VR

No Proscenium founder Noah Nelson, who was our guest on episode 7 of the 88 Names podcast, invited me and my co-host Blake Collier to come hang out on his podcast last week. You can listen to the conversation here.

If you haven’t already, I’d also highly recommend checking out the rest of the No Pro website. It’s an incredibly useful resource for learning about immersive technology and art, and now that the pandemic lockdown is almost over (fingers crossed), I look forward to experiencing a lot more in-person immersive entertainment.

Today on the 88 Names podcast site, we have a written interview with Johanna Pirker, a professor and researcher for games and VR experiences at the Graz University of Technology in Austria. Johanna is also the director of the Game Lab Graz. In 2018, she was selected by Forbes for their 30 Under 30 list in Science. You can read the interview here.

Today on the 88 Names podcast site, we have a written interview with actor, filmmaker, composer, and “VR evangelist” Keram Malicki-Sanchez. As the founder of the VRTO Virtual & Augmented Reality World Conference and the founder and executive producer of FIVARS, the Festival of International Virtual & Augmented Reality Stories, Keram knows a lot about recent and forthcoming developments in VR technology, and his answers to our questions cover a wide range of topics. You can check out the interview here.

On this week’s episode of the 88 Names podcast, we talk with Drew Stone, the founder of Locusium, a company that helps organize and facilitate events in virtual reality. Drew is also an old friend of the pod — last year, he helped set up my author appearance on AltspaceVR.

This will be our last regular podcast episode. Next week, I’ll be returning to AltspaceVR for another live reading and Q&A (details here). And the week after that, Blake Collier and I will be doing a special wrap-up episode where we talk about this very strange year we’ve just lived through.

We also have a couple of bonus written interviews that will be posting soon. Stay tuned!

On this week’s episode of the 88 Names podcast, Blake and I talk with Dr. Todd P. Chang, a pediatric emergency medicine physician at the Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles. Dr. Chang has done extensive research into the use of VR and other immersive technologies in medical training, particularly as it relates to his specialty. This was a great discussion, and as I mention at one point, prepping for the interview led me down some fascinating internet rabbit holes.

On our next episode, we’ll be talking to Locusium founder Drew Stone.

On the latest episode of the 88 Names podcast, we speak to Kelly McLaughlin and Montgomery Martin, aka the Dungeon Dudes, whose YouTube channel offers advice and role-playing tips for 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons. They also have a weekly Twitch stream on which they broadcast live sessions from their Dungeons of Drakkenheim campaign. If you like their work and want to support them, you can do so through their Patreon, or through their forthcoming Dungeons of Drakkenheim Kickstarter.

On our next episode, we talk to pediatric emergency physician Dr. Todd Chang about his research into the use of VR in medical training.

On this week’s episode of the 88 Names podcast, we talk to Sasha Samochina, an award-winning technologist at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

You can learn more about Sasha’s work at her website. This YouTube playlist contains 360 and VR videos that Sasha has produced for NASA JPL. This video gives a brief overview of the OnSight mixed-reality software, developed by JPL, that lets scientists take virtual walks on Mars. And the Access Mars WebVR experience lets you use your browser to make your own virtual visit to Mars.

On our next episode, we talk to the Dungeon Dudes, Montgomery Martin and Kelly McLaughlin.

The trade paperback edition of 88 Names will be published next Tuesday, March 16, and to celebrate, my friend Blake Collier and I have recorded some new episodes of the 88 Names podcast.

To kick off this second season of the pod, we talk to legendary game designer Mike Pondsmith, founder of R. Talisorian Games and the creator of the Cyberpunk roleplaying franchise, which includes the recently released Cyberpunk RED and the video game Cyberpunk 2077. You can listen to our conversation here.

On our next episode, we talk to Sasha Samochina, an award-winning creative technologist from NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.