Voices of VR

Nina van Doren, a co-curator at IDFA DocLab, and Caspar Sonnen, its founder and lead curator, discuss the upcoming theme, 'Off the Internet,' which critiques online culture while showcasing immersive installations. They introduce the concept of 'Perception Art,' blending fiction and documentary elements. Notable works include a nostalgic web-walking game, an interactive hip-hop album experience, and a VR piece that animates scanned specimens. The conversation also highlights the importance of reclaiming personal digital spaces in an age of social media.

In this captivating discussion, Dr. Morrow, an anonymous Moscow-based artist and VRChat worldbuilder, shares insights into his surreal creations like the Organism trilogy and Olympia. He reveals his chaotic creative process, emphasizing art for personal fulfillment over commercial demands. Dr. Morrow dives into the importance of sound design, using audio and weather to enhance player experience in his vast, dreamlike environments. He also reflects on his architectural inspirations and critiques the current trajectory of VR, advocating for more innovative ideas.

Charlie Melcher, founder of The Future of Storytelling, discusses his new book exploring over 50 immersive 'living stories.' He highlights how storytelling is evolving to be agentic, responsive, and social. Melcher shares insights from experiences he visited around the globe, emphasizing the importance of participation and agency in modern narratives. He redefines audiences as 'actiences' to stress active involvement. The conversation also delves into the transformative power of immersive storytelling and its potential to instill agency in future generations.

Alexis Scalice, Vice President of Business Development and Entertainment at Cosm, shares insights about the groundbreaking "Cinematic Shared Reality" experience at Cosm, where The Matrix is redefined within an immersive dome. She explains how the expansion beyond the classic 16x9 frame enhances emotional impact and audience engagement. The discussion covers the collaboration with creative partners, the art of selecting scenes, and the innovative use of lighting and color to evoke feelings. Alexis also hints at exciting future projects, including Willy Wonka.

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