Voices of VR Podcast
Biometric Data Streams and the Unknown Ethical Threshold of Predicting & Controlling Behavior
I recently attended the Experiential Technology Conference where there were a lot of companies looking at how to use biometric data to get insights into health & wellness, education for cognitive enhancement, market research, and more. Over the next...
Privacy in VR Is Complicated and It’ll Take the Entire VR Community to Figure It Out
When I was at the GDC VR Mixer, Jim Preston struck up a conversation about his concerns about privacy in VR. He works at FOVE which is making a VR headset with eye-tracking, but wanted to speak to me on...
Embodied Cognition Experiments with EleVR’s Math Museums & Hyperbolic Space
I believe that the principle of Embodied Cognition is probably one of the most significant and important concepts to understand about virtual reality. Cognitive science researchers have been connecting the dots the importance of our bodies when it comes...
Tobii Recommends Explicit Consent for Recording Eye Tracking Data
The eye tracking company Tobii had some VR demos that they were showing on the GDC Expo Hall floor as well as within Valve's booth. They were primarily focusing on the new user interaction paradigms that are made available...
Deepening Social Presence with SMI Eye Tracking
At GDC this year, SensoMotoric Instruments (SMI) showed a couple of new eye tracking demos at Valve's booth. They added eye tracking to avatars in the social VR experiences of Pluto VR and Rec Room, which provided an amazing...
‘Bigscreen’ Social Computing Space Metrics Show Big Value for VR Power Users
Bigscreen VR announced that they raised $3 million dollars for their "social utility" VR application. Bigscreen gives you access to your computer screen in VR, which is a deceptively simple idea but one that is unlocking new ways of...
‘Neurospeculative Afrofeminism’: Using VR to Build the Future You Want to Live Into
Hyphen Labs is a immersive design collective made up of women of color, and they were showing a sci-fi VR experience at Sundance this year called Neurospeculative Afrofeminism. Their VR experience features black women as some of the pioneers...
Experiential Poems: Exploring Emotions & Embodied Vulnerability in VR with Cabbibo
Using language to translate an experience into words is one of the highest levels of abstraction that we know as humans. Using the power of visual metaphor through poetry is able to get to deeper levels of emotion, and...
Valve Talks ‘OpenXR’, the Newly Revealed Branding for Khronos Group’s Industry-backed VR Standard
Valve's Joe Ludwig talks about the latest updates on the Khronos Group's VR standardization process that is now being called "OpenXR." Ludwig says that OpenXR is still primarily creating an open and royalty-free open standard for virtual reality, but...
Using VR as a Tool to Cultivate Compassion with Condition One
Danfung Dennis of Condition One has an ambitious vision for the potential of virtual reality, and it's one of the most radical ones that I've come across. He believes that VR can be used as a tool to cultivate...
‘Tilt Brush’ Deep Dive + Unanswered Questions about VR Privacy & Google
Tilt Brush is Google's first VR app to launch on the Oculus Rift, and I had a chance to catch up with Tilt Brush product manager Elisabeth Morant. We have a broad discussion about adapting Tilt Brush for the Touch...
HTC’s Vive President on What’s Happening in China & VR
Alvin Wang Graylin is the China President of Vive at HTC, and I had a chance to talk with him at CES this year about what's happening in China. He provided me with a lot of cultural context, which...
Beaming the ‘Matrix’ into Your Eyes: Otoy CEO on the Future of Real-time Lightfield Rendering
At Unity's Unite keynote in November, Otoy's Jules Urbach announced that their Octane Renderer was going to be built into Unity to bake light field scenes. But this is also setting up the potential for real-time ray tracing of...
‘Life of Us’: An Embodied & Social Story of Human Evolution
Within premiered their first real-time rendered, interactive experience at Sundance New Frontier this year with Life of Us, which is the story of life on the planet as told through embodying a series of characters who are evolving into...
Bringing Conversational Gameplay & Interactive Narrative to ‘Starship Commander’
Developer Human Interact announced this past week that they are collaborating with Microsoft's Cognitive Services in order to power the conversational interface behind their Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, interactive narrative title named Starship Commander. They're using Microsoft's Custom Recognition Intelligent Service (CRIS) as...
