There are a lot of unsupervised children in different social VR applications, and hopefully this interview with Lance G. Powell, Jr. about his article Parental Guide for the Metaverse can be a part of helping inform parents about some best practices for navigating virtual reality with your child.

Virtual Virtual Reality 2 has so many innovations in immersive storytelling structure through a very unique experience of nested contexts allowing for character persistence while the feeling of open world exploration. I talk with the co-founders of Tender Claws Samantha Gorman & Danny Cannizzaro about their unique production process that is able to create inherently satisfying interaction design combined with interesting themes, concepts, and philosophical provocations that are explored through a variety of character arcs, immersive worlds, surrealistic and weird art aesthetic that consistently defies your expectations, and an amazing soundtrack from independent musicians who deliberately cast as some of the main protagonists within this story.

Flat Earth VR started as a thought experiment by Lucas Rizzotto who was skewering the idea that VR is an empathy machine by creating an immersive experience that allowed you identify with delusional perspectives. After invoking some emotional reactions in people who knew it was a joke, Rizzotto took some time off of the project as the moral implications of creating propaganda for flat earthers weighed heavily on him. Eventually, he picked up the project again while framing it more explicitly as a satire and comedy that he submitted to Sundance New Frontier as a joke, but was accepted.

Tom Ffiske publishes the Immersive Wire Newsletter, and on February 2, 2022 he announced the release of his latest book called The Metaverse: A Professional Guide, which is available on Amazon. The metaverse has certainly seen an increase of attention ranging from Facebook rebranding itself to Meta to Microsoft and the Enterprise Metaverse to the hype around cryptocurrencies where collections of *.jpg image NFTs are trying to stake claim to the metaverse buzzword. He describes his book as 'An honest, no-bullshit outlook of the metaverse and its development, from someone who has seen both the good and the bad.'

The Child of Empire is an immersive story that tells the story of the India-Pakistan Partition of 1947, which is one of the largest forced migrations in human history. It uses puppet theatre-styled motion graphics in the beginning to provide a crash course of British colonialism in India, which sets the broader political context for tell the individual personal stories of a Hindu refugee who migrated from Pakistan to India, and a Muslim refugee who migrated from India to Pakistan. The piece uses the theatrical conceit of a modern day, fictionalized conversation between the Indian Hindu and Pakistani Muslim as they recount their verbatim and actual, embodied memories of their migration journey.

The State of Global Peace is an immersive experience that debuted at the Sundance Festival New Frontier 2022, which was produced by the Innovation Cell within the UN Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (UNDPPA) as a translation of a UN report titled: The State of Global Peace and Security. The report was a result of UN General Assembly Resolution 72/243: Nelson Mandela Peace Summit passed on 22 December 2017, which 'Calls upon the Secretary-General to submit a report on the state of global peace and security in line with the central mandates contained in the Charter to the General Assembly at its seventy-fourth session.' The report was first presented 6 April, 2020, turned into a book in June 2021, and then translated into an immersive experience in order to leverage the immersive storytelling and data visualization affordances of virtual reality to help summarize the major takeaways of the report for world leaders.

Suga': A Live Virtual Dance Performance was a live performance in Mozilla Hubs that premiered at SIGGRAPH 2021 and also screened at the Sundance New Frontier 2022. This project tells the story of rebellion, resistance, and resilience of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the Caribbean by blending different genres of live dance performance, guided tour, and environmental storytelling. They used OpenHeritage3D LIDAR scans of the Annaberg Sugar Mill in St John, U.S. Virgin Islands that are down converted into point-cloud representations that can be seen within a WebXR Social VR context in Mozilla Hubs.

This is Not a Ceremony is a cinematic VR piece that asks us to 'collectively bear witness to tragic events in the lives of two Indigenous men — Adam North Peigan and Brian Sinclair — and entrusts us to share what we've seen and heard.' It uses 360 3D documentary storytelling techniques to create opportunities to bear witness to stories of Indigenous trauma, and then that is juxtaposed with a more impressionistic, ancestral realm beyond space and time that's filled with with trickster poets, Matriarchs elders, and Inii (buffalo). The end result is a deeply layered experience that seamlessly blends mundane physical representations with more etheric virtual representations that provides a new way for how VR can be used for cultivating empathy.

Diagnosia is an immersive, non-linear environmental storytelling piece that takes you inside of a Chinese Internet Addiction Camp. In the early 2000s in China, there was a moral panic around video game use as state-run Chinese media started to declare label excessive technology use as 'electronic heroin' and 'spiritual opium.' Director Mengtai Zhang was bullied in school and was experiencing a stressful familial situation, which resulted in him retreating into video games, and was labeled a teenage 'Internet addict' and sent off to an Internet addiction camp run by Chinese military in Beijing in 2007

I was invited to participate on panel on Metaverse Ethics at Gamesbeat's Into the Metaverse 2 summit on January 26, 2022. Privacy in XR was the biggest theme and open question that each of the panelists focused on. This is a recording of the discussion that just aired, which was moderated by Kate Edwards (CEO of Geogrify), and featured Micaela Mantegna (Affiliate at Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University), Jules Urbach (CEO of Otoy), and Kent Bye (Voices of VR podcast).