Episode 3.08 The History of the Future with Blake Harris

Virtual Reality roared back to life this decade due to the efforts of  visionary teenager Palmer Luckey. Luckey built Oculus, sold to Facebook for $3 billion – then got fired.

Blake Harris’ wonderful book The History of The Future: Oculus, Facebook and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality served as the foundation for this episode – a true life story of triumph and tragedy. It’s a rip roaring good read.  Grab a copy here.

Episode 3.03: Entertaining the Future with StartVR & LegionM

One hundred years ago, cinema became the vehicle of our cultural imagination. It’s happening again with virtual reality — and new studio owners are leading the way with new audiences.

StartVR’s amazing VR episodic film Awake took me to places – and emotions – I’d never experienced before in any medium. With a lyrical, looping, dreamlike quality, Awake stretches the imagination – and redefines the possibilities for entertainment across the next billion seconds.

Mark Pesce and David Baxter
Mark catches up with LegionM’s David Baxter (who really is _that_ tall)

LegionM has a business model different from any other Hollywood Studio – one that leverages ‘crowd equity investing’, where tens of thousands of co-owners both fund and promote projects that get ‘greenlit’ by the studio. We talk to Development head David Baxter about what this means for the future of entertainment – and audiences.

Episode 2.06: Virtually Real with Tony Parisi

Like artificial intelligence, virtual reality is one of those twenty-year ‘overnight success’ stories. For longer than that, VR pioneer Tony Parisi has been probing the boundaries of computer graphics, interactivity and illusion to create the next generation of technologies that immerse us in experiences of new worlds.

Tony tells us why VR has finally come of age – and what’s coming next, as ‘augmented reality’ integrates ‘consensual hallucinations’ into our daily lives – influencing everything from entertainment to business to the design of our kitchens:

The show opens with a nod to Beyonce’s amazing performance at Coachella 2018 – which featured the largest livestream audience in history, nearly half a million viewers:

There’s a new technology – videogrammetry – that allows full performance capture in 3D. Videogrammetry was used to create a video by former Smashing Pumpkin’s frontman Billy Corigan, with amazing VR landscapes created by Tilt Brush virtuoso Danny Bitman (@DannyBittman on Twitter):

My own journey into VR began when a friend lent me his copy of issue #2 of MONDO 2000. The entire collection of MONDO 2000 is available on the Internet Archive, so here’s a link to the interview with Jaron Lanier that changed my life…

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