I've spoken to Whitehead scholar Matt Segall a couple of times before, and I was really keen to catch up with him to hear his process-relational and process philosophical takes on AI, intelligence and consciousness. I was responding to a piece he recently wrote titled " The Philosophical Implications of Artificial Intelligence" (full citation below…

I spoke with the curators of Tribeca Immersive 2025 Jazia Hammoudi and Casey Baltes to unpack the 11 impact project that are being feature in this year's selection. We also talk about Tribeca's new collaboration with Onassis ONX and Agog, how the selection process has changed over the years.This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of…

I spoke with Raindance Immersive curators Mária Rakušanová, Joe Hunting, Fangs about the 2025 selection of projects across 8 different categories. Tune in to get all of the latest tips from this year's selection that is mostly happening on social VR platforms including VRChat, Resonite, and Orion Drift.This is a listener-supported podcast through t…

I spoke with producer Victor Agulhon of Targo Stories about their collaboration with TIME Studios to produce D-Day: The Camera Soldier, which he calls the most technologically advance immersive documentary produced up to this point. They took footage from D-Day and spatialized it in a number of different ways, and really pushed the frontiers of inn…

The Portland Art Museum Center for an Untold Tomorrow (PAM CUT) has acquired the Tomorrow Theater in South East Portland, and is curating 25 unique events a month and over 250 unique events a year. Most of the experiences are grounded within the cinematic tradition, but there are usually ways that they are adding more levels of participation, commu…

We are in the middle of a hype cycle peak around AI as there are a lot of hyperbolic claims being made about the capabilities and performance of large-language models (LLMs). Computational Linguist Emily M. Bender and Sociologist Alex Hanna have been writing academic papers about the limitations of LLMs, as well as some of the more pernicious aspec…

The Creature label features a lot of really innovative VR and MR games with rich and innovative gameplay mechanics, and they just featured three new games, a new DLC pack, and lots of updates about the games in a half-hour Creature Feature gaming showcase hosted on IGN. I had a chance to catch up with Creature CEO and Creative Director Doug North C…

NOTE: This sponsored episode was produced by Kent Bye in partnership with PHI and participation from Agog: Immersive Media Institute and immersive artist Peter Burr.PHI and Agog: Immersive Media Institute are collaborating on the PHI Immersive: XR for Impact residency program that will be running for four weeks from March 2 to 27, 2026 in Montreal,…

Walkabout Mini Golf is really an incredible accomplishment of VR design with its fusion of worldbuilding, compelling physics-based gameplay, the unique social dynamics and community it's able to cultivate, and over 4 1/2 years of consistent DLC courses every 8 weeks or so. They have launched 33 total courses, and just recently announced that they'r…

asses.masses is a unique, 7-hour, live performance that uses video game logic to expand the narrative possibilities and social dramaturgy of experimental theater. With a single video game controller at the front of a movie theater with lights up so everyone can see each other, the audience must negotiate amongst themselves who will step up to play …

Charlotte Mikkelborg is the series director of the Adventure series on Apple TV, which is shot on Apple Immersive Video and co-produced by Atlantic Studios (formerly Atlantic Productions) and Apple. I think it has the strongest storytelling released by Apple so far, and it also has some of the most innovative and cutting edge shots that really show…

Ant Williams is a freediving athlete featured in the third episode of The Adventure Series titled "Ice Dive" that's co-produced by Apple and Atlantic Studios (formerly Atlantic Productions). In the episode, Williams attempts to swim a world record distance 182 meters under ice, and I wanted to get some additional behind-the-scenes context on his ex…

CURRENTS is a stunning debut from Jake Oleson as it pushes the grammar of 180 filmmaking to new heights. Oleson comes from the world of advertising and music videos, and he went through a rigorous pre-production process where he had actually already edited the entire piece before shooting any production footage by using still stereoscopic test phot…

OTO'S PLANET was being exhibited on the Quest at SXSW, but I had a chance to check out the Apple Pro Version ahead of the SXSW festival and I felt like I much preferred it. OTO'S PLANET picked up the second place prize at Venice Immersive, but I missed being able to interview the director Gwenael Francois there. I did manage to catch up with Franco…

Another Apple Vision Pro piece at SXSW 2025 was COSMOS IN FOCUS by Atlantic Studios (recently rebranded from Atlantic Productions). This was a short and sweet educational experience that allowed you to explore the imagery of the James Webb telescope, but it's both spatially contextualized in the night sky planetarium style. It is also fused togethe…

There was an projection-based immersive experience called ORIGINS - LIFE'S EPIC JOURNEY that was originally formatted for a digital art museum in Germany called Kunstkraftwerk Leipzig, but it was translated into a three-channel video installation that was showing in a small conference room at SXSW. I only saw the video version at SXSW, and so I hav…

FLY TO YOU tells the story of Kang Songjeol who was separated from her childhood friends in the aftermath of the 1950 split between North and South Korea. Oral history interviews were captured in 360 video, and her childhood memories were recreated with point scans derived from Leici BLK360 LiDAR scans combined with Azure Kinect volumetric captures…

SYMPHONI is a brand new hand-tracked rhythm game that was inspired by the mechanics of conducting a symphony. It was directed by Ingram Mao and developed by a number of undergrads and graduates of the USC Games program. This game also goes from mixed reality into fully immersive VR as you progress through each of the stages, but it's a really fresh…

ECHOVISION is the latest experience from multi-disciplinary artist Jiabao Li that has three major parts. The first part is a mobile-phone based mixed reality experience that does a metaphoric translation of echolocation by using LiDAR to detect your immediate physical surroundings, and then reveals it with a rippling shader that is voice activated.…

There were a number of pieces at SXSW that were centered around embodied interactions including HONEY FUNGUS, which is a series of interactive embodied experiments telling a broader story of cultivating intimacy with ecology. This piece leans more into embodied dream logic rather than clearly articulating a narrative journey, and I had a fascinatin…

1906 ATLANTA RACE MASSACRE is a phone-based AR experience directed by Nonny de la Peña that digs into the forgotten history of the violent attacks on the black community by white mobs incited by race-baiting politicians and newspapers. The arc of the story is told through the lens of black journalist Max Barber, who was chronicling the events as th…

THE CHOICE returns to SXSW with the latest Chapters 2 and 3, and continues to capture intimate testimonials of women and couples who make the choice to abort their pregnancies. Chapters 1 and 2 take place in Texas where abortion is now nearly totally banned in all but a few situations. The legal specificity of these exceptions is ambiguous enough t…

WAYS OF KNOWING: A NAVAJO NUCLEAR HISTORY tells the story of the impact of uranium mining on the Navajo community. This film is a unique collaboration between a Navajo storyteller Sunny Dooley and nuclear nonproliferation expert Lovely Umayam where the story of US nuclear history is told through an indigenous lens. This means telling the story of h…

SHELTER is a 360 video documentary telling the story of civilians in Ukraine seeking protection in bomb shelters. The film poetically transports you the many different ways Ukrainians are sheltering from small cramped basements to parking garages to hospitals. It also contrasts these underground spaces to the aftermath of war from bombed out buildi…

TRACES: THE GRIEF PROCESSOR is a multi-user interactive VR experience where four people are invited to poetically explore and learn more about their grief. Created by documentary filmmaker Vali Fugulin, it features didactic conversations about grief with ritualist Stéphane Crête who leans upon Francis Weller's Five Gates of Grief. Fugulin resists d…

There were a number of projects exploring social dynamics within immersive pieces, including the special jury prize winner for the XR competition PROOF AS IF PROOF WERE NEEDED. This was a projection-based video project that featured video feeds from four different rooms in a home where a couple is searching for different objects. There are five aud…

The final AI-related piece this year was THE LAST PRACTICE, which I unfortunately have not had a chance to see yet because there were a number of technical glitches that prevented me from seeing it on site. I did however have a chance to remotely catch up with director Phil McCarty to talk more about the story and mechanics of the experience. Part …

Another AI-based project at SXSW this year was SWEET! by Dutch designer and artist René van Engelenburg of DROPSTUFF MEDIA. This is a projection-mapped physical installation designed to facilitate a very brief conversation with an OpenAI LLM-driven virtual being about the parallels between how sugar is added to all of our food and how AI is current…

Curating archives was a theme that I also explored in a conversation with Tamara Shogaolu about her piece ORYZA: HEALING GROUND that premiered at DocLab 2024. She was at SXSW showing the interactive AR story game ANOUSCHKA exploring the memories of her grandmother through various cultural artifacts (see Shogaolu interview with her about ANOUSCHKA f…

The SXSW XR Competition jury prize winner REFLECTIONS OF LITTLE RED DOT had some really innovative mixed reality integrations, and was also a part of a new trend of cultivating an archive of material as an artistic practice. This piece by director Chloé Lee featured about 3 hours of documentary interview footage shot in Singapore starting in 2015 e…

THE SECRET LIFE OF MONSTERS: THE GATEWAY EXPERIENCE is a mixed reality puzzle game created by Wallrus Creative Technologies as an immersive demo in order to feature the unique tracking technology they've created in order to better facilitate LBE mixed reality experiences on the Quest. They built a tracking system hidden within their custom tiling i…

Andrew Schneider’s "NOWISWHENWEARE (the stars)" absolutely blew me away, and it was a story-driven, immersive art exhibit at the University of Texas Performing Arts Center that opened at the end of SXSW. It uses a cube of 4000 LED lights in a dark theater space to create a visual spectacle, but also to hide an incredible magic trick. There was an a…

Wayne Powell is the Global Artist Relations Manager for d&b audiotechnik, and he's been getting more and more interested in how independent artists and musicians are using spatial audio. He was in Austin, Texas with an array of 13 speakers enabling a spatial audio mix for Roman Rappak's annual Ristband mixed reality live performance. I had a chance…

On the last day of immersive exhibitions, I saw Roman Rappak's latest RISTBAND mixed reality live performance experiment, which now has a 4-year streak going at SXSW. This year he added an array of 13 d&b audiotechnik speakers that used wave field synthesis to create a spatial audio mix that was added to his mixed reality performance. I have Rappak…

The Polyphonic Spree band founder Tim Delaughter was looking for innovative ways to get people to listen to the entirety of his latest album called Salvage Enterprise. He was driving around a lot of speakers in his van and setting up pop-up listening parties around his home town when he thought there should be a better way to coax people into liste…

Web developer Pete Adams created seven different really cool WebXR worlds for his songs featured in the A NUMBER FROM THE GHOST experience. His music was really great to listen to as I explored his abstract open worlds that were being modulated by different three.js effects. It's tough going to make it as an independent musician today, and so Adams…

Tenderclaws debuted their first piece in competition at SXSW with a short called FACE JUMPING, which was a surreal, seemingly open world experience with a number of interactive experiments leveraging eye tracking in novel ways. Tenderclaws has consistently pushed the edges of locomotion in everyone of their interactive narratives, and FACE JUMPING …

IN THE CURRENT OF BEING is a powerfully-told story about electroshock conversion therapy using haptics, mixed reality, and a free-flowing dream logic structure paired with a documentary interview of a survivor. It was a deeply moving experience, and won the new Agog Social Impact Award at SXSW (more on that below). The director is BODY OF MINE's Ca…

There is a six-month exhibition titled "Other Worlds Are Possible" featuring a retrospective of a dozen different immersive storytelling pieces that will shown at the Le Pavillion in Nemur, Belgium from March 22 to September 21, 2025. The exhibition was curated by independent immersive curator Ana Brzezińska, and will also feature other AR pieces, …

The SXSW XR Experience Selection runs from March 9-11 and contains 15 pieces in competition and 16 pieces in the spotlight, and I had a chance to chat with SXSW's XR programmer Blake Kammerdiener about each of these pieces. He provides some highlights from the XR Track Sessions at SXSW, and also mentions that there is an immersive piece called NOWI…

The Theater application for the Apple Vision Pro by Sandwich Vision launched in June 2024 with the spatial livestreaming of John Gruber's live interview of Apple Executives at WWDC. They have been collaborating with independent producers of spatial video to distribute rentals and purchases of immersive content spanning across stereoscopic 180-video…

Lovesick is a narrative game featuring a character-driven story of a bank on the brink of collapse that faces a series of supernatural events that they must escape from. It features a lot of escape room and puzzle mechanics that are mixed with embodied gameplay, but at the heart it's about the relationship between these four different band members …

In a series of posts from February 8th to 11th, open source developer Matthieu Bucchianeri started making allegations that Meta's OVRPlugin is blocking non-Meta OpenXR runtimes, thereby undermining the open and interoperable spirit of OpenXR. He claims that "the OVRPlugin takes intentional precautions to exclude non-Meta platforms. This means that …

Niantic launched their Into the Scaniverse application on Quest 3 on February 26th, 2025 that features over 50,000 Gaussian Spats from 120 different countries. They originally launched the WebXR version on December 10th, 2024 at IntoTheScaniverse.com, which was built using Niantic Studio (be sure to check out their comprehensive history of Gaussian…

HTC has launched Viverse platform that is aiming to become the YouTube of 3D Content. It's a platform that hosts 3D content and worlds built on PlayCanvas as well as many other open source technologies like WebXR, WebGPU, and VRM. It is sort of like a mix between VRChat with social worlds, 3D web crypto-based metaverse worlds, but also with some mo…

The latest Polys Ombudsperson of the Year is Ingrid Kopp, and previous winners Brittan Heller, Michaela Montagna, and myself gathered again on December 8 2024 to reflect on the current state of the XR industry as well as the specific ethical concerns about the intersection between XR and AI. We also speak about some of the power of storytelling to …

Oliver Kadel's 1618 Digital specializes in spatial audio sound design and engineering across linear immersive storytelling and interactive immersive experiences. Kadel also co-hosts The Immersive Audio Podcast with Monica Bolles, and I was recently featured in episode #109. I sat down with Kadel to get a survey of some of the spatial audio formats …

The Khronos Group is working on a new open standard tentatively called the glTF External Reference Format (or glTFx for short), which will allow users to add multiple glTF assets to a single scene. This used to be called the "glTF Experience Format (glXF)," and the final name is still being finalized. This will enable new capabilities that are not …

I dig into my archives to unpack the one-on-one, immersive theatre piece that I saw online back in 2021 called TM that used a Socratic dialectic to interrogate you as you're going through a process of joining an imaginary cult. I spoke with Ontroerend Goed's artistic director Alexander Devriendt to get a lot more context for how he designs immersiv…

VR filmmakers Joe Hunting and Max Willson are premiering their short documentary film The Reality of Hope at the Sundance film festival this week (online tickets are still available here from Jan 30 to Feb 2 and it'll also be available later this year on Documentary+). Hunting's previous film We Met in Virtual Reality also premiered at Sundance in …