Voices of VR

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-CXdU330No Here's Zimtok5's video on the Meta Quest 3S: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csBnN73V95w This 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 Smith Here's Chan's Tested coverage of Orion AR Glasses https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynLm-QvsW0Q Here's Stein's CNET coverage of the Orion AR Glasses https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b020SbvnFX0 Here's the full video of the Meta Connect 2024 keynote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7JyydkqDeI This 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 Spectacles This 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=2270s This 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 Spectacles This 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=Fc2KspZgGRk This 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=fJT99fqzyiw This 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=FE7KYISf7cI This 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_XVyHOle3Y This 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=sPXYRnWCLaQ This 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=mnFZyQ3S4vs This 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_XtI This 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=HVnsFWIUgp4 This 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-XngO8Eebs This 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=zP5rHv7x7go This 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=H3IZiZMpeRA This 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=Qbu54ULcUC0 This 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=w871q2dmKx4 This 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_aE This 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=YuMwoawxscs This 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=0PzZXrqncsY This 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=zJaTpgZEAqA This 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=CUoOzBYQ1cM Emissive / 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=2tJmhkJC05Q This 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=uwLksFqZXs8 This 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-A This 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=37k4gIfTdaw This 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=jf3909F8UI8 This 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=YcgxlKjMN2s This 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=CoxzpYrQvt4 This 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=zDqtTyBuuUA This 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=apgQxXwx7WE This 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=ThEkIrqgDK0 This 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=WVKFzca5jjc This 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=6WgHtYWZoQs This 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=rZJ53W7NYnA VJs 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 Serenity Also 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_ozldM The 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/1807125937819148769 Overall, 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=rZJ53W7NYnA Then 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 Kana https://twitter.com/SoftlySteph/status/1807125937819148769 Their 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/1813989248837595504 I 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=256s I 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/1805274104460722464 I 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 VRChat In 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=jN6qfuSAqaw I 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/1806323145000816867 I 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=soHDdq0Lbwk I 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. EDIT: August 20, 2024. Here's a director's reel that Ariel just posted. https://twitter.com/ariel_emeraldVR/status/1825985914419454153 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 either full dome planetariums or front-facing dome venues (with a second location opening in the future outside of Dallas, Texas). 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 over the past couple of years to translate their XR projects to work in these different dome formats. You can check out Cosm's upcoming events that includes sporting events and world premieres of immersive content like "O" by Cirque du Soleil on July 11, LIQUIDVERSE: Microcosm & Macrocosm on July 12, Orbital on July 17, and SEEK on July 18. 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 Show Identity, Gender, and VRChat (Why is everyone in VR an anime girl?) by Straszfilms This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

The Troll Project was created by Ruth Diaz, who has a doctorate in clinical psychology and focuses on XR community design, in order to explore 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/1783406980192702842 Lynch 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-VmsZ5oAU There 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=uh7XTZNtzGs Immersive 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 Interbeing Colored -- #1251: From Book to Play to AR Installation, “Colored” Explores the Forgotten Segregation History of Claudette Colvin Maya: 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 Embodiment Traversing The Mist -- #1325 End of Tung-Yen Chou’s Gay Sauna Trilogy with “Traversing the Mist” Human Violins: Prelude (Multi-user Version) En Amour Telos I The Roaming Immersive Selection of Non-competitive works: Notes on Blindness (2016) -- #1068: “Notes on Blindness” VR Experience Receives a Legacy Peabody Award for Interactive Storytelling Battlescar (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_qvIymt4 I 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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-8Z-hWaktY 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 la...

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=-bab0CM7zK4 There'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 VR My 2016 interview with Neil Trevett announcing the formation of what would become OpenXR My 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 release Also 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 Motifs PREVIOUSLY 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 Center Carrie Shaw of Embodied Labs is featured in Chapter 5, and radically opens up her business to Messeri to study Jackie 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.z Music: 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 & Derealization This 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 & Derealization This 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 available I 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 Swart This 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 Swart This 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 Holland NARRATIVE 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 Bakery Tales from Soda Island - Chapter 2: The Neon Jungle Tales from Soda Island - Chapter 3: The Quantum Race Tales from Soda Island - Chapter 4: The Golden Record Tales from Soda Island - Chapter 5: The School Trip Tales from Soda Island - Chapter 6: Silence Tales from Soda Island - Chapter 7: The First Ingredient This 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