We’re excited to announce that the Voices of VR podcast by Kent Bye will now be syndicated through Road to VR. Kent began his journey in May, 2014, seeking to catalog the insights of experts working in the core of the virtual reality industry. With more than 200 episodes released, Kent’s podcast is an ever-growing repository of VR knowledge.

Kent speaks with the heart of the VR community to connect you directly to the folks building the industry, and asks the questions that you would ask as an educated and enthusiastic observer. Voices of VR is info-dense and an excellent way to grow your virtual reality knowledge.

As a happy listener of Voices of VR myself, I reached out to Kent about bringing the podcast to our audience, and today I’m pleased to be making it official. You’ll see Voices of VR episodes published on our front page through the usual article stream, and you’ll also find a dedicated page where you can subscribe, support the podcast through Patreon, and see the latest episodes.

Voices of VR on Road to VR

We’re really excited for Voices of VR to appear here on Road to VR, and encourage you to subscribe to the podcast and consider supporting Kent’s Voices of VR Patreon campaign if you enjoy his work; Kent continues to produce the podcast independently.

I asked Kent to introduce himself and his podcast to our audience. Please join me in welcoming him!

My name is Kent Bye, and I’m the host of the daily Voices of VR podcast where I’ve done over 200 interviews with the leaders and pioneers of consumer virtual reality. I’ve interviewed a wide range of VR developers, enthusiasts, academics, filmmakers, and educators in order to understand the full-spectrum of what people see as the ultimate potential of this new communications medium. The average length of a Voices of VR podcast is around 14 minutes, so it’s a great way to keep in touch with all that’s happening in VR on your morning commute.

My specialty has been to cover live events where I interview presenters, leaders, and other innovators in the community in order to hear more about their lessons learned in developing VR applications. I’ve covered the first and second SVVR Conferences, Immersion 2014, Oculus Connect 2014, GDC 2015, and I was the only journalist covering the academic IEEE VR and 3DUI conferences that took place in France. I attended Oculus Connect 2015 and will be soon releasing interviews collected there.

I recently quit my full-time day job, and if so you’d like my work of maintaining a daily cadence of in-depth interviews with VR developers then I’d encourage to consider supporting my Voices of VR Patreon. If enough people donated just a dollar a month, then that would enable me to continue to bring the community some of the latest and most up-to-date insights what it takes to be a successful VR developer.

I started the podcast in May of last year because I wanted to hear from a broader range of people doing VR than I was currently hearing. There was an academic IEEE VR conference that happened in the spring of last year, but there was little to no coverage of it anywhere beyond a handful of tweets from attendees.

I was hungry to hear about what types of discussions were happening there, and so I tracked down some of the attendees to interview them. What I learned is that there’s a distinct split between the “Old VR” and “New VR.” I feel like there’s a lot of academic and legacy VR experience and knowledge that the current consumer VR community hasn’t really been paying attention to.

I’m using the Voices of VR podcast to help bring some of these researchers and their insights into the wider discussion about VR. At IEEE VR and 3DUI I recorded 55 interviews with some of the world’s leading VR researchers.

I’m also a budding VR developer myself, and so I tend to ask questions to my fellow VR developers about some of the more technical insights and lessons that they’ve learned in creating compelling VR experiences. Right now gaming is really the most innovative and lucrative area that’s attracting the most talent, and so I certainly try to feature some of those leading developers. But I also have a film background, and I’m very interested in some of the non-gaming VR applications and experiences. I’m proud to feature a wide spectrum of how VR is being used across all areas beyond just gaming.

I feel like virtual reality is a revolutionary new communications medium that has the potential to transform society, and I just find it so exciting to be here at this stage where the language and full potential of VR is still being discovered.

Just as books are able to contain information and knowledge that eventually catalyzed the Renaissance, virtual reality is able to capture human experiences that communicates to the subconscious parts of our brains to convince us that we’re in another world. I personally believe that this new medium has the potential to catalyze another renaissance of creativity and expansion of our human potential.

It’s not very often that a technology comes along where anyone has the ability to step up and help contribute an important part of the basic vocabulary of a medium that’ll be defining entertainment and educational experiences for many years to come.

VR developers, enthusiasts, researchers, educators, information visualizers, artists & creative visionaries that I’ve been interviewing on my podcast collectively begin to paint a picture of what’s on the horizon for where this is all going.

My long-term intention is to get more involved with virtual reality professionally as a VR experience designer, and doing the podcast is the best way that I know to teaching myself about the industry. There are not really VR classes that I can take anywhere, and the Voices of VR podcast is my own educational curriculum that I can then share with others as the space is defining itself. It’s been fascinating to learn about all of the different dimensions of VR development ranging from psychological to the technical aspects of what constitutes the best practices for creating a compelling VR experience.

I also believe that VR will develop into a wide range of applications beyond gaming including a lot of social and telepresence applications, cinematic VR experiences, heath & healing apps, data and information visualization, architecture, educational experiences, and training applications.

I also like to think that the Voices of VR podcast series as an oral history of the emergence of this immersive communications medium, and so I’ve also really been interested in getting some historical perspectives as well as feature some of the voices that are helping to figure out and define this medium.