Voices of VR

I interviewed SXSW XR Experience 2026 curator Blake Kammerdiener about this year's selection, and how immersive artists are using Generative AI in a series of different projects. Below is the selection (ordered from longest to shortest). This year's program runs from 11a to 6p CDT from Sunday, March 15-17, 2026. XR Experience Competition Escape The Internet (Part 1) (50 min) Inter(mediate) Spaces (45 min) Winterover (45 min) Fabula Rasa: Dead Man Talking (30 min) Frustrain: Trainman (30 min) The Forgotten War (30 min) Watsonville (30 min) Fillos do Vento: A Rapa (28 min) Crafting Crimes: The Mona Lisa Heist (20 min) Love Bird (20 min) The Baby Factory is Closed (20 min) Lionia Is Leaving (18 min) Body Proxy (15 min) Cycle (15 min) The Great Dictator: A participatory AI installation about power, rhetoric, and memory (15 min) XR Experience Spotlight The Clouds Are Two Thousand Meters Up (62 min) The Great Orator (50 min) Lesbian Simulator (40 min) A Long Goodbye (35 min) Dark Rooms (35 min) Lacuna (34 min) The Dollhouse (24 min) Reality Looks Back (21 min) Insider Outsider (12 min) loss·y (10 min) Lost Love Hotline (10 min) Out of Nowhere (10 min) Spectacular: The Art of Jonathan Yeo in Augmented Reality (10 min) Ascended Intelligence (9 min) MIT Open Documentary Lab’s AR and Public Space Artist Collective Layers of Place: Austin [90 min total] ORYZA: Healing Ground (15 min) The Founders Pillars (15 min) Open Access Memorial (15 min) Paper Boat (15 min) Humble Monuments (15 min) Moving Memory (15 min) This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

This is the panel discussion of Mission Responsible 3 featuring the winners of the Polys Ombudsperson of the year including: Kent Bye (2020), Avi Bar-Zeev (2021), Brittan Heller (2022), Micaela Mantegna (2023), Ingrid Kopp (2024), and Nonny de la Pena (2025). Introduced by Renard T. Jenkins. The big topic this year was AI, but lots to say about XR as well. Here are some links that I mentioned in the introduction that were referenced within the show: "Freedom of Expression in Next-Generation Computing" by Brittan Heller XR Guild's Principles US sanctioning individual ICC judges for decisions they don't like. The Polys 6th Annual Immersive Awards takes place next weekend on Sunday, March 22, 2026 at SVA Theatre in New York City. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney gave a rousing speech at the World Economic Forum on January 20, 2026 about the rupture of the rules-based order of the globalized economy, and he emphasized the need to build new coalitions to sustain the pressure coming from the United States' emerging authoritarianism. Carney said, “Great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited. You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration, when integration becomes the source of your subordination.” Just as globalized, economic integrations are being weaponized by the United States, then Big Tech's integrations woven throughout our lives will continue to become the source of our own subordination, especially as surveillance capitalism heads towards its logical conclusion of an all-pervasive, AI Big Brother, perhaps eventually explicitly tied into authoritarian governments. The AI Big Brother has already started within the context of private companies, but with the outdated Third-Party doctrine of the Fourth Amendment, then any data given to a third party has "no legitimate 'expectation of privacy'." From UNITED STATES v. MILLER (1976): "The Fourth Amendment does not prohibit the obtaining of information revealed to a third party and conveyed by him to Government authorities." So the US government can request almost any data shared with a third party without a warrant, and given Big Tech's cozy relationship to a democratically-backsliding US government, then who knows what kinds of backroom deals are being made to automate data sharing. We're already in an era where almost all data given to a third party is not considered to be private, and you can start to see some early indications for how this can go wrong in Taylor Lorenz's interview with 404 Media's Joe Cox about ICE's surveillance technologies. It seems likely that we are entering into the very early phases of Orwell's worst nightmare of a 1984 surveillance state powered by Big Tech's AI. In this op-ed podcast episode, I connect some dots between Carney’s Davos speech about the hegemonic forces in the geopolitical sphere and the parallels with Big Tech's push towards "contextually aware-AI," which is just an always-on AI that is surveillance capitalism on steroids. Carney's speech provides a lot of insights for how Canada is navigating this new reality where the rules-based order on the International stage seems to be dissolving. One of his deepest insights is to simply name the truth, and to describe precisely what is happening. He refers to a powerful story from Vaclav Havel's The Power of the Powerless where shopkeepers eventually "took their [propaganda] signs down" during communist rule after they were no longer willing to live within a lie. Carney says: "The system's power comes not from its truth, but from everyone's willingness to perform as if it were true, and its fragility comes from the same source. When even one person stops performing, when the greengrocer removes his sign, the illusion begins to crack. Friends, it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down." Taking down metaphoric signs breaks the spell of the collective performative ritual that sustains the power of an authoritarian regime. Taking a sign down is also the embodiment of the first lesson of Timothy Synder's On Tyranny, which is "Do Not Obey in Advance." This lesson is certainly easier said than done, and I've been surprised how pervasive and powerful the chilling effects to remain silent can be. I find myself self-censoring, going dark on social media, and just generally not speaking the full truth as I see it. So this episode is a step in that direction of trying to name things as I see them, but also drawing the parallels between these broader political contexts and how they're collapsing into the technological contexts.

On Wednesday, January 28, 2026, Ian Hamilton announced on Bluesky that "I've been fired from UploadVR." He was the editor in chief at UploadVR, and he wrote a Substack post titled "Ian is Typing" on January 30th detailing how is co-workers were pushing to do a test of a "clearly disclosed AI author for UploadVR," and that he had three specific concerns that it be brief, for the ability for readers to turn off and hide all AI-authored posts, and for human freelancers to have the right of first refusal. Hamilton claims to have tried to raise these concerns in the context of Slack, but that the experiment was going to proceed regardless. He writes, "Unable to shift the direction of my colleagues and out of options to affect what was coming, I stepped out of Slack and sent a final email to them on Wednesday morning with a number of my contacts in the industry copied, raising some of these concerns. Not long after, I was called by my boss and fired." I spoke with Hamilton last Friday after his Substack post in order to get more context that led to his departure. Hamilton claims that UploadVR Editor & Developer David Heaney and UploadVR's Operations Manager Kyle Riesenbeck were behind the push to test this clearly disclosed AI author on UploadVR, and that ultimately the proposed test was a business decision made by Riesenbeck. It was a decision that Hamilton ultimately disagreed with, and he cites it as the primary factor that led to behavior that ultimately led to his firing. (UPDATE Feb 5, 2026: It is worth noting here that UploadVR has yet to run this AI bot author test, but that it was the proposed test that was the catalyst for Hamilton’s behavior). The specific reasons and circumstances around Hamilton's firing are publicly disputed by Heaney, who reacted on Twitter after Hamilton's Substack post went live by saying, "It is indeed only one side of the story. And an incomplete telling of it, with key omissions and wording choices that serve to paint a misleading picture." In another post Heaney says, "I can't get into it more at this point for obvious reasons, but don't believe everything you read, especially a single side of a complex story." I asked Hamilton for his reaction to Heaney's claims that he's being misleading during our interview, and he did provide more context in our conversation that lead up to his firing. Ultimately, it does sounds like the proposed AI bot author test was the primary catalyst for Hamilton, and that this disagreement may have led to other behaviors and reactions that could also be reasonably cited for why he was fired. UploadVR may have a differing opinions as to what happened, but no one from UploadVR has made public comments beyond what Heaney has said on Twitter. I have extended invitations to both Riesenbeck or Heaney to come onto the podcast for a broader discussion about AI, but nothing has been confirmed by the time of publication. My Personal Take on AI: Technically, Philosophically, Legally, and Culturally Public discourse around AI has split into a binary of Pro-AI vs Anti-AI, and while my personal views can not be easily collapsed into one side of the other, I'd usually take the Anti-AI side of a debate if given the opportunity. I do think some form of AI is here to stay, and will be around for a long time, but that right now there is a lot of hype and deluded thinking on the topic. I see AI as a technology that consolidates wealth and power, and so a primary question worth asking is “Whose power and wealth is being consolidated?” Karen Hao's The Empire of AI elaborates on how the past patterns of colonialism are replaying out within the context of data and the field of AI, as well as how scaling with more compute power has been the primary mode of innovation in AI, and that Gary Marcus has been pushing against the "Scale is All You Need" theory for many years now. Technically speaking, I'm more of a skeptic in the short-term around LLMs along the lines of Stocha...

I interviewed Andrew M. Davis about his forthcoming book titled Whitehead's Universe: A Prismatic Introduction on Thursday, December 4, 2025. It's absolutely the best introduction to Alfred North Whitehead's work in Process Philosophy, and I can't recommend it enough. The worst part is that it isn't set to release until sometime next year, but you can get an early look at some drafts if you sign up with some of Davis' upcoming Whitehead's Universe courses that are being offered in January and February 2026. Whitehead's Process Philosophy centers the human experience at the center of it's philosophy, and therefore focuses on the dynamic flux and flow of experience as we inherit past memories, anticipate the future, decide what actions to take moment to moment, and synthesize it all through our feelings which help to solidify our core memories through the peak emotional experiences of our lives. Davis helps us navigate through Whitehead's neologisms, which are attempting to rewire our brain to think about the nature of reality in a completely new and different way. The subject-predicate and noun-emphasized object-oriented structure of the English isn't doing us any favors, but thankfully the immersive experiences that are offered through immersive art and entertainment is very much oriented into the dynamic flux of our experience, through what is theorized as presence theory in virtual reality. I have my own elemental theory of presence, and in this conversation with Davis I discovered that there's a lot of resonance with how Whitehead is reconceptualizing the nature of reality into a more verb-based event ontology. This is my fifth deep dive on Process Philosophy, and so be sure to check out my other conversations here: #965: Primer on Whitehead’s Process Philosophy as a Paradigm Shift & Foundation for Experiential Design #1147: Thirteen Philosophers on the Problem of Opposites: Grant Maxwell’s Integration & Difference Book & Archetypal Approaches to Character #1183: From Kant to an Organic View of Reality: Scaffolding a Process-Relational Paradigm Shift with Whitehead Scholar Matt Segall #1568: A Process-Relational Philosophy View on AI, Intelligence, & Consciousness with Matt Segall #1708: How Process Philosophy Centers Experience. A Prismatic Tour of “Whitehead’s Universe” by Andrew M. Davis This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I interviewed Karim Ben Khelifa about In 36,000 Ways on Sunday, November 16, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Here are the 26 episodes and more than 24 hours of coverage from my IDFA DocLab 2025 coverage: #1682: Preview of IDFA DocLab's Selection of "Perception Art" & Immersive Stories #1683: "Feedback VR Antifuturist Musical" Wins Immersive Non-Fiction Award at IDFA DocLab 2025 #1684: Playable Essay “individualism in the dead-internet age” Recaps Enshittification Against Indie Devs #1685: Immersive Liner Notes of Hip-Hop Album "AÜTO/MÖTOR" Uses three.js & HTML 1.0 Aesthetics #1686: 15 Years of Hand-Written Letters about the Internet in "Life Needs Internet 2010–2025" Installation #1687: Text-Based Adventure Theatrical Performance "MILKMAN ZERO: The First Delivery" #1688: Hacking Gamer Hardware and Stereotypes in "Gamer Keyboard Wall Piece #2" #1689: Making Post-Human Babies in "IVF-X" to Catalyze Philosophical Reflections on Reproduction #1690: Asking Philosophical Questions on AI in "The Oracle: Ritual for the Future" with Poetic Immersive Performance #1691: A Call for Human Friction Over AI Slop in "Deep Soup" Participatory Film Based on "Designing Friction" Manifesto #1692: Playful Remixing of Scanned Animal Body Parts in "We Are Dead Animals" #1693: A Survey of the Indie Immersive Dome Community Trends with "The Rift" Directors & 4Pi Productions #1694: Reimagining Amsterdam's Red Light District in "Unimaginable Red" Open World Game #1695: "Another Place" Takes a Liminal Architectural Stroll into Memories of Another Time and Place #1696: Speculative Architecture Meets the Immersive Dome in Sergey Prokofyev's "Eternal Habitat" #1697: Can Immersive Art Revitalize Civic Engagement? Netherlands CIIIC Funds "Shared Reality" Initiative #1698: Immersive Exhibition Lessons Learned from Undershed's First Year with Amy Rose #1699: Announcing "The Institute of Immersive Perservation" with Avinash Changa & His XR Virtual Machine Wizardry #1700: Update on Co-Creating XR Distribution Field Initiative & Toolkits from MIT Open DocLab #1701: Public Art Installation "Nothing to See Here" Uses Perception Art to Challenge Our Notions of Reality #1702: "Coded Black" Creates Experiential Black History by Combining Horror Genres with Open World Exploration #1703: "Reality Looks Back" Uses Quantum Possibility Metaphors & Gaussian Splats to Challenge Notions of Reality #1704: "Lesbian Simulator" is an Interactive VR Narrative Masterclass Balancing Levity, Pride, & Naming of Homophobic Threats #1705: The Art of Designing Emergent Social Dynamics with Ontroerend Goed's "Handle with Care" #1706: Using Immersive Journalism to Document Genocide in Gaza with "Under the Same Sky" #1707: War Journalist Turns to Immersive Art to Shatter Our Numbness Through Feeling. "In 36,000 Ways" is a Revelatory Embodied Poem by Karim Ben Khelifa This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I interviewed Khalil Ashawi, Sami Sultan, & Hail Khalaf about Under the Same Sky on Saturday, November 15, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I interviewed Alexander Devriendt about Handle with Care on Wednesday, December 3, 2025. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I interviewed Iris van der Meule about Lesbian Simulator on Tuesday, November 18, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I interviewed Anne Jeppesen & Omid Zarei about Reality Looks Back on Tuesday, November 18, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I interviewed Maisha Wester about Coded Black on Monday, November 17, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I interviewed Celine Daemen about Nothing to See Here on Monday, November 17, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I interviewed Sarah Wolozin, Scarlett Kim, Julia Scott-Stevenson about MIT Open DocLab's Co-Creating XR Distribution Field Initiative on Wednesday, November 19, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I interviewed Avinash Changa about The Institute of Immersive Perservation on Tuesday, November 18, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I interviewed Amy Rose about first year of the Undershed at the Watershed on Saturday, November 15, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I interviewed Martijn de Waal about revitalizing civic engagement through immersive art on Sunday, November 16, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I interviewed Sergey Prokofyev about Eternal Habitat on Monday, November 17, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I interviewed Domenico Singha Pedroli about Another Place on Saturday, November 15, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I interviewed Vitor Freire & Monique Grimord about Unimaginable Red on Wednesday, November 19, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I interviewed Janire Najera & Matthew Wright from 4PI Productions and CULTVR Lab about The Rift on Monday, November 17, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I interviewed Maarten Isaak de Heer about We Are Dead Animals on Saturday, November 15, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I interviewed Luna Maurer & Roel Wouters about Deep Soup on Tuesday, November 18, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands. You can also check out their Designing Friction Manifesto. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I interviewed Victorine van Alphen about The Oracle: Ritual for the Future on Wednesday, November 19, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I interviewed Victorine Van Alphen about IVF-X on Saturday, April 8, 2023 at New Images in Paris, France. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I interviewed Sjef van Beers about Gamer Keyboard Wall Piece #2 on Saturday, November 15, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I interviewed Matt Romein about MILKMAN ZERO: The First Delivery on Monday, November 17, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I interviewed Jeroen van Loon about Life Needs Internet 2010–2025 on Wednesday, November 19, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I interviewed Albert Johnson about A Ü T O / M Ö T O R on Sunday, November 16, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I interviewed Nathalie Lawhead about individualism in the dead-internet age: an anti-big tech asset flip shovelware r̶a̶n̶t̶ manifesto on Monday, November 17, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I interviewed Claudix Vanesix, Cocompi & Aaron Medina about Feedback VR, un musical antifuturista on Sunday, November 16, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Here are the 26 episodes and more than 24 hours of coverage from my IDFA DocLab 2025 coverage: #1682: Preview of IDFA DocLab's Selection of "Perception Art" & Immersive Stories #1683: "Feedback VR Antifuturist Musical" Wins Immersive Non-Fiction Award at IDFA DocLab 2025 #1684: Playable Essay “individualism in the dead-internet age” Recaps Enshittification Against Indie Devs #1685: Immersive Liner Notes of Hip-Hop Album "AÜTO/MÖTOR" Uses three.js & HTML 1.0 Aesthetics #1686: 15 Years of Hand-Written Letters about the Internet in "Life Needs Internet 2010–2025" Installation #1687: Text-Based Adventure Theatrical Performance "MILKMAN ZERO: The First Delivery" #1688: Hacking Gamer Hardware and Stereotypes in "Gamer Keyboard Wall Piece #2" #1689: Making Post-Human Babies in "IVF-X" to Catalyze Philosophical Reflections on Reproduction #1690: Asking Philosophical Questions on AI in "The Oracle: Ritual for the Future" with Poetic Immersive Performance #1691: A Call for Human Friction Over AI Slop in "Deep Soup" Participatory Film Based on "Designing Friction" Manifesto #1692: Playful Remixing of Scanned Animal Body Parts in "We Are Dead Animals" #1693: A Survey of the Indie Immersive Dome Community Trends with "The Rift" Directors & 4Pi Productions #1694: Reimagining Amsterdam's Red Light District in "Unimaginable Red" Open World Game #1695: "Another Place" Takes a Liminal Architectural Stroll into Memories of Another Time and Place #1696: Speculative Architecture Meets the Immersive Dome in Sergey Prokofyev's "Eternal Habitat" #1697: Can Immersive Art Revitalize Civic Engagement? Netherlands CIIIC Funds "Shared Reality" Initiative #1698: Immersive Exhibition Lessons Learned from Undershed's First Year with Amy Rose #1699: Announcing "The Institute of Immersive Perservation" with Avinash Changa & His XR Virtual Machine Wizardry #1700: Update on Co-Creating XR Distribution Field Initiative & Toolkits from MIT Open DocLab #1701: Public Art Installation "Nothing to See Here" Uses Perception Art to Challenge Our Notions of Reality #1702: "Coded Black" Creates Experiential Black History by Combining Horror Genres with Open World Exploration #1703: "Reality Looks Back" Uses Quantum Possibility Metaphors & Gaussian Splats to Challenge Notions of Reality #1704: "Lesbian Simulator" is an Interactive VR Narrative Masterclass Balancing Levity, Pride, & Naming of Homophobic Threats #1705: The Art of Designing Emergent Social Dynamics with Ontroerend Goed's "Handle with Care" #1706: Using Immersive Journalism to Document Genocide in Gaza with "Under the Same Sky" #1707: War Journalist Turns to Immersive Art to Shatter Our Numbness Through Feeling. "In 36,000 Ways" is a Revelatory Embodied Poem by Karim Ben Khelifa This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

IDFA DocLab is the immersive selection of non-fiction digital and immersive stories that is a part of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), and they're having their 19th selection this year. DocLab founder Caspar Sonnen has been doing an amazing job of tracking the frontiers of new forms of digital, interactive, and immersive storytelling since 2007, and he joined me along with his co-curator Nina van Doren to talk about the ten pieces within the DocLab Competition for Immersive Non-Fiction as well as the nine pieces within the DocLab Competition for Digital Storytelling as well as portions of their DocLab Spotlight as well as the DocLab at the Planetarium: Down to Earth program, DocLab Playroom prototype sessions as well as the DocLab R&D Summit. In trying to describe the types of immersive art and storytelling works that DocLab curates, then they have started to use the term "Perception Art" in order to describe the types of pieces and work that they're featuring. This year's theme is "Off the Internet," which speaks to both the types of works that critique and analyze the impacts of online culture on our lives, but also taking projects that were born on the Internet and giving them an IRL physical installation art context to view them. I'll be on site seeing the selection of works and also be interviewing various artists who are on the frontiers of experimentation for these new forms of "perception art." UPDATE: December 6, 2025. Here's all of my coverage from IDFA DocLab 2025: #1682: Preview of IDFA DocLab's Selection of "Perception Art" & Immersive Stories #1683: "Feedback VR Antifuturist Musical" Wins Immersive Non-Fiction Award at IDFA DocLab 2025 #1684: Playable Essay “individualism in the dead-internet age” Recaps Enshittification Against Indie Devs #1685: Immersive Liner Notes of Hip-Hop Album "AÜTO/MÖTOR" Uses three.js & HTML 1.0 Aesthetics #1686: 15 Years of Hand-Written Letters about the Internet in "Life Needs Internet 2010–2025" Installation #1687: Text-Based Adventure Theatrical Performance "MILKMAN ZERO: The First Delivery" #1688: Hacking Gamer Hardware and Stereotypes in "Gamer Keyboard Wall Piece #2" #1689: Making Post-Human Babies in "IVF-X" to Catalyze Philosophical Reflections on Reproduction #1690: Asking Philosophical Questions on AI in "The Oracle: Ritual for the Future" with Poetic Immersive Performance #1691: A Call for Human Friction Over AI Slop in "Deep Soup" Participatory Film Based on "Designing Friction" Manifesto #1692: Playful Remixing of Scanned Animal Body Parts in "We Are Dead Animals" #1693: A Survey of the Indie Immersive Dome Community Trends with "The Rift" Directors & 4Pi Productions #1694: Reimagining Amsterdam's Red Light District in "Unimaginable Red" Open World Game #1695: "Another Place" Takes a Liminal Architectural Stroll into Memories of Another Time and Place #1696: Speculative Architecture Meets the Immersive Dome in Sergey Prokofyev's "Eternal Habitat" #1697: Can Immersive Art Revitalize Civic Engagement? Netherlands CIIIC Funds "Shared Reality" Initiative #1698: Immersive Exhibition Lessons Learned from Undershed's First Year with Amy Rose #1699: Announcing "The Institute of Immersive Perservation" with Avinash Changa & His XR Virtual Machine Wizardry #1700: Update on Co-Creating XR Distribution Field Initiative & Toolkits from MIT Open DocLab #1701: Public Art Installation "Nothing to See Here" Uses Perception Art to Challenge Our Notions of Reality #1702: "Coded Black" Creates Experiential Black History by Combining Horror Genres with Open World Exploration #1703: "Reality Looks Back" Uses Quantum Possibility Metaphors & Gaussian Splats to Challenge Notions of Reality #1704: "Lesbian Simulator" is an Interactive VR Narrative Masterclass Balancing Levity, Pride, & Naming of Homophobic Threats #1705: The Art of Designing Emergent Social Dynamics with Ontroerend...

The VRChat worlds by DrMorro are truly incredible. They're vast landscapes made of surreal mash-ups of various architecture styles and symbols that feels like you're walking through a waking dream. His Organism Trilogy (Organism, Epilogue 1, and Epilogue 2) is a true masterpiece of VR worldbuilding. And his latest Ritual is one of the biggest and most impressive single worlds on VRChat that feels walking through a fever dream, and probably the closest thing to Meow Wolf's style of immersive art. And his Raindance Immersive award-winning Olympia was his truly first vast world, and they've been getting bigger and bigger and more impressive ever since. He's got a keen ear for sound design and a sound track that will help set the eerie mood of his sometimes unsettling and liminal worlds. In short, the experience of spending 4-5 hours going through one of DrMorro's worlds is a completely unique and singular experience, as he's in a class of his own when it comes to VRChat world building. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4AfYsmHQB8 I have long wanted to conduct an interview with DrMorro doing a comprehensive retrospective of his works, but he's an anonymous Russian artist who doesn't speak English. He's only done one other interview with Russian Del'Arte Magazine, but otherwise he's a pretty mysterious and cryptic figure. I managed to got ahold of him through a mutual friend, and he suggested that we do a "19th-century-style written correspondence" where I would send questions over text chat over the course of a week. He would use an AI translator to translate what I said into Russian, and then he would then translate his Russian response back into English. For this podcast, I used the open source Boson AI Higgs Audio with Russian actor Yul Brynner's voice to bring DrMorro's personality to life, but the full transcript of our edited chat is down below if you prefer to read it as I had experienced it. You can support DrMorro's work through Boosty, and you can support the Voices of VR podcast through Patreon. Kent Bye: Alright! Can you go ahead and introduce yourself and what you do in the realm of VR? DrMorro: Hello! The name's DrMorro – or well, that's my alias, to be precise. That's the name I'm known by as the creator of all those strange worlds in VRChat. For now, that's my only real achievement in the VR sphere. Other than that, I'm a 2D and 3D artist, which is my main profession. Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, this is my first interview that I’ve done via text. Can you give a bit more context for why you prefer to do the interview in this way? DrMorro: Honestly, I'm a pretty closed-off person, and it's easier for me to write than to talk. It’s just a character trait. Especially since I can't even imagine communicating through a voice translator. When I write, I can at least somehow control the translation. I don't know spoken English, but I manage fine in writing. So, no conspiracy theories. It's just how I'm used to communicating. Though it's strange because by nature, I'm a staunch introvert and I make worlds about total solitude. In ORGANISM, how many entities did you even find there besides the hat-wearing figure? And then suddenly, this popularity falls on me, and constant communication becomes the norm. Aaaahhh! Kent Bye: Well, I very much appreciate you taking the time to do what you describe as a “19th-century-style written correspondence” with me over the next week or so. And it makes sense that you could have a little bit more control in how you can express yourself via written text through a translator. Alight. So I always like to hear what type of design disciplines folks are bringing into VR, and so can you provide a bit more context about your background and journey into working with VR? DrMorro: To put it briefly, my journey is that I essentially work in architectural visualization. But that's more of a day job to keep myself afloat and pay the bills. My main interest,

Charles Melcher's new book "The Future of Storytelling: How Immersive Experiences Are Transforming Our World" was released on November 4, 2025, and I had a chance to take an early look and interview Melcher. The book is broken up into six main chapters where Melcher argues that the future of storytelling is agentic, immersive, embodied, responsive, social, and transformative. Melcher covers over fifty different "living stories" across different genres including virtual reality stories, location-based entertainment, immersive stories, immersive theatre, immersive art, experiential brand activations, and interactive experiences. He told me that he's had a chance to experience around 80 to 85% of the experiences that he features in his book, which most of them are site-specific and many times time-limited, immersive exhibitions that are not always easy to get into. He's been traveling to different locations around the world with his Future of Storytelling Explorer's Club to see many of these experiences, as well as engage with the creators behind the experiences. In his book, he shares some brief trip reports on over 50 different experiences, as well as some very high-quality, official photo documentation of these projects. It serves to provide some documentation of many of these ephemeral projects, but also tie together some of the common elements that helps to define and elucidate what exactly is meant by "immersive." Melcher and I also talk about the founding of The Future of Storytelling Summit back on October 2012, as well as the start of his Future of Storytelling podcast on March 2020 that has published over 120 interviews since it started during the pandemic. Around 20% of the projects and creators that have appeared on his podcast are featured in his book as what he considers to be a canon of work that exemplifies these deeper trends of immersive storytelling and living stories. While the book does provide a lot of valuable documentation, one complaint that I have is that it is not always easy to tell where Melcher is sourcing his quotes from project creators. The majority of quotations are coming from either private interviews that he personally conducted or from public conversations that he's featured on his podcast. But sometimes he uses quotes of creators from other publications without full attribution. So if there's a second edition, then I hope to see a more detailed set of footnotes and perhaps an index to make it an even more useful piece of documentation. The way that Melcher is breaking down the different foundational qualities of immersive experiences also closely mirrors my own elemental approach, but with some slight deviations or different categorizations. His agentic qualities are equivalent to what I call active presence, his embodied is the same as my embodied presence, and his social is the same as my social presence. I also have emotional presence and environmental presence, which he classifies as emotional and physical subsets of immersive qualities. Melcher also has a participatory subset under immersive qualities, which I consider to just be a part of active presence and what he is already classifying as agentic. For me "immersive" is more of an umbrella term that includes all of the various qualities of presence, and Melcher proposes a sort of rating system judging the degree of immersiveness rated across the different physical, emotional, and participatory dimensions. But Melcher doesn't list social as it's own vector of immersiveness as he told me that he considers social to be a subsection of emotions, but I consider social qualities to be distinct from emotional ones. Melcher also highlights the "responsive" qualities of a piece of work, which I see as both connected to ways of amplifying agency, but also something that contributes to Slater's Plausibility Illusion of an experience or a suspension of disbelief, which I classify under mental presence.

The Matrix at Cosm in LA opened on June 6th, 2025, which leverages Cosm's 87-foot, 12K+ LED immersive dome to show this classic film within a 16x9 frame while the additional space beyond the frame was filled with over 50 different scenes thereby expanding the worldbuilding beyond the frame. I finally had a chance to see it last month, and was really impressed with how much this additional space was able to increase the level of immersion, to amplify key emotional beats within the film, and create some truly awe-inspiring moments. I had a chance to speak with Alexis Scalice, Cosm’s vice president of business development and entertainment, about Cosm's collaboration with Little Cinema, MakeMake, and Warner Brothers to launch their inaugural "Cinematic Shared Reality" immersive experience. The Matrix has a few more weeks of screenings before their second film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971) opens on November 21, 2025. You can also hear more context from in Noah Nelson's No Proscencium podcast interview with Little Cinema's Jay Rinsky conducted ahead of the world premiere. And I also share some impressions of the two enhanced cinema productions of The Black Phone and M3GAN within Blumhouse Enhanced Cinema Quest App. These films have some similarities to what The Matrix at Cosm is doing, but at a much smaller scale and not nearly as effective as the expanded immersive worldbuilding in one of the greatest science fiction films of all time. The Matrix at Cosm is setting a quality high bar for this type of format that is going to be difficult to match. You can see more context in the rough transcript below. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I had a chance to catch up with Wevr's CEO and co-founder Neville Spiteri, which has been making location-based VR experiences for the last decade in what he calls a "New Cinema." See more context in the rough transcript below. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I did an interview with Joe Darko, Global Head of Developer Relations at Snap, at Snap's Developer Conference of Lensfest. See more context in the rough transcript below. You can also check out all 11 episodes in this Snap Lensfest series here: #1667: Kickoff of Snap Lensfest 2025 Coverage & SnapOS 2.0 Announcements #1668: Snap Co-Founders Community Q&A about Specs 2026 Launch Plan #1669: Snap's Resh Sidhu on the Future of AR Commerce & Developer-Centered Innovation #1670: Snapchat's Embodied Gaming Innovations with AR Developer Relations Head #1671: Reflecting on Snap's AR Platform & Developer Tools Past and Future with Terek Judi #1672: Niantic Spatial's Project Jade Demo Shows Latest Location-Aware, AI Tour Guide Innovations #1673: Snap Lensfest Announcement Reflections from AR Gaming Studio DB Creations #1674: 3rd Place Spectacles Lensathon Team: Fireside Tales Collaborative Storytelling with GenAI #1675: 2nd Place Spectacles Lensathon Team: CartDB Barcode-Scanning Nutrition App #1676: 1st Place Spectacles Lensathon Team: Decisionator Object-Detection AI Decision-Maker #1677: Snap's AR Developer Relations Plan for 2026 Specs Consumer Launch with Joe Darko Here are some concluding deep thoughts that I just posted in a LinkedIn post. Reflections on Snap Lensfest XR & AI Trends Covered in Latest Voices of VR Podcast Series Snap brought me down to LA to cover their Lensfest developer conference where they made a lot of AR developer platform announcements, had a hackathon featuring those new capabilities, and are gearing up for their 2026 consumer launch of Specs, their fully 6-DoF, hand-tracked enabled, AR Glasses. It’s been a full year since their Spectacles dev kit was announced and made available to developers, and I feel like Snap is on the bleeding edge of where the overall XR industry may be headed. These latest 11 Voices of VR podcast episodes spanning nearly 7 hours dig into these deeper trends that go beyond the headline announcements from Snap Lensfest. I recorded five interviews with various Snap employees, and I had a chance to catch up with some of the leading AR developers in the space, including Niantic Spatial’s latest VPS guided tour experience on the Spectacles with an AI virtual being. I also served as a preliminary hackathon judge where I got hands-on experiences with all of the AR experiences exploring what’s possible with the latest Snap Cloud announcements, and I’m featuring interviews with the top three Lensathon teams from the Spectacles track. Snap's Latest AR Developer Platform Announcements Snap is gearing up for a 2026 launch of Specs for what will likely be nearly two full years of the Spectacles dev kits having been made available. So this Lensfest marks a half-way point towards a consumer release, and the product team has been busy rapidly iterating on their bespoke, AR app production pipeline. Dedicated AR glasses are very resource constrained, and so Snap has been continuing to evolve their Lens Studio developer tool and optimizing their SnapOS platform for Spectacles. Snap didn't share any news on their target specifications for the Specs, but they released eight significant releases of their development tools over the past year with some of the biggest announcements being shared as the primary focus at Lensfest. Snap is launching Snap Cloud, based upon a Supabase deployment of their open source, PostgreSQL hosted solution. This will allow developers to dynamically load assets, call edge functions, and more easily set up database backends. This will hopefully help to enable Spectacles AR lenses to go beyond some byte-sized entertainment and rapidly prototyped experiments into more fully-featured applications that also leverage cutting-edge AI models and computer-vision enabled applications. Spectacles developers have been limited by 25MB lens size limits, but the Snap Cloud announcements makes it so that larger assets can be dynami...

At Snap's Developer Conference of Lensfest, I did an interview with 1st place team in the Snap Spectacles Lensathon named Decisionator including Candice Branchereau, Marcin Polakowski, Volodymyr Kurbatov, and Inna Horobchuk. I also summarize the other 10 Spectacles Lensathon projects after serving as a preliminary judge for the competition. See more context in the rough transcript below. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

At Snap's Developer Conference of Lensfest, I did an interview with 2nd place team in the Snap Spectacles Lensathon named CartdB including Guillaume Dagens, Nigel Hartman, and Uttam Grandhi (the other team member Nicholas Ross had some prior commitments). See more context in the rough transcript below. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

At Snap's Developer Conference of Lensfest, I did an interview with 3rd place team in the Snap Spectacles Lensathon named Fireside Tales including Stijn Spanhove, Pavlo Tkachenko, and Yegor Ryabtsov. See more context in the rough transcript below. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I did an interview with DB Creations co-founders Dustin Kochensparger and Blake Gross at Snap's Developer Conference of Lensfest. See more context in the rough transcript below. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I did an interview with Alicia Berry, Executive Producer at Niantic Spatial, and Asim Ahmed, Head of Product Marketing at Niantic Spatial, at Snap's Developer Conference of Lensfest about their latest Project Jade Spectacles demo. See more context in the rough transcript below. https://twitter.com/tweetsfromasim/status/1981830288771887606 This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

At Snap's Developer Conference of Lensfest, I did an interview with Terek Judi who is working on Spectacles Product at Snap focusing on SnapOS, Platform, and Developer Tools. See more context in the rough transcript below, and if you'd like to check out the two interviews with Matt Hargett that I reference in the intro, then be sure to check out epsiode #1311 and episode #1660. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I did an interview with Raag Harshavat, AR Developer Relations at Snapchat, at Snap's Developer Conference of Lensfest. See more context in the rough transcript below. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I did an interview with Resh Sidhu, Senior Director of Innovation of Specs and Developer Marketing at Snap, at Snap's Developer Conference of Lensfest. See more context in the rough transcript below. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

The snap co-founders of CEO Evan Spiegel and CTO Bobby Murphy typically have a community-driven Q&A after their Lensfest Keynote where they field over a dozen questions from Lensfest attendees. I'm including this in my coverage again this year as it's a really great set of questions about their consumer release of Specs AR glasses next year, some of their thinking about the role of AI at Snap, and reflections of their 10 years of working with AR lenses going back to the vomiting rainbows facial filter released in 2015. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality