Designing for Virtual Reality. Oral history podcast featuring the pioneering artists, storytellers, and technologists driving the resurgence of virtual & augmented reality. Learn about the patterns of immersive storytelling, experiential design, ethical frameworks, & the ultimate potential of XR.
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June 4, 202629 min
#1723: Agog’s Open Call for Climate Futures + Immersive Media: Deadline on June 12th
Agog is having their first open call on Climate Futures + Immersive Media that closes on June 12, 2026, at 11:59p PDT. Agog is "committing up to $1 million in grants to support innovators, technologists, artists, organizers, researchers, organizations, studios, and creative teams using immersive media to engage people on climate, from awareness to action." Their official page has a lot more details, including a FAQ as well as a link to an info session held in VRChat.
I had a chance to catch up with Agog's co-founder and executive director Chip Giller as well their chief of programs and strategy Amy Seidenwurm. I got some updates on where some of their initial $6.5 million of funding has gone so far in order to support the broader XR industry around immersive storytelling in what has been a lot of foundational field building. Most of this money has been done through private invitations, and this open call is the first time that Agog has opened up funding to the wider XR industry.
We dig into more details about this Climate Futures + Immersive Media open call, and be sure to check out my previous three conversations for more context: Episode #1720 on the Immersive Impact Review hybrid journalistic / academic magazine launched at SXSW, Episode #1721 on the Impulse Impact Study that came out last week, and #1722 is the keynote on Patterns of Meaning, Transformation, and Impact that I gave at the Meaningful XR Conference over the weekend that explores my phenomenological framework for understanding the unique affordances of experiential design and immersive storytelling as well as some theories of change for XR. Giller said that each proposal will need to have their own theory of change with plans for how to engage existing communities and be able to track the success or failure of your work.
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
June 4, 202633 min
#1722: Meaningful XR Keynote on Patterns of Meaning, Transformation, and Impact
I gave the opening keynote of the Meaningful XR Conference on May 30, 2026, and here's the video version of my keynote talk titled: "Patterns of Meaning, Transformation, and Impact in XR" and here is the PDF of the slides with clickable footnotes. In this talk, I cover my Experiential & Phenomenological Framework, discuss the Impulse Impact Study that came out on May 28th (see my discussion in episode #1721). I cover a bit about the Transformation Economy (see my interview with Joe Pine in episode #1718), Mission-Oriented Change, & Co-Creation, as well as cover some Other Models for Paradigm Shifts, and finally dive into AI & Friction.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-XNH4upTVw
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
June 4, 20261 hr 36 min
#1721: Impact Study on “Impulse” Immersive Doc on ADHD: Artistic Reflections
On May 28, 2026, Anagram released a report titled: "Results of Impact Study Carried Out for Mixed Reality Experience Impulse: Digest for General Public," which was commission by Agog. This 43-page report was written by Dr. Alexandra Sierra, and there's also a more extended 121-page version from December 2025 that's titled "Impulse Research Study Detail and Results" that was also written by Sierra (it is in the process of being made available). The study tracked the behavioral shifts of over 100 people across three different cohorts who watched the Impulse: Playing with Reality immersive documentary experience that was first launched in 2024. You can check out my previous interviews covering this experience in episodes #1378 and #1421. But I had a chance to speak with co-director May Abdalla about some of her highlights of this study, as well as some deeper reflections as an artist what it means to have pieces of art quantified and evaluated with such rigor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJIdBEKnniA
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
June 4, 20261 hr 2 min
#1720: Immersive Impact Review is a Hybrid Journalism and Academic Magazine on XR Impact
The Immersive Impact Review launched on March 13, 2026 at 4p CDT in Austin Texas during SXSW, and they describe themselves as "a hybrid journalistic and academic magazine examining immersive media’s strive for social impact." The first issue theme is titled “Value(s) in Practice: Impact and Sustainability in XR,” which is investigating the following questions: "How do we measure and demonstrate social impact? How do we justify costs and tradeoffs in immersive vs. more traditional media?" I spoke to managing editor Michael Epstein at SXSW four days after their launch to get a bit more context on their founding with support from Agog, and we unpack some of the articles from the first issue.
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
June 1, 20261 hr 39 min
#1719: RIP Rec Room: Reflections & Memories with Shawn Whiting
On March 30, 2026, Rec Room announced they would be closing on June 1, 2026 at noon PDT. I had a chance to speak to former Rec Room employee Shawn Whiting, who previously the roles of Head of Creators, Head of User Acquisition, and Head of Community. He shares some additional context for the past decade of Rec Room including reflections of some of their top milestones, riding the Metaverse hype, the benefits of costs of being available on so many different platforms, the impact of Meta's competing Horizon Worlds, and the challenges of monetization. We also share some of our favorite memories of the platform, and Whiting's time working for Rec Room. Rec Room is officially are closing everything down today at noon PDT, and you can check out their final AMA that was posted yesterday.
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
May 12, 20261 hr 20 min
#1718: Primer on “The Transformation Economy” with Joe Pine: When Experiences Fulfill Aspirations, Meaning, & Flourishing
On February 3rd, 2026, Joe Pine released The Transformation Economy, which is a follow-up to The Experience Economy co-written with James Gilmore and published in 1999. They identified a key pattern of how economic offerings have evolved beyond commodities, goods, and services, and moved into experiences as well as transformations.
Their prescient predictions about these underlying patterns in the late '90s took many years of convincing businesses of their merits. But after a few decades, their core ideas of The Experience Economy have taken root, and now it is much easier to see how consumers have shown that they are willing to pay for memorable experiences.
Now Pine is back at it again with The Transformation Economy with ideas that have been there from the very beginning, but he told me that the world wasn't ready yet, and he wasn't ready either. About 5-6 years ago, Pine started to hear from designers at World Experience Organization events talking about the transformative intent behind their experiences. This was the catalyst indicating to him that it was time to finally write this book, and he started researching the topics of aspiration, positive psychology, human flourishing, and the dynamics of transformation.
I had a chance to interview Pine about The Transformation Economy, and in my write-up below I provide an overview of some of his biggest ideas, some of my personal reactions, how they relate to the XR industry, and finally some of my disagreements on where value comes from. Despite some of my philosophical disagreements with Pine, I still see a lot of value in the frameworks laid out in his book. He describes a roadmap towards a future where the core values driving a critical mass of businesses have evolved to focus on helping their customers fulfill their deepest aspirations, find meaning and purpose, and promote human flourishing.
Progression of Economic Value
Pine & Gilmore first theorized about a hierarchy of economic value in a 1997 article titled: "Beyond Goods and Services: Staging Experiences and Guiding Transformations." They originally called it "The Economic Pyramid," and described it by saying, "The inexorable march of competitive forces drives the advancement of economic offerings over time: commodities are extracted from the environment to make goods, then delivered as services, which are scripted to stage experiences, which then guide those persons or enterprises in a transformation."
"The Progression of Economic Value" figure from page 3 of Pine's The Transformation Economy (2026).
Within their "Welcome to the Experience Economy" article in the 1998 issue of Harvard Business Review and in their 1999 book The Experience Economy, they started calling it "The Progression of Economic Value" as shown in the figure above. In The Transformation Economy on page x, Pine describes each of the five distinct economic genres as well as their associated verb / function,
Extract Commodities (fungible stuff)
Make Goods (tangible things)
Deliver Services (intangible activities)
Stage Experiences (memorable events)
Guide Transformations (effectual outcomes)
There is an inevitable gravity towards commodification, and the antidote is customization. This insight first came to Pine in 1994 after he wrote a book in 1993 titled Mass Customization: The New Frontier in Business Competition that explored how Mass Production was moving into Mass Customization. When customization is applied to a service, then it yields an experience. When customization is applied to an experience, then it has the potential to yield a transformation that could be life-changing. Here's how Pine & Gilmore described this progression to transformations in their original 1997 article,
"The way out of the commodization trap in which so many service companies find themselves is to move up an echelon of value and stage an experience. But experiences are not the utmost in economic offerings. Just as customizing a good automatically turns it into a service, so customizing an experience turns it into something distinct. If you design an experience so in tune with what an individual needs at an exact juncture in time, you cannot help but change that individual — guiding him to (and through) a life-transforming experience. Transformations are a fifth economic offering, whose value far exceeds that of any other."
Pine also says in The Transformation Economy that "Eliminating human contact is a surefire way to commoditize yourself." Technology has an inclination to move more and more towards automation and creating "frictionless experiences," but I see the value of human intuition, emotion, relationality, community, and meaning being a differentiating factor in the transformation economy. I suspect that it will be really beneficial to deliberately embrace friction and tension that comes from interacting with other humans as explored in the piece called Deep Soup. I see the movement towards the transformational economy as a bit of an argument against automating too many things with AI because people will be craving authentic human contact.
Key Concepts and My Personal Experience of The Transformation Economy
The Transformation Economy book is written with the intention to become a transformational experience within itself. There are many pointed questions throughout the book that helped shape my overall framing through the lens of my business.
My first reading of the book was focusing on trying to understand the origin, development, and evolution of Pine's provocative ideas to explore within my interview with him. My ongoing second reading of the book has catalyzed me to reconceive some fundamental notions around my identity, as well as the story of why I do what I do with The Voices of VR Podcast.
So much of my work has been driven by a fundamental impulse to bring about change in the world. My motivation to cover the frontiers of emerging technology with XR, AI, immersive storytelling, and experiential design has been because I've seen the transformative power of embodied and immersive experiences to potentially bring about some meaningful changes in the world.
I'm also very much drawn to philosophical frameworks like Process Philosophy that provide some key metaphysical foundations leading to a paradigm shift around the underlying nature of experience and reality itself. Here's a graphic from Andrew Davis' upcoming Whitehead's Universe book that lays out some of the scaffolding of this paradigm shift from substance metaphysics to process-relational metaphysics.
Davis, Andrew M. (Forthcoming in 2026). Whitehead’s Universe: A Prismatic Introduction. Orbis Books.
One of the key concepts that really stuck with me from Pine's The Transformation Economy was at the beginning of the third chapter that says, "All transformation is identity change." Pine cites Suzy Ross' definition of identity as "all the ways you can complete the statement ‘I am . . .’ " He says "From / To" statements are also key where you might say, "I was X, now I am Y."
I really resonate with these definitions of identity since they're very flexible and practical. Once I became aware of these "I am ..." statements, then I started to hear them all the time. I found myself naturally making and reflecting upon identity statements, which provide clues to changes that I aspire to. As an example, I've often found myself saying something to the effect of "I'm more a knowledge artist than a viable business person." So in essence, my aspirational, identity-transformation statement is "I am a terrible business person, but I aspire to become a thriving independent scholar and transformational change agent."
Reading through The Transformation Economy has been really inspiring since it's the first business book I've ever read where I can really see myself in these frameworks. Pine has been giving me language to articulate the possible futures that I'd love to live into, but yet the business models around the transformation economy are still nascent, uncertain, not very well specified, and rapidly developing.
Each business will have a unique blend of commodities, goods, services, experiences, and/or transformations that they'll be offering, and so it is unlikely that there will be a universal formula that works across all contexts. I'm still meditating on this statement where Pine claims that your business is what you charge for. He says on page 22,
"A business ultimately defines itself by what it charges for. If you charge for undifferentiated stuff, you’re in the commodities business. If you charge for tangible things, you are in the goods business. If you charge for the activities your people do, you are in the services business. So, economically, you are in the experience business if and only if you charge for the time customers spend with you."
Pine says that experiences are inherently ephemeral, and sometimes the only thing you keep from it is the memory, which can fade over time. He contrasts this with his definition of transformations, which he shares on page 10 as, "Transformations are effectual outcomes that change individuals in a lasting way. Where experiences are memorable, transformations are effectual."
This implies that the business offering of transformations actually has more of an ongoing time commitment. Businesses in the transformation economy will be helping "aspirants" (Pine's preferred term for customers in the transformation economy) achieve their aspirations of transforming from one state into another state over longer periods of time.
Aspirants will need to invest time, be patient with results, make progress, but also deal with periodic regressions. I've been reckoning with how I am what I charge for, and I can't help but think about the logistical difficulty in trying to escape the real-time accounting of how we've conceived of value delivered
May 10, 20261 hr 28 min
#1716: “Human Spatial Computing” is a Human-Rights-Centered Textbook for XR Design
The Human Spatial Computing book was published by Oxford University Press on February 5, 2026, and I had a chance to interview the co-authors Reginé Gilbert and Doug North Cook a few weeks after it launched. They alternative as the lead author on each chapter, which provides a comprehensive overview of designing for XR through a variety of different lenses. The entire book is grounded in human rights and ethics, with a recurring focus on how to design experiences that are inclusive and accessible to as diverse of an audience as possible.
There's a helpful recap of the history of human computer interaction that goes way back to desire to recreate reality with the Leonardo da Vinci paintings and the imaginative worldbuilding creating new realities by science fiction writers. Other topics covered include insights from universal design principles, industrial design affordances, architecture, neuroscience, and ethics. Here's a list of the chapters of the book, which we also do a brief recap and overview throughout the course of this interview.
Why Should We Care about Ethics?
The Story of Human–Computer Interaction
What Connects Us All
Universal Design for Spatial Computing
Merging Human Creativity with Technology
The Body
Affordances of Immersive Technology and the Future of Computing
Spatial Computing and the Brain
Where Do We Go From Here?
There are also a lot of questions and activities at the end of each chapter, which makes this Human Spatial Computing book a compelling textbook option for folks teaching XR design.
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
May 10, 20261 hr 7 min
#1715: “BurnerSphere” Combines Immersive Documentary, Social VR, and Digital Twin of Burning Man
BurnerSphere is part immersive documentary, party social VR platform, and part digital twin of Burning Man. It's a standalone VR experience that launched in early alpha for both Quest and Steam on July 22, 2025. It's an evolution of the original Burning Man on AltSpace that I covered back in episodes #940, #960, & #1192, and now they have their own standalone social VR platform that has a digital twin of Burning Man that creates a spatial context for a ton of immersive documentary content that's shot in 360-degree video, stereoscopic 180-degree video, gaussian splats, 3D-modeled recreations, 3D photos, and 2D photos and videos. It's a vast archive that has a taster that is completely free, but you can also pay camp dues to become a member to get access to all of the footage as well as special events.
I interviewed the cofounders of Big Rock Creative (BRCvr) Athena Demos and Doug Jacobson back in November 2025 to get the latest updates in what's happening with their hybrid immersive documentary archive and nascent social VR platform.
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
May 5, 202645 min
#1714: Lincoln Center for Performing Arts Immersive Programming Overview with Jordana Leigh
The Lincoln Center for Performing Arts has been stage a variety of different types of immersive experiences as a part of their interdisciplinary programming, and I had a chance to catch up the lead immersive programmer Jordana Leigh at Venice Immersive in order to get an overview of what they've been showing, XR experiences they've commissioned, how audiences connect to each other about the unique transportive affordances of experiences presented there, and generally how they're using XR to bring new and diverse communities together in New York City. We also talked about their Lincoln Center Collider Fellowship for XR artists to advance their artistic practice through a range of either open-ended R&D or time and space for innovative experimentation. Leigh was scheduled to present at the IDFA DocLab R&D Summit, but had some travel delays. Hopefully this conversation helps to explain the many ways that the Lincoln Center for Performing Arts is totally in alignment with some of the broader themes of providing opportunities to de-isolate and revitalize civic society that is covered extensively in this report.
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
May 1, 202642 min
1713: CIIIC’s €200 Million in Public Funding: The Creative Industries Immersive Impact Coalition
The CIIIC is the Creative Industries Immersive Impact Coalition based out of the Netherlands, which will be spending about €200 Million in Public Funding over the next five years. It is a really exciting development in Europe that is promoting the development of Immersive Experiences (which they abbreviate IX). They will be cultivating knowledge and methods of experiential design, developing immersive talent and human capital, cultivating immersive ecosystem and facilities, catalyzing innovation via various projects, and creating an over synergy across all of their efforts.
For a comprehensive recap of CIIIC and what they're doing, then also be sure to check out the CIIIC section starting on page 62 of the extensive 121-page IDFA DocLab Think Tank Report that I wrote, which was recently published on April 21, 2026. I provide a bit more context to this report in the intro and outro of this episode, which is an oral history interview with CIIIC Program Director Heleen Rouw at UnitedXR in December. This conversation forms the basis for that section, but also has some additional updates on their various efforts including:
Artistic & Design Research for Immersive Experiences (ADRIE) (5 projects)
Phase I of Innovation Impact Challenge: IX in Urban Development (17 projects)
Phase II Innovation Impact Challenge: IX in Urban Development (10 projects)
The "Shared Realities" consortium is part of the initial ADRIE cohort, which includes a collaboration between IDFA DocLab, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, MIT Open Documentary Lab, PHI, ARTIS Planetarium, and a number of XR studios based in the Netherlands including POPKRAFT, Polymorf, Studio Biarritz, WeMakeVR, ALLLESSS (Ali Eslami), Ado Ato Pictures (Tamara Shogaolu), and Cassette (Nu:Reality). Be sure to check out episode #1697 to hear more about how the Shared Realities initiative will be facilitating experiential designers and artists collaborating with researchers to see if immersive art can help to revitalize civic society.
This interview with Rouw provides an overview of the CIIIC, how they're defining "immersive" to be much broader than any single technology, and why they think immersive will be the next big wave of innovation that can help promote public interest values.
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
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