VR Podcasts
PTSD Exposure Therapy in VR: Importance of Storytelling & Emotional Presence in Healing Trauma
Dr. Skip Rizzo heads the Medical VR Research Group at USC's Institute for Creative Technologies, which has been exploring how to use VR for psychological treatments, cognitive assessment, motor rehabilitation therapy, as well as interactions with virtual humans. He's...
Merleau-Ponty’s ‘Phenomenology of Perception’ & Embodied Metaphors
I had a chance to catch up with phenomenologist Kai Riemer at SIGGRAPH where he gave his perspective on what phenomenology is and why it's holistic approach could provide some vital insights for people working in VR.
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Horror & Gore in VR – Designing ‘Killing Floor: Incursion’
Killing Floor: Incursion is a horror game featuring lots of gore that is sure to evoke visceral reactions in players. I had a chance to play a demo at GDC 2017, and I can say that it's definitely an...
Navigating Paradox, Reality Bubbles, & Multiple Worldviews with VR
Dr. Marilyn Schlitz is a social anthropologist, consciousness researcher, and co-author of the books Consciousness & Healing and Living Deeply. Her anthropological work has been at the frontier of researching how different cultures use various indigenous practices to invoke...
‘VRChat’ Anecdotes and Dealing with Harassment & Tolling in Social VR
Gunter S. Thompson has been hosting VR meetups in VRChat for the past three years where he will give guided tours through the latest additions to the VRChat metaverse, and he also hosts a live talk show every Tuesday...
Avatar Creation with Morph3D & Social VR Anecdotes from Chris Madsen
Custom avatars in social VR add a lot of fidelity of identity expression and creative flair in applications like VRChat or High Fidelity. Morph3D is a custom avatar solution that offers a number of free avatars within VRChat, but...
The Gift Economy Dynamics of ‘Anyland’ & Social VR Anecdotes
Anyland is a social VR experience focusing on worldbuilding and avatar creation tools that allow you to create interactive experiences while in VR. They've also implemented an open sharing feature that makes it easy to collect objects from the...
Reflecting on AltspaceVR’s Technical Achievements & Social VR Lessons Learned
AltspaceVR held its final official Good Bye gathering on Thursday, August 3rd after announcing last week that they had run out of money and their investors decided to not invest any more. News of the social VR platform's closing rippled throughout...
‘Decentraland’ – Using Ethereum Blockchain ICO to Sell Virtual Real Estate
Decentraland is a virtual world that is using the Ethereum Blockchain to sell plots of virtual reality real estate. They're selling an initial offering of the currency they call 'MANA', from August 8 to August 16, 2017, and they'll...
Models of Consciousness Transformation & Unlocking Latent Human Potentials with VR
The Institute of Noetic Sciences was founded by Apollo 14 Astronaut Edgar Mitchell after he had a mystical experience on the way back from being the sixth man to walk on the moon. After finding a description of his...
Using Google Earth VR to Study Awe – Towards a Virtual Overview Effect
One of the unique affordances of virtual reality is its power to convey the vastness of scale, which can invoke feelings of awe. Denise Quesnel is a graduate student at Simon Frasier University's iSpace Lab, and she has been...
Using Experiential Design to Expand VR Presence Theory
Dustin Chertoff has pulled experiential design insights from the advertising world to come up with a more holistic theory of Presence in virtual reality. In 2008, he was in graduate school and was dissatisfied with the major theories of...
VR Presence Researcher Finds Full Embodiment to be Key Component in Plausibility
Mel Slater's Theory of Presence includes two major components including the Place Illusion (the degree to which you're transported to another world), and the Plausibility Illusion (the degree to which you believe what's happening in that world is believable)....
Magik Gallery – Highlighting Artists Using VR as Their Canvas
Nick Ochoa curated some of the top artists producing work entirely in VR for the Magik Gallery show that happened in San Francisco, CA on May 20th. It was an ambitious effort to introduce VR creation tools for artists...
State of VR with the Venture Reality Fund & Why They’re Continuing to Invest
Virtual Reality Headsets have not sold as many units as some of the more optimistic analysts have predicted, and VR Fund's Tipatat Chennavasin says that the relatively quick adoption of smartphone technologies have spoiled a lot of people within...
