Voices of VR Podcast – Designing for Virtual Reality

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 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 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

This interview with Spectacles Community Manager Jesse McCulloch kicks off my coverage of Snap's Developer Conference called Lensfest. Snap is gearing up for a consumer release of their Snap Specs AR glasses some time next year, and they've been busy frequently updating their underlying operating system and platform tools like Lens Studio. There were no new announcements or reveals about the details of the Snap Specs that have been shared yet, but I did cover the biggest announcements at Lensfest throughout this series and in this interview with McCulloch. I also had a chance to interview five different Snap employees exploring different aspects of their AR strategy, and I also interviewed some AR developers in from the Snap ecosystem. Snap brought me down to also cover the 25-hour Lensathon, and I had a chance to be a judge for the 10 different Spectacles-based hackathon projects, and so I'll be featuring the top 3 finalists in the series. I also interviewed the AR game developers from DB Creations, as well as the latest AI assistant, guided tour demo from Niantic Spatial. Here is a list of the 11 episodes and nearly 7 hours of coverage from Snap's Lensfest: #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 This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I did an interview with VRChat co-founder and CEO Graham Gaylor at Meta Connect 2025 where we talk about the various different monetization strategies that VRChat has been exploring with their user-generated content platform. VRChat announced layoffs for 30% of their employees back on June 12, 2024, and so this is the first time I've had a chance to interview any of the VRChat executives since then. I used to have a pretty consistent streak of interviewing either VRChat leaders or employees at various VR conferences running from 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019, but after the pandemic they were not giving as many public interviews. I did however recently cover the VRChat Avatar Marketplace as well as a conversation with VRChat's new Trust and Safety lead Jun Young Ro about his plans to overhaul and modernize VRChat's Trust and Safety processes, especially as users like Harry X were pointing out some gaps in their moderation processes. I had a chance to chat with Gaylor about some of the early decisions in VRChat for making custom avatars easily uploadable since version 0.3.5 on March 16, 2014 when co-founder Jesse Joudrey made his first public contributions to the project. Joudrey elaborated on his vision of what he considered to be "one of the corner stones of virtual reality and any cyberpunk offshoot... Customization. I don't want any limit on who or what I can be in virtual reality." I had dug up these dates and posts in the write up for episode #1408 where I went down a deep rabbit hole of tracing down some of the origin story for VRChat. Gaylor had actually passed along some early emails and documentation of the early days of VRChat for that write-up. The decision to make avatars completely customizable has been part of the magic and success of VRChat. But centralized and controlled identity has traditionally been one of the core pathways for monetization. In a conversation with VRChat community members after the June 2024 layoffs, qDot told me, "You cannot put the asset genie back in the bottle for VRChat. They can't just come up with an asset system that works this sort of centrally-regulated way now. Everyone is used to throwing these assets around, selling them on Gumroad, selling them on Booth." So I had a chance to talk with Gaylor about his paradox of customizable identity being both the secret sauce of VRChat, but also the clearest traditional path for monetization. You can see more context in the rough transcript below. This also happens to wrap up my coverage of Meta Connect 2025, and here's a recap of the different stories and coverage if you'd like to dig into more details of other things that were announced this year. #1652: Kick-off of Meta Connect Coverage with Meta Ray-Ban Display Glasses Insights from Norm Chan #1653: XR Analyst Anshel Sag on Meta's AI Glasses Strategy #1654: CNET's Scott Stein's Reflections on Meta Ray-Ban Display Glasses Implications #1655: Meta Horizon Studio News and Virtual Fashion with Paige Dansinger #1656: Kiira Benz Part 1: "Runnin'" Large-Scale Volumetric Music Video (2019) #1657: Kiira Benz Part 2: "Finding Pandora X" Bringing Immersive Theatre to VRChat (2020) #1658: Kiira Benz Part 3: Immersive Storytelling Career Retrospective (2025) #1659: VR Gaming Career Retrospective of Chicken Waffle's Finn Staber #1660: Enabling JavaScript-Based Native App XR Pipelines with NativeScript, React Native, and Node API with Matt Hargett #1661: State of VR Gaming with Jasmine Uniza's Impact Realities and Flat2VR Studios #1662: Meta Connect Highlights & Meta Horizon News with JDun and JoyReign #1663: ShapesXR Updates & Neural Band Design Implications of Transforming Your Hand into a Mouse #1664: Resolution Games CEO on Apple Vision Pro Launch + Gaze & Pinch HCI Mechanic in Game Room (2024) #1665: Resolution Games' "Battlemarked" Blends Mixed Reality Social Features with Demeo and D&D Gameplay

I did an interview with Gustav Stenmark at Meta Connect 2025 talking about their latest game Demeo x Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked, which enables some pretty interested co-located mixed reality social features, but also enables individual players to have their own mixed reality or VR POV. You can cee 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 Resolution Games CEO Tommy Palm soon after the Apple Vision Pro launch last year where we talk the in the Game Room game commissioned by Apple as well as the exploration of the relatively new gaze and pinch mechanic that's enabled with the eye-tracking of the Apple Vision Pro. After seeing the Neural Band at Meta Connect, then I'm reminded about how ultimately the gaze and pinch mechanic is a lot more efficient and more optimized for quickly selecting items in a fully volumetric context. Meta's Neural Band announced at Meta Connect in the context of the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses is only within a 2D context in a head-lock HUD display screen, and so operating the Neural Band feels a lot like what it feels like to navigate TV menus with a TV controller, but rather than a controller, then your thumb and side of your index finger are being transformed into a two-axis D-pad. Again, the ultimate form factor is likely going to come back to gaze and pinch, but that will require shipping with eye tracking. And so this unpublished conversation with Tommy Palm takes on a new context as we reflect upon the latest HCI innovations that were announced at Meta Connect and where the ultimate form factor may be headed. Resolution Games also has quite a history of launching games on newly XR devices, and so this conversation with Palm is also within that spirit, and we'll be diving into Battlemarked within the next conversation You can also 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 Michael Markman at Meta Connect 2025 talking about all of the latest updates to the VR design and prototyping tool of ShapesXR, and then we start to dive into some of his hot takes after getting a chance to try out the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses and associated Neural Band. He sees that the neural band is essentially transforming your hand into a mouse that is providing a simplified navigation system (probably closer to a D-pad on a TV remote), but the index-finger-to-thumb serves as a functional left click and middle-finger-to-thumb serves as a functional right click, which has been enough to build the foundation of most modern HCI for computer software for the last 57 years since The Mother of All Demos debuted the mouse in 1968. 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 JoyReign and JDun talking about all of the latest announcements from Meta Connect 2025 focusing a lot on the biggest news from Meta Horizon including their new Studio and Engine. We also talk a bit about the other VR demos that were being shown at Meta Connect, and what they're the most excited about coming out of Meta Connect 2025. JoyReign also talks about developing the VR game Crystal Frenzy within Horizon Worlds, and which parts of GenAI she found to be the most helpful. They also won the Amplifier Award at the Meta Horizon Creator Summit that was being held ahead of Connect. We also chat a bit about how Meta was also promoting different mobile phone games on their Horizon platform including Super Strike, Battle Kin, Shovel Up, Smash Golf early access, and Bumble Dudes. You can also 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 Jasmine Uniza at Meta Connect 2025 where we talk about her journey from being a robotics engineer for the Mars Rover to doing a career pivot into the VR games industry with the founding of Impact Reality marketing firm for games as well as Flat2VR Studios that is porting popular 2D games into VR. We also reflect upon the current state of VR gaming with Meta and their store curation strategies and emphasis on free-to-play games, while focusing on premium VR games. 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 did an interview with Rebecker Specialties' founder Matt Hargett at Meta Connect 2025 about alternative open source and open standards, JavaScript-based pipelines for developing XR applications that he's been working on including React Native for VisionOS, as well as working with NativeScript for VisionOS, and also working to bringing Node API support for React Native. Also be sure to check out his git visualizer Factotum, which is an app that is using some of these alternative production pipelines. Hargett also mentions a couple of recent React Universe Conf talks covering this work including Hermes + Node API: A Match Made in Heaven and Bringing Node-API to React Native. You can also 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 Finn Staber at Meta Connect 2025 reflecting about on his journey into VR from co-founding The Wave VR to then forming Chicken Waffle to developing the games of Baby Hands, Cowbots and Aliens, Shadow of Valhalla, Blazer League, and MarsXR. We also reflect on the current state of VR gaming with Meta, and some of the feedback he's been providing to them from the perspective of an independent, third-party game developer. You can see more context in the rough transcript below. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

Here is my third and final interview of a trilogy of interviews with Kiira Benz. This was conducted at Meta Connect 2025, and serves as a sort of career retrospective of Benz's journey into immersive storytelling. You can check out our previous conversations with our interview about Runnin' from Sundance New Frontier 2019, our interview about Love Seat from Venice Immersive 2020, and then our interview about Finding Pandora X from Venice Immersive 2020. 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 Kiira Benz and Joanna Popper during my remote coverage of Venice Immersive 2020, where her Finding Pandora X project won the Best VR Immersive User Experience award. This is a second in a trilogy of interviews with Benz, and you can check out our conversation about Runnin' and our latest interview conducted at Meta Connect 2025 where we do a bit of career retrospective of her journey into the realm of immersive storytelling. In this conversation, we talk about her immersive theatre production called Finding Pandora X, which she brought into VRChat during the pandemic. Be sure to check out her "The Making of Finding Pandora X Documentary - Virtual Theater" to get even more details on it. See more context in the rough transcript below. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I'm featuring a trilogy of interviews with Kiira Benz (formerly known as Kiira Benzing) with this first part covering her Runnin' music video piece that showed at Sundance 2019 and won the top prize at SXSW 2019. I'll follow up with an interview about her immersive theatre piece that won a prize at Venice Immersive 2019 called Finding Pandora X. And the final I did with her at Meta Connect 2025 doing a bit of a career retrospective, including some work she did in Horizon Worlds and her latest piece focusing on accessibility and dance performance. Also be sure to check out the second recorded interview that I did in 2019 about her hybrid theater and VR piece Love Seat, which showed at Venice 2019. 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 prolific Horizon world builder Paige Dansinger at Meta Connect about the latest Meta Horizon news including the new Meta Horizon Studio as well as Meta Horizon Engine. She also was wearing some custom, hand-made pants that were inspired by virtual pants that she designed for her MetaversePaige avatar. 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 Scott Stein at Meta Connect 2025 reflecting on the biggest news of the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses and the associated Neural Band. Stein has been covering the XR industry since 2012, and always has some deep thoughts on the broader implications of the latest news. You can check out his hands-on first impressions in his CNET video here, and his interview with Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth here. Stein and I had a chance to catch up after the day 1 Meta Connect keynote announcements, and also speculate on the future of the ecosystem in around the Meta Ray-Ban Display Glasses. The Meta Wearables Device Access Toolkit wasn't announced until the following day at the end of the developer keynote at Meta Connect, but there still hasn't been any announcement about if or when third-party developers will get access to develop apps for it as Meta seems content to focus on their own first-party apps at the launch of the device today. 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 Moor Insights and Strategy principle XR Analyst Anshel Sag at Meta Connect to hear some of this latest thoughts on the biggest announcements, but also a broader reflection of how Meta is focusing on how these new AI glasses wearables like the Meta Ray-Ban Display Glasses as well as upgraded Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 and Oakley-branded AI glasses will provide a platform for Meta's AI products. 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 did an interview with Norm Chan at Meta Connect about the Meta Ray-Ban Display Glasses and Meta Neural Band. Be sure to watch Chan's full 58-minute Tested.com report including an interview with Meta CTO Andrew "Boz" Bosworth as his hands-on impressions of the biggest announcement at Meta Connect 2025. You can also see more context in the rough transcript below. This kicks off my Meta Connect 2025 coverage, and I'll be including about a dozen interviews that I did on site that will also be unpacking different news and reactions to Meta's emphasis of AI-driven wearables, and what's happening within the broader XR industry and VR gaming ecosystem. Here's links to all of the interviews that are a part of my Meta Connect 2025 coverage: #1652: Kick-off of Meta Connect Coverage with Meta Ray-Ban Display Glasses Insights from Norm Chan #1653: XR Analyst Anshel Sag on Meta's AI Glasses Strategy #1654: CNET's Scott Stein's Reflections on Meta Ray-Ban Display Glasses Implications #1655: Meta Horizon Studio News and Virtual Fashion with Paige Dansinger #1656: Kiira Benz Part 1: "Runnin'" Large-Scale Volumetric Music Video (2019) #1657: Kiira Benz Part 2: "Finding Pandora X" Bringing Immersive Theatre to VRChat (2020) #1658: Kiira Benz Part 3: Immersive Storytelling Career Retrospective (2025) #1659: VR Gaming Career Retrospective of Chicken Waffle's Finn Staber #1660: Enabling JavaScript-Based Native App XR Pipelines with NativeScript, React Native, and Node API with Matt Hargett #1661: State of VR Gaming with Jasmine Uniza's Impact Realities and Flat2VR Studios #1662: Meta Connect Highlights & Meta Horizon News with JDun and JoyReign #1663: ShapesXR Updates & Neural Band Design Implications of Transforming Your Hand into a Mouse #1664: Resolution Games CEO on Apple Vision Pro Launch + Gaze & Pinch HCI Mechanic in Game Room (2024) #1665: Resolution Games' "Battlemarked" Blends Mixed Reality Social Features with Demeo and D&D Gameplay #1666: VRChat CEO Graham Gaylor on Exploring Various UGC Monetization Strategies This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

PHI Studio sponsored today's episode to highlight that they are expanding their location-based entertainment distribution network to the United States with their EXP Rosemont location in the greater Chicago, IL area that is opening to the public on September 26, 2025. They will be launching with a couple of Excurio pieces including The Horizon of Khufu and Life Chronicles that feature large-scale, free-roaming VR guided tours that I've covered previously in episodes #1430, #1431, and #1588. Both Excurio and PHI Studio are interested in collaborating with creators who are interested in creating large-scale LBE experiences that could draw 100-150 people per hour, and you can reach out to Fabian Barati and/or Julie Tremblay on LinkedIn. Excurio will be making their tools and SDK available to third party developers to expand the number content producers creating this type of large-scale work, and PHI Studio continues to do co-productions across a wide range of formats and throughput scales. I'm excited to see PHI Studio continue to build out their independent distribution network across Canada and North America as they continue to produce and distribute their own experiences as well as distribute the best of large-scale, free roaming experience from Excurio. EXP Rosemont will be launching with a couple of Excurio pieces, but I expect them to eventually distribute some of their own large-scale VR and non-VR, immersive works as well. PHI Studio continues to build out their own independent distribution networks, which will provide new outlets and opportunities for immersive stories that have featured on the festival circuit to have a home beyond this more insular XR industry exhibition network. Not all projects will be a good fit for this high-throughput format, but the revenue generated will help support their other more experimental efforts that are helping to push the boundaries of the medium. Look for my more in-depth coverage of Blur coming out here within the next couple of weeks, which was my personal favorite from Venice Immersive and one of the hottest tickets at this years festival. Thanks again to PHI Studio for sponsoring this episode, and keep an eye on this new location in the greater Chicago area (and apparently only a 10-minute ride from O'Hare Airport if you happen to have an extended layover). I'll be diving more into more 30+ hours of coverage from Venice Immersive within the next couple of weeks, likely after I return from Meta Connect. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I spoke with Venice Immersive curators Liz Rosenthal & Michel Reilhac about sneak peak of their 2025 selection, which is their largest selection yet. See more context in the rough transcript below. Here's an Venice Immersive Program Cheat Sheet by Voices of VR podcast (PDF), which has an overview of the four categories of immersive experiences ordered by longest booking times to shortest (amount of time required for scheduling purposes) as well as the actual runtime, the number of people who can see it per slot, and then the number of people who can see it per day. This should hopefully help for your scheduling process. I typically book experiences to roughly corresponding to hours. The Biennale scheduling website will open up on Thursday, August 21st, and it will not let you double book yourself. So I personally find it easier to book the longer experiences first, and then fill out my schedule with shorter experiences, and then experiences that generally have higher capacity. Note that Ancestors (capacity of 48 people), and L'Ombre (capacity of 50 people), and each of the VRChat sessions only have one booking time per day, and so these are also worth prioritizing if you want to see them and they should have lots of capacity throughout the week. The One the Other Earth may be one of the more logistically difficult experiences to see as you'll need to make a trek up to the main Venice island. I'd recommend trying to keep your schedule clear for at least an hour before and afterwards. Here's a Venice Immersive Schedule Helper that I put together to help navigate the schedule. Here's a placeholder for my other coverage of Venice Immersive 2025 to be updated after the festival. Venice Airport to Lido Island The best way to get to Lido from the Venice airport is either via the Red or Blue Line of the Alilaguna Public Transport water taxi, which you can get tickets either after you come out of customs or you can go to the water taxi dock at the Venice airport, and there's a booth there.  Picking up badge at Palazzo del Casinò I usually pick up my badge at the bottom of the Palazzo del Casinò, which is at Lungomare Guglielmo Marconi, 1861, 30126 Lido VE, Italy Venezia 2000 to the VR Island (Lazzaretto Vecchio) The best way to get to the VR Island of Lazzaretto Vecchio from the docks is the bus. The buses leave every 15-20 minutes, and it's a 3 minute ride, and another 5 minute walk to the island. Here is a link to the bus route and the addresses. I believe it is either the A, N, or C or CE routes. I believe the bus stop names are S.Maria Elisabetta and then I get off at the Gallo Sant'Antonio stop. The address of the VR island is Isola del Lazzaretto Vecchio, Lazzaretto Vecchio, 30100 Venezia VE, Italy There is a water taxi that you can find the pick-up spot by looking at the google map and get directions there. It takes 1 minute of a ride, but there is only one taxi that can be a 10-15 minute wait depending on how busy it is. Also be sure to check out XR Must's interview with Liz and Michel, which I found a lot of helpful info in. Some of the artist statement videos are starting to get posted onto the BiennaleChannel YouTube page. Here's a list Best of Experiences and Best of Worlds from VRChat that are already available if you'd like to get a head start on this year's program. Already Released - BEST OF EXPERIENCES The Midnight Walk Ghost Town One True Path, Part 1 Wall Town Wonders D-Day: The Camera Soldier - Apple Vision Pro Submerged - Apple Vision Pro Adventure: Ice Dive - Apple Vision Pro Already Released - BEST OF WORLDS - VRChat links included vent. by Premium² What is Virtual Art – Volume 1 by Jessien FLASHING WARNING by xlxxl Flat Earth by Niko Lang Neuron by Juice… Powdergame by Pema Malling [NOT REPLAYABLE YET] FZMZ Pointzero by ReeeznD [VR_SMEJ] よるとうげ -Yorutouge- by mikkabouzu / Kikuo [VR_SMEJ]

I spoke with TrainingFangs & TehArbitter about Raindance Immersive Closing Night music and VR performance (now available as a replayable event in the Moon Pool VRChat World) as a part of my Raindance Immersive 2025 coverage. (Photo by Kaerun). See more context in the rough transcript below. Here's a recap of my Raindance Immersive 2025 & VRChat coverage: #1566: Raindance Immersive Curators on the 2025 Selection of Immersive Art on Social VR Platforms [VRChat Story] - #1634: User Claims Potential Gaps in VRChat's Moderation of NSFW Avatars [VRChat Story] - #1635: VRChat's Avatar Marketplace is Targeting Demographic of New Users [VRChat Story] - #1636: Planned Improvements of VRChat's Trust & Safety from New Lead Jun Young Ro #1637: VRChat Doc "The Architect Across Realities" Features MR Design Innovations in Japan #1638: Virtual Photographer Kaerun's Japanese Friendships Featured in Documentary at Raindance #1639: Playing Live Jazz in VRChat with EMN Records enabled by Yamaha SYNCROOM in Japan #1640: "Tonevok" features Real-Time Audioreactive MIDI Visualizations in VRChat #1641: "Siholette of Memories" Cinematic VR Concert Experience Features Live Choreography #1642: "Cathedral of Witches" Performance Explores Trans & Queer Spirituality in VRChat #1643: Studio Penrose's "Our Precious Autumn" Short Film Shot in VRChat Wins Raindance Award #1644: Julianna Loh on Creating Immersive Art in VR and AR #1645: "Hommage" Adventure Inspired by Moebius' Art Collaboratively Built in Resonite #1646: "The Continuous Present" Combines Poetry, Music, & Giant Immersive Sculptures to Win Raindance Immersive's Best Art Experience #1647: Virtual Art Exhibition Innovations in Jessien's "What is Virtual Art?" VRChat World #1648: Vast Hand-Painted "Natura's Queendom" Wins Raindance Immersive's Best Art World #1649: Fangs & Arbi Close Out Raindance with a Breathtaking Music and VJ Show at the Moon Pool This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I spoke with Anders Fray (aka Ders) & Starheart about Natura's Queendom as a part of my Raindance Immersive 2025 coverage. See more context in the rough transcript below. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I spoke with Jessien about his Virtual Museum of Virtual Art as well as his latest What is Virtual Art? VRChat World exhibition as a part of my Raindance Immersive 2025 coverage. We also talk about his previous Raindance award-winning world Thickness Of Calligraphy. See more context in the rough transcript below. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xOZhfAMORw This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I spoke with ReVerse Butcher & Kylie Supski about The Continuous Present as a part of my Raindance Immersive 2025 coverage. See more context in the rough transcript below. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DL_2L0jzUhA This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I spoke with Nanotopia & Rixx about Hommage as a part of my Raindance Immersive 2025 coverage. See more context in the rough transcript below. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqOjHRWRAfM This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I spoke with Juliana Loh about creating immersive art in VR and AR as a part of my Raindance Immersive 2025 coverage. See more context in the rough transcript below. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I spoke with Khang Lu, Quinn Heptig, & Eliza Zhang about their short film shot in VRChat called Our Precious Autumn as a part of my Raindance Immersive 2025 coverage. See more context in the rough transcript below. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxrbWg5vYdk This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I spoke with hexe.exe, T_Braun, Shadowwulf82, RingSystem, Casperillion, Venixia, LadybugVR, & Starheart about Cathedral of Witches as a part of my Raindance Immersive 2025 coverage. See more context in the rough transcript below. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I spoke with HoneyWeeWee, Sandi_, Humi, Quinnster, & Kiashi_GL about Silhouette of Memories as a part of my Raindance Immersive 2025 coverage. See more context in the rough transcript below. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsgZm4u8UsU This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I spoke with VoxelKei and R_Tone with RIKU_VR as the Japanese translator about Tonevok: Sonic Sky Journey as a part of my Raindance Immersive 2025 coverage. See more context in the rough transcript below. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aS7eZWK6oI This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I spoke with Alpaka, Emnyeca, Sheena_baobab, & tktk about playing live jazz in VRChat in Blue Rondo: Stratus as a part of my Raindance Immersive 2025 coverage. You can join the EMN Records VRChat Group if you'd like to check out one of their shows. See more context in the rough transcript below. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IjGhiINz5A This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I spoke with Kaerun about being featured in Madame Kana's documentary about him called a Dutchman in Virtual Japan | A VRChat documentary as a part of my Raindance Immersive 2025 coverage. Kana also previosly made a short doc about Kaerun's VR photography called Kaerun, event photographer on #vrchat. See more context in the rough transcript below. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hR--zc4MOVk This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I spoke with Jiyue Human about VRChat Doc The Architect Across Realities as a part of my Raindance Immersive 2025 coverage. See more context in the rough transcript below. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I spoke with Jun Young Ro about planned improvements of VRChat's Trust & Safety processes. See more context in the rough transcript below. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I spoke with Kaki Navarre & Aev about the launch of VRChat's Avatar Marketplace. See more context in the rough transcript below. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I spoke with Harry X about potential gaps in VRChat's moderation of NSFW avatars that he details in a series of articles here: The Dark Reality of VRChat: How Public Sexual Avatars Are Slipping Through the Cracks (2025, April 29) VRChat's Dangerous Oversight: A Breeding Ground for Public NSFW Avatars (2025, May 4) VRChat's Complete Failure in Avatar Moderation – Over 300 TOS-Violating Avatars Reported, Zero Action Taken (2025, May 10) I did have a chance to follow up with VRChat's new trust and safety lead in a subsequent interview to go into more details for how VRChat is responding to these potential gaps. 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 spoke with Navid Khonsari about Fire Escape at the Vancouver International Film Festival 2018. See more context in the rough transcript below. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I spoke with Navid Khonsari, Vassiliki Khonsari, & Brooks Brown about Hero at Sundance 2018. See more context in the rough transcript below. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

I spoke with Navid Khonsari about the GDC Narrative Innovations Showcase Highlights at GDC 2017. See more context in the rough transcript below. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

Here's my interview with Keiichi Matsuda, Designer and Director of Liquid City, that was conducted on Thursday, June 12, 2025 at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, CA. In the introduction, I read through Matsuda's essay titled "Gods" (also uploaded here) where he explores the idea that AI should be more like pets and polytheistic and animistic familiars rather than the more monotheistic approach where there's one true AI God represented by one of Big Tech's omniscient and all-powerful AI systems. This approach has lead Matsuda to developing a system of what he calls "parabrains" that is an interface for AI agents that goes beyond the narrative scripting capabilities that he was exploring in inworld.ai with his project MeetWol that I covered previously at AWE 2023. A lot of Matsuda's ideas were also explored in the speculative fiction short film called Agents that was produced in collaboration with what was a the time Niantic Labs and is now Niantic Spatial (check out my interview with Niantic Spatial at AWE 2025 for more on how they're using Matsuda's Parabrains system). And you can also see more context in the rough transcript below. This is episode #41 of 41 of my AWE Past and Present series totaling 24.5 hours. You can see a list of all of the interviews down below: #1590: AWE Past and Present: Ori Inbar on the Founding of Augmented World Expo to Cultivate the XR Community #1591: Sonya Haskins' Journey to Head of Programming at Augmented World Expo #1592: Highlights of AWE 2025 from Head of Programming Sonya Haskins #1593: From Military to Enterprise VR Training with Mass Virtual on Spatial Learning #1594: Part 1: Rylan Pozniak-Daniels' Journey into XR Development (2019) #1595: Part 2: Rylan Pozniak-Daniels' Journey into XR Development (2025) #1596: Engage XR's Virtual Concert as Experiential Advertising for their Immersive Learning Platform (2023) #1597: Educator Vasilisa Glauser on Using VR for Twice Exceptional Students #1598: Part 1: Immersive Data Visualization with BadVR's Suzanne Borders (2018) #1599: Part 2: Immersive Data Visualization with BadVR's Suzanne Borders (2021) #1600: Part 1: Jason Marsh on Telling Data Stories with Flow Immersive (2018) #1601: Part 2: Jason Marsh on Telling Data Stories with Flow Immersive (2019) #1602: Part 3: Jason Marsh on Telling Data Stories with Flow Immersive (2025) #1603: Spatial Analytics with Cognitive3D's Tony Bevilacqua (2023) #1604: Investing in Female Founders with WXR Fund's Amy LaMeyer + Immersive Music Highlights (2019) #1605: Rapid Prototyping in VR with ShapesXR + 2021 Launch with CEO Inga Petryaevskaya #1606: Weekly Meetups in VR with XR Women Founder Karen Alexander #1607: 2023 XR Women Innovation Award Winner Deirdre V. Lyons on Immersive Theater #1608: AWE Hall of Famer Brenda Laurel on "Computers as Theater" Book, Ethics, and VR for Ecological Thinking #1609: Framework for Personalized, Responsive XR Stories with Narrative Futurist Joshua Rubin #1610: Scouting XR & AI Infrastructure Trends with Nokia's Leslie Shannon #1611: Socratic Debate on Future of AI & XR from AWE 2025 Panel #1612: AWE Hall of Famer Gregory Panos's Journey into VR: Identity, Body Capture, and Virtual Immortalization #1613: VR Content Creator Matteo311 on the State of VR Gaming #1614: Story Behind "Escape Artist" 2024 Polys WebXR Awards Winner #1615: Viverse's WebXR Plublishing Strategy with James C. Kane & "In Tirol" Game #1616: Founding Story of Two Bit Circus Micro-Amusement Park with Brent Bushnell & Eric Gradman (2018) #1617: Dream Park: Using MR in Public Spaces to Create Downloadable Theme Parks with Brent Bushnell & Aidan Wolf #1618: Producing Live Sports for Cosm's Immersive Dome with Ryan Cole #1619: Deploying Snap Spectacles in Verse Immersive AR LBE with Enklu's Ray Kallmeyer #1620: Snap's Head of Hardware Scott Myers on Spectacles Announcements & Ecosystem Update

Here's my interview with Alicia Berry (Executive Producer at Niantic Spatial) & Asim Ahmed (Head of Product Marketing at Niantic Spatial) that was conducted on Thursday, June 12, 2025 at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, CA. Check out their announcement blog posts including "Niantic Spatial and Snap's Multi-Year Strategic Partnership to Build AI-Powered Map" as well as "Niantic Spatial Joins Khronos Group to Advance Geospatial AI and 3D Standards" (mentioned in my latest interview with Neil Trevett, as well as "Meow Wolf and Niantic Spatial Announce Plans to Explore an Expansion of the Meow Wolf Universe". Also be sure to check out my interview with Keiichi Matsuda about Liquid City's Parabrains system that Niantic Spatial was using in their VPS guided tour demo they were showing at AWE. And you can also see more context in the rough transcript below. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

Here's my interview with Caitlin Krause, Founder of Mindwise, that was conducted on Wednesday, June 11, 2025 at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, CA. This is part 2 of 2 of my conversations with Krause, you can see part 1 from 2019 here. See more context in the rough transcript below. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

Here's my interview with Caitlin Krause, Founder of Mindwise, Writer, Speaker, Programmer, Educator, & Curator of Experiences, that was conducted on Wednesday, September 25, 2019 at Oculus Connect in San Jose, CA. This is part 1 of 2 of my conversations with Krause, you can see part 2 from 2025 here. See more context in the rough transcript below. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality