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 h…

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 …

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 the…

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 tra…

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 divisio…

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…

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 interview…

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 wi…

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…

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 …

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 …

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 N…

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…

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, …

In just a few short years, mobile gaming has exploded, now accounting for almost half of all gaming, with the market worth an astounding $90 billion dollars. According to Statista, by 2026 the mobile AR market is predicted to reach $36 billion dollars in revenue. As mobile AR gaming evolves beyond Pokemon Go, one company is going all-in to redefine…

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 …

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 th…

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 e…

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…

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 mo…

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 …

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 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#136…

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: FatalityBy Kent Bye

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: FatalityBy Kent Bye

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: FatalityBy Kent Bye

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: FatalityBy Kent Bye

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: FatalityBy Kent Bye

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: FatalityBy Kent Bye

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: FatalityBy Kent Bye

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: FatalityBy Kent Bye

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: FatalityBy Kent Bye

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: FatalityBy Kent Bye

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: FatalityBy Kent Bye

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: FatalityBy Kent Bye

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: FatalityBy Kent Bye

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: FatalityBy Kent Bye

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: FatalityBy Kent Bye

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: FatalityBy Kent Bye

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: FatalityBy Kent Bye

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: FatalityBy Kent Bye

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: FatalityBy Kent Bye

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 …

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…

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…

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: Fa…

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 throu…

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 …