Voices of VR Podcast
Walt Disney’s Patrick Osborne on ‘Pearl’, a Powerful VR Story about Selfless Service
People were waiting in lines for over an hour to see Pearl both at SIGGRAPH and VRLA, which is one of the best narrative VR experiences that I've seen so far. The central character in the story is a...
Rendering the Metaverse with Otoy’s Volumetric Lightfield Streaming
Digital lightfields are a cutting-edge technology that can render photorealistic VR scenes, and Otoy has been a pioneer of the rendering and compression techniques to deal with the massive amounts of data required to create them.
Their OctaneRender is...
Embodied Cognition: Using VR Dance to Teach Computational Thinking
During the Enlightenment, René Descartes declared that the mind and body were split and that we should think about them as separate dualistic entities. But more and more evidence is pointing to the fact that our bodies are much...
Living Stories: What VR Can Learn from Immersive Theater
When the recession hit in 2008, book publisher Charlie Melcher looked to reinvent how Melcher Media told stories using the latest smart phone technologies. They developed an iOS app for Al Gore's Our Choice, and started having a lot...
‘Adventure Time’ Creator Pendleton Ward on Stretching the Boundaries of Identity in VR
Adventure Time creator Pendleton Ward has been fascinated by the idea of virtual reality since he first read Snow Crash as a teenager. He backed the Oculus Kickstarter, and has been exploring many of the early VR prototypes over...
Wizard of Oz Narratives: Puppeting Virtual Characters with Improv Acting
'Wizard of Oz' VR experiences use improv actors to drive either a single or multiple virtual characters. This technique is commonly used within VR training applications where it's cheaper to have a single actor puppeting multiple virtual characters rather...
‘Situational Knowledges’ in VR Narrative: The Role of Place & Perspective
Catherine Rehwinkel is working on creating a conceptual framework that enables storytellers to storyboard linear stories in VR. She's a filmmaker who recently finished a master's degree computational & systems thinking at NYU. She's been inspired by Donna Haraway's...
Cracking the Narrative Code of VR with the Interactive Documentary Genre
Back in 2014, the CLOUDS interactive documentary premiered at Sundance New Frontier where it debuted a VR interface to navigate over 40 oral history interviews with creative coding pioneers. Movies have typically been pretty linear, but how could a...
‘Lawnmower Man’ Director Brett Leonard on Building Storyworlds
Brett Leonard's journey into VR all started when he moved to Santa Cruz and started partying and smoking pot with some of the elite visionaries from the Silicon Valley technology scene. He was an aspiring writer and film director...
Memory Capture & Virtual Tourism for the Benefit of Those with Physical Disabilities
Roy Sherrill is enabling the time travelers from the future to get a sense of presence at a number of different tech and cultural events around the San Francisco Bay area. Roy's been shooting a lot of 360 videos...
Immersive Game Design Lessons from ‘Pokémon Go’
Pokémon Go has quickly become the #1 mobile game of all time, and while there's been some debate as to whether it should be considered Augmented Reality or not, it's clear that location-based gaming has taken to the next...
Designing a VR Experience for Streaming Spectators on VREAL
What are the game design considerations for creating a VR experience that will be compelling for not only the primary player, but also the spectators who may be watching it on a livestream with VREAL? This was the big...
Five Theories of Motion Sickness Triggers in Virtual Reality
When people dream about what they want to do in VR, it inevitably involves actually moving around within a virtual environment. But VR locomotion triggers simulator sickness in a lot of people, and solving it is one of the...
Auto VR Sound Generation via Physics Simulations and Machine Learning
Dr. Ming Lin has been working on realtime physics simulations before physics engines were cool. Ming is now actively researching how to simulate audio in real-time. Rather than recording or generating sounds that are then simulated within a virtual...
The State of VR with Unity’s Pete Moss on Voices of VR’s 400th Episode
Pete Moss is known as the "VR Dude" within Unity, and has long seen the potential of virtual reality. He's really been on the frontlines of this virtual reality revolution over the past 3-4 years creating a bridge between...
