLab MoCap Stage at IDFA 2022. I interviewed her at IDFA to talk about the evolution of this project, working with indigenous poet Joan Naviyuk Kane, recording sounds of a melting glacier, and how she wanted to juxtapose geological time with the time of a human lifespan to bring more ecological awareness to the changing world around us.
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 an imaginal future for the next generation, but it also works as a broader metaphor for the intergenerational legacy that will be inheriting by future generations.I found it to be both very challenging and confronting to translate my thoughts about the deep future that we’re leaving behind in a way that was very specific to one individual. We often think about the future in broad generalizations rather than how they may impact an individual’s life, and being asked to imagine someone’s story in an one-on-one immersive theater conversation like this was very striking and powerful in a way that both landed for me in the moment, but also really stuck with me.
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 exploring overconsumption, and asks some deeper questions about the ecological sustainability of XR technology.The co-directors of Landia Egal (Tiny Planets) and Amaury La Burthe (Novelab) are challenging the inevitability of technology evolution and diffusion by asking what the cost to our environment would be if XR headsets become as ubiquitous as smart phones. With the rapid nature of how quickly the VR technology is developing, then each generation of technology is producing electronic waste that doesn’t always get properly recycled.
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-directors Gayatri Parameswaran and Felix Gaedtke (producers of Home After War and Kusunda), this piece documents the story of how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is illegally targeting cultural heritage sites and shows how artists and museums are reacting to the war and continuing to create cultural artifacts.This piece mixes a number of modalities from 360-video, 180-video, animation, and stereo drone shots and ties everything together with spatialized sound and at times emotionally-moving or driving sound track. I had a chance to talk with Parameswaran and Gaedtke about the challenges of shooting an immersive documentary within a war zone, and the various tradeoffs for how and when they’d use a particular technology to tell this story. We were also joined by VR for Good executive producer Amy Seidenwurm who gave some additional context on this project.
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. Robinson is getting his Ph.D. in clinical psychology, and Inner World is a research project studying how the effects of what he calls “Cognitive Behavioral Immersion,” which is an adaptation of Aaron T. Beck’s Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Model. Robinson took inspiration from Dennis Greenberger and Christine A. Padesky’s “Five-Part Model to Understand Life Experiences” that includes Physical Reactions, Thoughts, Moods, Behaviors all within an Environmental Context that was first published in their 1995 book Mind Over Mood: Change the way you feel by changing the way you think. The main idea that your feelings are difficult to directly control, but that you can alter your mood by changing your thought patterns, behaviors, embodied physiology within the context of a different environmental context.
Robinson has found some powerful anecdotal evidence that providing mental health interventions within a social VR world can lead to some profound transformative moments as it provides a significant shift in environmental context that can lead to different thoughts, physiological reactions, and behaviors that ultimately can shift someone’s mood. He’s in the process of conducting three randomized-control trial studies to provide more scientific evidence on the impact of immersive environments on these types of mental health interventions, and is collecting lots of anonymized data within his social VR app to study what works and does not working within the process of peer counseling.
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). This adds interactive capabilities to glTF objects that are similar to Unreal Engines Blueprint system, Unity’s Visual Scripting Language, and NVIDIA Omniverse’s Omnigraph systems.
I had a chance to sit down with Threekit’s Ben Houston, who has been collaborating with the Khronos Group on this interactive behavior extension to get a run down of how this fits into an overall development of an open and interoperable Metaverse. (see reference implementation here).
The Metaverse Standards Forum is an independent and separate process that started after this specific effort, and it’s role is to foster collaboration among Standards Development Organization to make recommendations for standards that are in service towards creating an open and interoperable Metaverse, and does not have any power to enforce adoption or promote any one standard at the expense of others.
While glTF with interactive extensions may eventually be a building block towards creating a complex of standards that replicates many of the functionality of a game engine, but within a broader set of open standards. Moving from static objects to interactive experiences that are dynamic, unfold over time, respond and interact with the environment is certainly a key feature of an immersive virtual world, and the abstraction of that interactivity into a visual scripting language. Tune in for more details, and then check out the behave-graph reference implementation and the introductory webinar for more context.
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 putting simulator in partnership with Top Golf with Pro Putt by Top Golf, a rebrand to Golf+, and most recently a funding round that including Rory McIlroy (the current #1 ranked golfer in the world), Jordan Spieth, Tom Brady, Steph Curry, Mike Trout and Ben Crenshaw.
I had a chance to talk to the founder Engle about his journey into VR, writing his own custom physics engine, the process of transforming the initial app from a professional training tool to an engaging video game, the series of strategic partnerships to make golf more accessible to casual players, tuning the difficulty at three different levels, evolving from putting into full courses, the 4-6 week process to translate a physical course into a virtual course, simulating the golf swing with peripherals, recreating “shot euphoria” and the golf feel of short game shots, why sports super stars like Tom Brady and Steph Curry were interested in investing in the app, and new opportunities for virtual golf architecture and course design.
It’s a really engaging app that has been able to find it’s way into the top charts as it recreates some of the social dynamics of playing golf with tunable difficulty bumpers and making golf more accessible to new users and users who can no longer physically play full rounds of golf.
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. This Voices of VR podcast episode is a 2.5-hour, philosophical deep dive providing an overview of each of these thinkers and how their ideas fit into the broader context of experiential design, perception, embodied experience, consciousness, and the metaphysical assumptions about the nature of reality itself. The 13 philosophers included within Maxwell’s book and this discussion include:
Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) F.W.J. Schelling (1775-1834) Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) William James (1842-1910) Henri Bergson (1859-1941) Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) C.G. Jung (1875-1961) Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) James Hillman (1926-2011) Isabelle Stengers (1949-)
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 industry. Lynch has been fusing together patent research, sources from the supply chain and wider XR industry, expert interviews, data mining techniques of import records and decompiled software updates to discover clues about future hardware, and in some cases leaks of CAD drawings for the Meta Quest Pro (1 2 3 4) and Quest 3. I had a chance to do an interview with him a year ago to understand more about his journey into doing this unique blend of hardware analysis, YouTube commentary, and independent reporting. In the past year he's proven himself to have cultivated some amazing insider sources and consistently break news about the latest hardware developments. This post will summarize some of his reporting over the past year (with a full timeline down below), and set a broader context for my October 2021 interview with him.
Brad Lynch (aka SadlyItsBradley) got 17 out of 23 predictions on Meta Quest Pro confirmed to be correct.
The fact that Lynch got 17 out of 23 of his Meta Quest Pro predictions explicitly confirmed to be correct during Meta Connect made me want to dig up this more speculative conversation that I had with him nearly a year ago now.
I interviewed Lynch on October 22, 2021, which was 3 weeks after October 1, 2021 where he summarized 6 months of research and reporting on Valve's Deckard, the standalone VR headset Lynch claimed was in development at Valve that was then independently validated by Ars Technica. On September 28, 2021 reporter Sam Machkovech got confirmation from Valve that Lynch was on the right track with an anonymous quote saying, "Sources familiar with matters at Valve have confirmed to Ars that information in the wild is legitimate—at least in terms of products being made within Valve's headquarters, even if those products don't ultimately see retail launches."
In other words, there's no guarantee the Valve Deckard standalone VR headset will ever see the light of day, but Lynch's reporting catalyzed a tacit confirmation that they are indeed prototyping next-generation, standalone VR hardware. Valve News Network's Tyler McVicker tipped me off to a Steam Dev Days 2014 talk by Robin Walker where he talked about how Valve will deliberately let certain information leak for fans like Lynch to piece together in a sort of alternative reality game, in order to build grassroots buzz but also get feedback from their fans.
I wanted to hear a bit more about Lynch's journey into doing this type of speculative VR hardware analysis, and my October 2021 interview with him covers his journey into do these types of predictions. But because of the speculative and predictive nature of these work, then many of the things we talked about a year ago have not fully come to pass -- but yet at the same time are still totally relevant today. This includes the future of micro OLEDs and micro LEDS display technologies, new types of varifocal and pancake lenses, the next generation modular VR HMD designs, and the types of XR hardware trends that Lynch has been seeing across all of the major XR hardware producers.
Lynch has been a big advocate for the importance of OLED microdisplays (μOLED) are predicts that they are going to figure prominently in the next phase of VR hardware as it decouples from smartphone-based screen components. After the recording of my interview, he went on to interview the eMagin CEO on OLED Microdisplays, scouted out the MeganeX HDR 5.2K microOLED at CES 2022, recapped the Display Supply Chain Consultants (DSCC) VR/AR Display Forum, and attended the Society for Information Display (SID) Displayweek Conference with a full livestream breakdown.
Valve still hasn't officially announced anything around the Deckard over the past y...
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 journalists covering this space on the No Proscenium podcast episode #363 hosted by Noah Nelson (@noahjnelson) along with CNET’s Scott Stein (@jetscott), and LA Times games & themed entertainment journalist Todd Martens (@toddmartens). This Voices of VR episode is a cross-over rebroadcast of the NoPro podcast #363, but with some additional context and closing thoughts that I’ve added at the beginning and end.
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 continuation of two previous conversations that I also participated in during Venice Immersive 2019 (I hope to air the recordings of those here soon), and the major conclusion back then was that the challenges of the limited distribution of immersive stories makes it difficult to cultivate a broader audience for reviews and critiques.
Fast forward to 2022, and many of these distribution challenges by and large still exist, although it is slightly better given more immersive stories showing up on the Meta platform and Viveport has the most robust selection of immersive stories, even though Steam still is largely games only. But the challenge for immersive festivals is that they’re still having many challenges trying to attract the mainstream film critics to pay more attention to the selection of immersive stories.
It’s under this context that there was another gathering of mostly film critics who occasionally write about immersive work and myself who is solely dedicated to covering immersive stories, immersive art, and immersive entertainment.
Moderated by Michel Reilhac & Liz Rosenthal (co-curators of Venice Immersive) Federica Polidoro (Contributor, Repubblica, L’Espresso, Vanity Fair, Il Foglio Quotidiano) Kent Bye (Philosopher and Founder, Voices of VR Podcast) Róisín Tapponi (Contributor, Frieze Magazine, Sight & Sound, The Guardian, & Founder of Habibi Collective and Shasha Movies) Xan Brooks (Film writer & novelist, former associate editor at The Guardian)
A big takeaway for me is that the editors...
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 he’s been able to be quite prolific in make a variety of different types of worlds with each one doing different types of experimentations with including narrative. He said that he was able to put together Treasure Heist within just a couple of months, which is pretty incredible compared to the timelines of other projects take many times longer than that.
I get the story of Fins’ journey into VR, and then we walk through the progressive development of his worlds starting with Shark‘s Fin Cafe, Deep Blue, Pandora Night, Mine Heist, Magic Heist, District Roboto, & Aquarius.
Fins wasn’t able to complete all of Treasure Heist in time for Venice Immersive, and so he’s currently trying to wrap it up in time for the Raindance competition starting at the end of October. One of the challenges he faced was trying to balance the difficulty of the puzzles across two radically different demographics: the core VRChat/gamer community who usually think his puzzles are too easy vs the the more passive film festival attendees who usually think some of his puzzles are too difficult.
Fins also shared some of his inspirations of Avatar and Stray, and I get the sense that he’s slowly building up to a really epic narrative adventure world in the style of Pandora and Avatar. You can keep an eye on Fins latest worlds on social media via @VRCFins.
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 end some of the more very specific ways in which it may be unique to the protagonists. We also talk about the character designs, and how the abstracted animation representations are able to withhold some information that allows for certain information to remain more occluded and then revealed at the end. It’s a brief experience, and I had a chance to watch it a second time before I interviewed director Bambou Kenneth. I ended up doing a shot-by-shot breakdown of the piece unpacking each scene, each perspective shift from 3rd person to 1st person and back again, and how being immersed within VR is able to provide another layer of intimacy to this story.
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 actually run all of the various world hops. The VRChat world gallery had over 30 different worlds that were featured on a variety of different world hops throughout the day, but there were also five different VRChat worlds that were in competition. Two were immersive theatre pieces (Gumball Dreams & Typeman), and three were VRChat worlds including Kevin Mack’s Namuanki, Fins’ Treasure Heist, and MetaRick’s Uncanney Alley.
I talked to Salmon about his journey into VRChat and the underground music scene, his short-list curation strategy, and collaboration with curators Liz Rosenthal and Michel Reilhac. In my last interview with Liz & Michel, we spoke about the festival’s emphasis on trying to onboard other immersive storytellers onto VRChat in order to show the quality and extent of some of the worldbuilding that’s happening on the platform. Salmon likes to call VRChat the YouTube of VR in the sense that the publication of experiences are much more democratized in the sense that they don’t have to be curated by a big walled garden like Meta. This allows for a lot more experimentation as well as more avante-garde, DIY, punk aesthetics, but also experimenting with more bite-sized experiences that you wouldn’t necessarily want to download an entire application for.
There’s also a social dimension to VRChat, which means that the social dynamics are built-in and often times the environmental design provides a background context for connection. Salmon points to the Rat King as a world that is like a community-driven and open source DJ club with a video player that allows anyone to throw their own rave within a VRChat instance. Each year Venice highlights a number of different clubs and events, and this year they featured LLLL SILENT DAWN RELEASE PARTY by PK, OXYMORE by VRrOOm, SANCTUM by PammeMatth, and SODAWORLD by Michael Balkind. You can see how I categorized the different VRChat Worlds Gallery in my Venice Immersive sneak peak post after I had a chance to check out the worlds ahead of my trip to Venice.
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 experience had a wide variety of different problems with hand tracking properly detecting ranging from environmental conditions to having too many nested if-statement conditionals within their code that made it more difficult to trigger the hand gesture.
I spoke with director Céline Tricart about her underlying motivation in creating this experience, and the broader context of how learning self-defence impacts various statistics around domestic violence and sexual assault. Tricart’s The Key experience has also allowed her to keep close tabs on the shifting demographics of VR to having more registered women using VR, which encouraged her to push forward on developing a hand-tracking driven narrative even if there are still a number of bugs and glitches that still need to be worked out.
The Fight Back experience was developed with the interactions in mind first, but it also feels like the narrative in this experience has superseded some of the refinement of the interaction design. There’s still a lot of work that needs to be done to clean up the experience and prepare it for launch, but Tricart also mentioned a number of times the challenges in fundraising for projects like this. Hopefully they’ll be able to find some more funders who can see their vision for where they want to take this as there is so much potential in combining these embodied hand-tracked interactions within a narrative to tell a deeper story about what’s behind the shadow characters and providing a catalyst for women to want to learn more about the techniques of self-defense.
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 decisions. It’s an example of an interaction within a narrative that seamlessly fits into the context of the story, and is also really satisfying to play with VR when the hand-tracking without any hitches (which is how I experienced it at Venice Immersive). I had a chance to speak with director Alex Ruhl about the evolution of this project, the catalyst that got her to not just produce other people’s pieces but to take a more active role in directing, and the overall process of designing and building out this experience.
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 child. There are some 3D models in his piece, but there are a whole lot more 2D images that are collaged throughout a space in order to create a 2.5D experience that still manages to create a sense of place.
The story moves from being connected to community and nature into a more disassociated place of pop culture spectacle and party, but in a way that is not in right relationship to the earth. We’re left to clean up the mess and to try to find our center again by planting seeds. There are catchy songs that bookend the experience, and overall it’s a really polished experience with a story that stuck with me. Preis is able to create a communal sense of ritual and belonging with this low-fi punk aesthetic, and it’s a really good reminder that not every experience has to have the same polished look and feel.
Preis’ piece brings a much appreciated DIY and punk attitude that serves to democratize the medium and make it feel a lot more accessible for folks to tell immersive stories that might otherwise be too intimidated by the 3D pipeline of modern game engines. Definitely try to catch this piece as hopefully it’ll become more widely available at some point as it’s festival run is coming to an end, and tune into our conversation as he unpacks his journey into creating immersive stories like The Miracle Basket.
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 that dynamically transform as you move your hands. It’s really quite a hypnotic and compelling experience, and I actually experienced phantom touch during one of the surprise twists at the end. I had a chance to talk with the director Sjoerd van Acker, who may be one of the first XR native creatives that I’ve spoken with (i.e. that they’re not coming from film, video games, or some other domain). He talks about his inspiration for creating this as a non-material gift for his cousin, and stumbled upon something that people didn’t want to put down. He then got into the Biennale College Cinema program, and won one of the grants. He highly recommends applying as he was able to get a lot of great feedback on the piece. It’s a short and simple piece, but extraordinarily powerful and compelling, especially as I was able to have such a sense of embodied presence as to invoke my first experience of phantom touch. To that end, hand tracking has the potential to help people get deeply immersed within VR.
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 staged. It was was produced by Meta, but the launch date hasn’t been announced yet as it’s still making the rounds on the festival circuit.
I had a chance to catch up the director Julie Cavaliere and producer Michaela Ternasky-Holland at Venice Immersive to get a bit more context to this anthology series that they pitched to Meta. They’re creating a new canon of stories inspired by existing fairy tales, but taken in new directions given that they’re writing these new stories for female protagonists. We talked about the process of coming from the film world, how Cavaliere got a lot of pointers and help along the way, how they’re using the elements and temperaments to design their character arcs, their collaboration with Studio Syro, and how the pandemic shut down other film projects providing an opening for them to develop this project. They’re already in production on the next installments in the series with Ternasky-Holland episode II and a guest director coming in for episode III.
Keep an eye out for this series as it’s a polished piece that manages to have a refined cinematic quality while also taking advantage of the spatial medium of VR to transport you into these fairy tale realms.
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 visceral sense of embodiment after taking what felt quite literally like a descent into infinity complete with moments of confusion, feeling lost, and generally being somewhat stuck within a liminal space. Turns out that this was somewhat by design as creator Celine Daemen wanted to lean heavily into the more confusing in-between aspects with throwing in a few impossible spaces in the experiences. But there was a lot of emphasis put upon the unfolding opera song as the primary focus while the visuals leaned more towards a somewhat repetitive series of loops of point-cloud representations as you circle around down to the bottom… or to the top. There are some choices that the user can make on their journey that will ultimately lead them to the same destination. There were also some elements of how the original myth of Eurydice and Orpheus plays out that were changed in this version, and so I’m not sure if it the story completely translates as I still have a lot of confusion around it. But there is a lot of room to take other opera songs and translate them into embodied experiences like this can amplify a whole mood, vibe, or visceral embodied experience that’s inspired by the music.
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 in All Unsaved Progress Will Be Lost is via motion graphic text as you float through nature scenes constrained underneath a bridge. The full context of protagonist’s rebellion & resistance is held until the very end, and so using the modality of text encourages the audience to use their imagination to fill in the gaps for in what’s missing for what’s happening and why. There’s an undertone of psychological terror that director Mélanie Courtinat was going for as she’s inspired by Jordan’s Peele’s work like Get Out as well as Annihilation, Midsommar, and It Follows. She users color shifts and moving from constrained spaces under bridges to much more open spaces to help emphasize the moments of peak emotion, and other contrasts that we dig into more detail in the context of our conversation. There’s also a lot of subtle direction of embodied postures that likely work on an unconscious level, and I really appreciate the depth of design consideration Courtinat has put into her piece. I’m looking forward to seeing where she goes next in her explorations of immersive 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 and All That Remains are both a stereoscopic 360 video that require an incredible amount of VFX stitching post-production work for each scene. Because each shot is a potential pitfall, then CHUAN works closely with directors during the pre-production and production phases to ensure that they’re not creating more post-production work to clean up the shots. There is an incredible amount of hidden labor behind each of these stereoscopic VR shots, which starts to call into question the finical viability of some of these types of ambitious and beautiful festival circuit pieces.
I had a chance to catch up with CHUAN to learn more about his journey into VR, and the variety of different 360 videos that he’s been involved with over the years including Your Spiritual Temple Sucks, Home, and Afterlife for Tomorrow. CHUAN also showed me some of his incredible 10K stereoscopic photo captures that he’s been taking of different cultural landmarks and events across Taiwan. He also talked about a previous VFX shot that he did in a piece called Perpetual War featuring photogrammetry statues that were animated that he showed to director Singing Chen, which inspired the final shot in The Man Who Couldn’t Leave. I also saw CHUAN taking full advantage of being at Venice by seeing as many immersive stories as he possibly could to see the latest storytelling innovations, and to take a bit of a break after working so hard to complete three different projects leading up to the festival.
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 dilemma at the end of the experience that requires half of the participants to come to some level of consensus, and there's a number of different endings based up what the group decides. I had a chance to talk with director Thomas Villepoux about the process of cultivating the social dynamics of this piece as well as collaborating with Beijing-based Sandman Studios on their Vast social VR platform.
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 competition. Taiwan has consistently had a really strong showing of immersive stories at Venice Immersive over the past number of years, which is somewhat surprising given that the country only has 27 million residents. I sat down with Grace Lee, the Director of Content & Culture Technology Department, Taiwan Creative Content Agency, and Sebox Hong of the Kaohsiung Film Festival in order to unpack more of what's happening within the Taiwanese Immersive Storytelling community and how the government is encouraging citizens to share their stories and cultural identity through the latest immersive technologies.
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 tells a broader mythical story contrasting the different symbolic phases of Yathay's mind and heart as he searches for his son that he had to abandon. It has some light interaction mechanics to gate the linear experience, created a number of exquisite and immaculate environments, and also includes some volumetric captures that are memory flashbacks that help tell the story of how he came to decide to leave his family behind during the genocide. I had a chance to catch up with Bousis at Venice Immersive to talk about her storytelling design process, but also how the invasion of Ukraine impacted their production and Ukrainian developers working on this project.
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 revamped website coming sometime in the future). I had a chance to sit down with XRMust founder Mathieu Gayet during Venice Immersive to share his vision of part magazine and part database to help track the XR ecosystem. Be sure to follow @XRMust on Twitter, check out their latest report on “Access to Audiences: Challenges and Emerging Opportunities in XR Content Distribution,” and see their website for more coverage of immersive stories.
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 take first ever road trip. I speak with director Eloise Singer and producer Siobhan McDonnell about they come to VR via film, how they created a stunning imaginal archival film scene, how they used environmental design as an expression of character, and a sneak peak into some their transmedia plans to expand this story beyond VR into a podcast series, film, and into other formats as well.
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 release tension as Moravec walks you through his embodied experiences in similar moments of catharsis, which allows you to connect the embodied practices that have allowed him to find solace through his depression. You see this experience in a group of up to 3 other people, which creates a disassociated sort of social dynamics as you can overhear other people as they go through moments of catharsis in the experience. At the end of the screening at Venice Immersive, Moravec was on hand to lead the four audience members through a debriefing group conversation allowing them to reflect upon and share any similar experiences of mental health. I had a chance to sit down with Moravec to talk about his process of creating this piece, how curating other immersive events helped to hone his own sense of experiential design, and how he hopes to help cut through mental health taboos with this experience as he continues to tour around and directly engage with audience members to help unpack the experience.
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 fest to replication a one-on-one, immersive theatre encounter in 360 video. So it makes sense that director Craig Quintero is synthesizing over a decade's worth of insights from experimental theatre in Taiwan into this piece. I sat down with Quintero during Venice Immersive in order to get more context on his process of creating All That Remains, how he directs his actors, and the eschewing of any explicit meaning or narrative in favor of creating a sequence of visceral moments.
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 performance showed at Venice Immersive 2022, and fused together aspects of dance, fashion, and immersive performance.
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 many innovations of storytelling grammar and fully using the spatial medium of VR to find new ways of telling this story and moving the audience. Be sure to catch the behind-the-scenes video in order to fully appreciate the ambitious scope of the production, and the various multi-perspective theatrical staging, lighting, and art direction on top of many abstracted metaphors and poetic interpretations of the story that cultivated a dream-like quality. Funique also did an amazing job with the stereroscopic production & post-production of this project. I had a chance to chat with director Singing Chen through interpreter / distributor of the project Poshan Wu during the Venice Immersive Festival.
The first half of this interview is in English, and the Mandarin Chinese portion starts at 42:52.
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 the course of the experience, but it’s easier to focus on the an overall gestalt of broad shifts and changes over time.
The From the Main Square took home the 2nd place Grand Jury Prize at Venice Immersive, and I had a chance to sit down with creator Pedro Harres to unpack his journey of creating this piece of prescient and timely art that’s tapping into some deeper themes of polarized conflict happening in his home country, but also around the world.
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 compelling 2.5 platformer game mechanic where you're navigating a table-top scale egg character through a number of bridges and obstacles placed in a physical environment. It has a very similar vibe to Lucky's Tale, but rather than just a 2.5 POV, you're able to have the full 6DoF experience by moving your body through space in order to aid your 3D perspective judgments. It was a charming, innovative, & engaging enough experience to earn the 3rd place Special Jury Prize at Venice Immersive. I had a chance to sit down with co-founder German Heller to get the backstory of 3dar's evolution from animation to film to VR, and a sneak peak at some of the new frontiers of co-located gameplay that's enabled with these new mixed reality features on VR devices like the Meta Quest 2, Meta Quest Pro (coming soon), Lynx R1 (coming soon), and Pico 4 (also coming soon).
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: Special Jury Prize [3rd place] Eggscape, Grand Jury Prize [2nd place] From the Main Square, and Best Immersive Experience [1st place] The Man Who Couldn’t Leave.
We then make our way through the 27 other experiences organized by which quality of presence it emphasized the most, whether it’s active presence focusing on interactivity & agency, emotional presence focusing on passive storytelling, embodied & environmental presence focusing on cultivating embodied experiences, or focusing on environmental storytelling, or spatial design, and then finally mental & social presence experiences focusing on puzzles, escape rooms, social dynamics, and text-based projects that play with expectations or imagination.
We spend on average around 5 minutes talking about each of the 30 immersive stories in competition (sometimes more and sometimes less), and you can find the timecodes down below to jump around.
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 rocks, static blort entities that offer your a psychedelic vision, and then jump through a portal at the bottom of the ocean to go into an ice world and lava world where you're met with a variety of different mythic Sumerian deities along the way.
Mack's project ANANDALA was selected for last year's Venice VR Expanded (interview here), and he attended many of the virtual events and world hops in VRChat, which inspired him to take a stab at translating his procedural and generative art style in VRChat. NAMUANKI will be publicly available in VRChat for the length of Venice Immersive from September 1st to 10th, and TBD whether it'll be available afterwards.
I spoke to Kevin about his iterative design process and how he uses Houdini for his procedural art, the how he embraces paradox in a pluralistic fashion, his ongoing creative dialogue with what he perceives to be alien-like AI entities from the future, the backstory behind the different Sumerian deities that are featured, and then an extended discussion for how he's been collaborating with different generative AI art programs, and the debates around consciousness and AI from a materialist, idealist, and panpsychic perspective.
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 section, 30 VRChat worlds in the Worlds Gallery, 3 projects in the Biennale College Cinema VR section, 2 special music events in VRChat, and a special film screening of Joe Hunting's We Met in Virtual Reality. Nearly all of the Venice Festival selections are primarily physical this year with the exception to some of the VRChat events and worlds.
We talk about some of the latest trends in immersive storytelling, and then give a sneak peak to 24 out of the 30 pieces in the competition. We didn't have the time to have a comprehensive overview, but you can see the full selection here. We also talk about their efforts this year for hosting 8 different 75-minute worldshops in VRChat featuring a total of 30 worlds in VRChat. [See the full show notes for links to the 30+ VRChat worlds] They've hired 2 virtual docents per worldhop as a tour guide and a logistics wrangler, as well as a physical docent to help onboard people into these curated VRChat world hops. I'll be on site in Venice covering the festival, interviewing creators, and talking on a panel about reviewing immersive works on Saturday at 2:30p CEST.
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 used on other game engines as well. There are real limitations on the client-side and VR hardware with how many of those 4000 users can been rendered within a close proximity, but having a single instance with hundreds or thousands of people could start to open up new use cases for cultivating virtual spaces that recreate some of the social dynamics of tech conferences, large-scale concerts, or perhaps persistant Burning Man playa communities that focus on serendipitious collisions and real-time hangouts. I unpack RP1's design process and potential implications of large-scale shards for the Metaverse with CEO Sean Mann, Chief Architect Dean Abramson, and Chief Client Architect Yin-Chien Yeap (aka Yinch).
Virtual land speculation within cryptocurrency-based Metaverse platforms has gone from boom to bust over the past couple of years. I sat down to do a deep dive with the Voxels platform (formerly Cryptovoxels) founder Ben Nolan to interrogate the premise of idea of buying and selling virtual plots of land. Nolan is not all in for all aspects of cryptocurrencies, including the carbon footprint of proof-of-work chains like Ethereum that Voxels uses, and surprisingly the buying and selling virtual plots of land as a speculative investment. Nolan says that 'Voxels isn't a way to make money. Voxels is a way to build the Metaverse and to capture the value that they create. It's not an investment vehicle.' He's increased the supply of virtual plots of land over the last years to keep it affordable, but to also capitalize on the NFT boom and crypto Metaverse hype to the tune of $22 million of 2021 revenue in New Zealand dollars.
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 questions and aspirations towards what he calls 'Neurologically-True Reality.' Considering the many tens of billions of dollars of XR R&D that companies like Meta, Apple, and Microsoft have been spending, then the multiple billions of venture capital raised by Magic Leap seems like a relatively efficient and tight budget.
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,
Living Cities is a digital twin XR startup announced on May 26th, 2022 with an article titled “Reality is Scarce…and The Metaverse is infinitely abundant.”
Matthew Ball’s “The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything” book (launching today) is the most comprehensive articulation of the Metaverse technology stack, as well
I had a chance to drop by the Brooklyn office of Brain Control Interface start-up OpenBCI in order to get a hands-on demo of Project
I moderated a Tribeca Talks Panel discussion on “Making a Difference with Immersive Non-Fiction Stories” that on Sunday, June 12, 2022 where we focused on
ReachYou is an AR story that receives transmissions from the future in order to connect to the tenderness of the now. It’s a slow media
Liam Young is a director and speculative architect who is designing regenerative futures via provocative thought experiments. Planet City VR is the provocation of centralizing
The LGBTQ+ VR Museum won the inaugural Tribeca Immersive New Voices Award as it curated a number of really touching virtual objects, art, and stories
Exhibition A is “A love letter to women of color written in virtual reality… [that] showcases talent from the POC, immigrant, non-binary, LGBTQ, and Black
Zanzibar: Trouble in Paradise is a volumetric documentary that premiered at Tribeca Immersive 2022 on the Looking Glass Factory 65-inch Holographic Display that was announced
Marshmallow Laser Feast’s latest piece Evolver premiered at the Tribeca Immersive festival, and it takes you inside the human body in a transcendent journey into
Missing Pictures is a five-part episodic series that translates unmade films from famous directors from around the world into a spatialized VR story pitch and
Black Movement Library: Movement Portraits is a motion capture database project and series of experiences across different media by multi-media artist LaJuné McMillian. She wanted
Iago: The Green Eyed Monster is an Animated AR, Rock Operetta, exploring the villain origin story of the character of Iago from Shakespeare Othello. There
Looking Glass Factory has been producing Holographic Displays for a number of years with their Kickstarted Dev Kit and then their $400 Looking Glass Portrait,
The Infinite is a location-based VR experience that allows you to freely roam around an architectural abstraction of the International Space Station with friends and
The Metaverse Standards Forum was announced today on June 21, 2022 as it “brings together leading standards organizations and companies for industry-wide cooperation on interoperability
The Metaverse and Its Governance is the final paper in the series of the IEEE Global Initiative on the Ethics of Extended Reality. The lead
The Extended Reality (XR) Ethics in Education is the next paper in the series of the IEEE Global Initiative on the Ethics of Extended Reality.
I get a preview of Tribeca Immersive 2022 with curator Ana Brzezinska. LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE OF THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST This is a
The Extended Reality (XR) Ethics in Medicine is the next paper in the series of the IEEE Global Initiative on the Ethics of Extended Reality.
The new business models of the Metaverse have yet to be fully forged? Will the existing structures of surveillance capitalism be extended into the new
The next series in the IEEE XR Ethics series is deconstructing the paper title “Who Owns Our Second Lives: Virtual Clones and the Right to
The ethical questions around privacy in virtual and augmented reality are some of the most pervasive, unanswered questions in XR with the top two questions
Continuing on my series on XR Ethics in collaboration with the IEEE Global Initiative on the Ethics of Extended Reality, this episode dives into the
The IEEE Global Initiative on the Ethics of Extended Reality has published the first eight white papers investigating different ethical aspects of virtual and augmented
Croquet is an operating system within the context of a browser that serves as a virtual machine that enables bit-identical simulations across multiple computers synchronized
Eric Kohn has been a professional film critic for 15 years, and he’s currently the Executive Editor at Indiewire, the Vice President of Editorial Strategy,
The Ristband music platform (formerly known as Overview Ark) launched an alpha version at SXSW during co-founder Roman Rappak’s mixed reality show with his band
Radio Ghost is a 70-minute, interactive and immersive audio piece for three people that’s site-specific to a mall. It’s meant to unpack the unseen stories
Paradise is an immersive audio piece exploring themes of domestic violence that was an interdisciplinary collaboration between Darkfield, VR documentary filmmaker Gabo Arora of Lightshed.io
Lustration is a 4-part episodic VR series illustrated within Quill that’s in the fantasy, detective noir genre, and created by First Nation Creative Ryan Griffen.
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
Ihyangjeong: Carving with Memories is by Korean 2D animator Sunghwan Lee of Studio Shelter, who used Quill to tell a spatial story about the connections
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
On January 10th, Ana Brzezińska was announced to be the new Immersive Curator of the Tribeca Film Festival, and I had a chance to speak
FRAMERATE is a timelapse LIDAR art installation by ScanLAB Projects that showed at SXSW. It encourages the audience to “think and feel in another time
Black Ice VR is a sci-fi horror immersive narrative that experiments between switching between 3rd person and 1st person POV, and it was produced as
Future Rights was a prototype at SXSW that aimed to bring bringing Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring into VR. They were showing a short
The Choice is an interactive documentary that explores the issue of reproductive rights in Texas. The team uses a special stereoscopic compositing pipeline that combines
Céline Tricart is an award-winning VR director who gave one of the main SXSW Keynotes about immersive storytelling, live action role play, and emotional bleed.
Liminal Lands is an environmental VR piece commissioned by Luma Arles to document and volumetrically capture different objects and organisms within “overlooked wetlands at the
AmazeVR is a VR Concert Platform that premiered part of an experience at SXSW that they will be taking on a 10-city concert tour called
The Peabody Awards have expanded beyond the traditional categories of Entertainment, News, Podcast & Radio, Documentary, Arts, & Public Service, and into new formats of
On the Morning You Wake (To the End of the World) is now available for free on Oculus, and it’s a must-watch immersive story that
Forensic Architecture is an innovative interdisciplinary, non-profit research group that uses the tools & techniques of architecture to tell spatial stories of state-sponsored violence and
The immersive story of Notes on Blindness: Into the Darkness (2016) VR experience (Quest, Rift) was awarded with a Legacy Peabody Award for Digital &
Nonny de la Peña was one of the 16 Legacy Peabody Award recipients honoring historical work as a part of their new Digital & Interactive
One of my favorite experiences from SXSW was Vincent Morisset’s Composition, which is a physical installation of a table with blocks that serves as the
Ioulia Isserlis’ Komez Alef O translates the story of her father’s refugee journey of escaping the Nazis during the Holocaust. Isserlis collaborated with her father
(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
On the Morning You Wake (To the End of the World) won the best XR Experience at SXSW, and is set to be released this
Weird Times is an 5-part, VR episodic series that explores issues of teenage mental health that’s produced by the teach at Flight School and executive
Gumball Dreams is the latest immersive theatre production in VRChat by The Ferryman Collective, who previously produced Welcome to Respite: The Severance Theory. They just
I talk with the creators of Choctaw Code Talkers 1918, Kilma Lattin, Founder & CEO of OurWorlds as well as Catherine Eng, Co-founder & CTO
There are nearly 40 XR experiences and special events programmed as a part of the physical SXSW festival in Austin, and I spoke with lead
There’s a lot of debates about the Metaverse, and whether or not it’s complete BS or if it’s the natural evolution of the Internet as
There are a lot of unsupervised children in different social VR applications, and hopefully this interview with Lance G. Powell, Jr. about his article Parental
Virtual Virtual Reality 2 has so many innovations in immersive storytelling structure through a very unique experience of nested contexts allowing for character persistence while
Flat Earth VR started as a thought experiment by Lucas Rizzotto who was skewering the idea that VR is an empathy machine by creating an
Tom Ffiske publishes the Immersive Wire Newsletter, and on February 2, 2022 he announced the release of his latest book called The Metaverse: A Professional
The Child of Empire is an immersive story that tells the story of the India-Pakistan Partition of 1947, which is one of the largest forced
The State of Global Peace is an immersive experience that debuted at the Sundance Festival New Frontier 2022, which was produced by the Innovation Cell
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
This is Not a Ceremony is a cinematic VR piece that asks us to “collectively bear witness to tragic events in the lives of two
Diagnosia is an immersive, non-linear environmental storytelling piece that takes you inside of a Chinese Internet Addiction Camp. In the early 2000s in China, there
I was invited to participate on panel on Metaverse Ethics at Gamesbeat’s Into the Metaverse 2 summit on January 26, 2022. Privacy in XR was
On the Morning You Wake (to the End of the World) is one of the most powerful experiences I’ve seen in VR, and is also
Gondwana VR simulates 100 years of climate change in the Daintree Rainforest within a 24-hour durational simulation that’s running each day throughout the Sundance New
We Met in Virtual Reality is feature-length documentary by Joe Hunting premiering today at the Sundance film festival. It follows five different protagonists (2 couples
The Sundance New Frontier 2022 selection of 15 immersive stories is available starting today until January 30th, and I had a chance to speak with
Philosopher David Chalmers has an amazing book called “Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy” that is being released on January 25th, and I
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
Michaela French is a visual artist working with moving image, primarily in immersive experiences in the context of a full dome space. She’s been collaborating
Francesca Panetta is a freelance immersive artist, director, journalist who worked at The Guardian experimenting with new forms of storytelling, then as a creative director
Vincent Morisset is the founder of the studio AATOAA, and has been doing interactive projects for the past 2 decades. He’s worked with folks like
Ali Eslami is an Iranian artist who has been working with VR since 2014 & living in Amsterdam since 2018, and we talked about these
Roel Wouters is a founding partner of Moniker, which is a small tight-nit studio doing projects on how people relate to technologies, social impact of
Victoria Mapplebeck has been a storyteller for more than 30 years across different platforms, genres, and technologies. She’s a self-shooting director who shifted to smartphone
May Abdalla & Amy Rose are co-founders of Anagram, which has been exploring ways of telling non-fiction stories experientially using technology. There some of my
Tamara Shogaolu is an interdisciplinary artist & director who works in film and as a creative technologist that mixes analog with digital including VR, AR,
Rahima Gambo is a multimedia journalist based between Abuja, Nigeria & London, UK, and presented “A Rest Guide for a Tired Nigerian Artist,” which is
Polymorpf is small design collective & studio based in Holland that creates of all kinds of different immersive experiences that usually revolving around the senses
The IDFA DocLab is celebrating it’s 15th year anniversary, and I collaborated with DocLab to produce a series of a dozen interviews reflecting on the
I caught up with the XR Safety Initiative CEO & Founder Kavya Pearlman as well as Kristina Podnar, who is an independent Digital Policy Consultant,
Felix & Paul Studios just released Episode #3 of their Space Explorers: ISS Experience, which features some absolutely stunning & breathtaking shots captured outside of
Asad J. Malik is an AR artist who spent a lot time making work for the HoloLens on the film festival circuit, and then started
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
The Oregon Shakespeare Festival in collaboration with Artizen producers Ana Brzezińska and René J. Pinnell commissioned & produced four VR pieces that premiered at the
Exploring Home is a full-body tracked, dance performance in a VRChat world that premiered at Venice VR Expanded 2021. It explores issues around identity, avatar
Hope for Haiti is a Haitian-based, non-profit with the goal to improve the quality of life for Haitian people through education, medical, clean water initiatives,
The MetaMovie Presents: Alien Rescue is one of the most immersive experiences I’ve had in VR. It’s part Cinematic Adventure, part Immersive Theater, and part
Tosca Terán (aka Nanotopia) is an interdisciplinary artist at intersections of ecology, bioart, mycology, and sound, and she collaborated in creating the “Mycelia” performance with
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
I had a chance to do a demo of the Lynx R-1 standalone mixed reality headset at the Augmented World Expo, which was a really
On November 9th at the beginning of the Augmented World Expo (AWE),Qualcomm announced Snapdragon Spaces, which is a series of AR tools striving to cultivate
Monika Bielskyte is a world designer, immersive artist, science fiction critic, and cultivator of Protopia Futures (@ProtopiaFutures on Instagram), which is a an intersectional design
The third annual Virtual Beings & Virtual Societies Summit happened on October 29-30, and I had a chance to attend and unpack it with the
Connect 2021 happened on Thrusday October 28, 2021 where Facebook rebranded to Meta on their path towards becoming a Metaverse company, and they provided a
The Severance Theory: Welcome to Respite is a VR adaptation of an immersive theatre piece of the same name originally produced in 2019 by CoAct
On October 21, there was a five-hour AR/VR Policy Conference organized by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation as well as XR Association covering some
Tony Parisi published really great Metaverse manifesto on October 22nd titled The Seven Rules for the Metaverse, which attempts to rein in some of the
Adam Draper is the founder of Boost VC, which a technology accelerator that has funded over 70 VR companies and over 100 crypto companies since
I talk with Joey J. Lee & Elliot Hu-Au about a paper they published in Frontiers of Virtual Reality called “E3XR: An Analytical Framework for
The WebXR Design Summit was a 9-hour series of talks about immersive design & experiential design that was organized by Ben Erwin and his WebXR
The Festival of International Virtual and Augmented Reality Stories (FIVARS) is holding a hybrid event where the IRL component in LA starts today October 15th,
HTC is launching the Vive Flow today available for pre-order $499 and launching in early November. They’re 6-DoF “immersive glasses” weighing 189 grams that are
HP’s G2 Reverb Omnicept edition is a special version of their VR headset targeted for enterprises that includes Tobii eye tracking that can track real-time
The London Film Festival Expanded runs from October 6-17 with a total of 18 pieces of immersive stories and art, with 9 of those pieces
em>Container is a hyperreal 180-degree spatial art installation that explores modern day slavery. Visual artist/visual anthropologist Meghna Singh and documentary filmmaker Simon Wood utilize the
Kevin Mack’s Anandala is an awe-inspiring piece of VR-native, generative, abstract art with some really compelling experiments in interactive, embodied NPC entities he calls “blorts.”
GOLIATH: PLAYING WITH REALITY is an interactive VR story that explores the experience of schizophrenia & psychosis through the story of a Twitch Streamer named
Kusunda is a spatial documentary about a indigenous language in Nepal that is on the brink of going dormant and falling asleep. It’s an incredibly
The Venice VR Expanded portion of the Venice Film Festival opens today, and runs from September 1-19, 2021. I had a chance to talk to
Episode #1000 of the Voices of VR podcast is a special, three-hour retrospective featuring over 100 of the best answers I’ve received about the ultimate
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is a non-profit that has been defending civil liberties & digital rights for over 30 years since it was first announced
In her Contextual Integrity theory of privacy, Helen Nissembaum defines privacy as “appropriate flows of information” where the appropriateness is defined by the context and
Ellysse Dick is a policy analyst who has written 10 technology policy publications over the last year about VR & AR for the The Information
OpenBCI’s Project Galea was originally announced on November 19, 2020 as a “hardware and software platform that merges next-generation biometrics with mixed reality.” OpenBCI has
Breonna’s Garden is an augmented reality experience that premiered at the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival that was created by Lady PheOnix in collaboration with Ju’Niyah
Neuroscientist researcher Rafael Yuste started the Columbia University’s Neuro-Rights Initiative to promote an ethical framework to preserve a set of human rights within neuro-technologies. He
HTC announced two new, enterprise-focused VR headsets at their Vivecon on Tuesday May 11th. The Vive Focus 3 is a standalone VR HMD with an
The second volume of the Immersive Arcade Showcase featuring four immersive stories from the United Kingdom launches today as DLC within the Museum of Other
Facebook’s Project Aria announcement in September at Facebook Connect raised a number of different ethical questions with anthropologists and technological ethicists. Journalist Lawrence Dodds described
The 29 immersive experiences that are a part of the Tribeca Immersive 2021 line-up were announced on Tuesday, April 29. There will be 11 Virtual
On April 22, 2020, Magic Leap announced layoffs of somewhere between 600 to 1000 employees, which amounted to around 1/3 to 1/2 of their total
Brittan Heller is a human rights lawyer who recently published a paper pointing out that there are some significant gaps in privacy laws that do
On March 18th, Facebook Reality Labs Research announced some of their research into next-generation neuromotor input devices for mixed reality applications. I paraphrased the most
Dream was a series of 10 live performances over 8 days that used motion captured actors who had virtual embodiments set within an immersive storyworld
I participated in a Facebook press event on Tuesday, March 16th that featuring some Facebook Human-Computer Interaction Research on AR Neural Inputs, Haptics, Contextually-Aware-AI, &
Kiira Benzing‘s Loveseat was an ambitious fusion of live theater performance with VR technologies that premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2019. They performed
SXSW Online is happening March 16-20, and I had a chance to get a sneak peak of the SXSW Online XR world in VRChat and
The Polys WebXR Awards was an awards show on February 20th, 2021 founded by Ben Irwin in collaboration with Sophia Moshasha and Julie Smithson. Irwin
One of my favorite pieces at Sundance New Frontier 2021 this year was a series of four open web experiences created as a part of
Worldbuilding and speculative design was a big theme at Sundance New Frontier 2021, and I had a chance to participate in an experience that facilitated
Nightss is an sensual experience that’s structured around an erotic Polish-language poem by Weronika Lewandowska that uses dance and spatial metaphors in VR to create
Depthkit’s volumetric capture solution is democratizing access to the tools of volumetric filmmaking. I had a chance to do a deep dive with two of
The Changing Same is one of the most ambitious pieces of volumetric filmmaking yet since it combines all sorts of volumetric capture techniques with Scatter’s
I’ve been an executive committee member of the IEEE Global Initiative of the Ethics of Extended Reality for the past six months, and we had
After watching the 14 immersive experiences at Sundance New Frontier 2021, I invited three other immersive critics for a roundtable discussion unpacking each of the
On January 14, 2021, VR developer Fox Buchele announced on Twitter that he was fired by Owlchemy Labs in 2020, and “I’m sharing this now
Sundance New Frontier 2021 features 14 immersive experiences that will be accessible via the $25 Sundance Explorer pass starting on Friday, January 29th until Wednesday,
Aardvark is an AR platform within the context of virtual reality applications. Here’s how Aardvark is described on it’s Steam page: Aardvark is a new
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,
Note: This is a sponsored content post from the University University of North Carolina School of the Arts I was a mentor for the UNCSA’s
The Devouring is an epic, 5-6 hour horror adventure game within VRChat that launched on August 14, 2020. It quickly went viral in the VRChat
Virtual Market 5 opens today December 18th, 2020 at 6p PST (Dec 19th at 11a JST), and will run until January 10th at 6a PST
Note: This is a sponsored content post from the University University of North Carolina School of the Arts January 31st, 2021 is the deadline for
Pluto VR is a general-purpose VR, telepresence application that hopes to provide the social presence glue for a standards-driven, multiple-application ecosystem using SteamVR on the
Virtual reality has the potential catalyze a paradigm shift around our concepts about the nature of reality, and one of the most influential philosophers on
On October 4th, YUR Fit co-founder Cix Liv spoke out on social media about his frustrations in collaborating with Facebook as an independent developer by
Inside COVID-19 is a new 360 video series that premiered on Oculus TV on Friday, November 20, 2020, and it features Dr. Josiah Child who
The new Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge VR experience releases today, and I had a chance to play through it and talk to
The first VR Awards shows was produced by Academy of International Extended Reality (AIXR) in 2017, and after producing three annual events in London the
Athena Demos is the Chief Cultural & Community Officer for Black Rock Creative and Black Rock City VR (BRCvr). I previously covered BRCvr’s officially-sanctioned multiverse
John Robb has a concept of Networked Tribalism, which is a result of the combination of filter bubbles, AI algorithms, and political polarization. Robb is
There is a lot of sensitive data that will captured by virtual reality devices that present a wide range of ethical and moral dilemmas that
I talk with the founder of the FIVARS VR & AR story festival Keram Malicki-Sánchez & WebXR developer James Baicoianu to talk about how the
Mária Rakušanová got her start in the VR industry in 2014 when she was a product marketer for the Gear VR at Samsung. Her job