Kent Bye (Voices of VR) on Truth, Reality, and the Human Experience (Part 1)

The Guest

Kent Bye is the creator and host of the Voices of VR podcast. He’s recorded more than a thousand interviews featuring the pioneering artists, storytellers, and technologists driving the resurgence of virtual & augmented reality.

Kent is a philosopher, oral historian, and experiential journalist helping to define the patterns of immersive storytelling, experiential design, and the ultimate potential of XR.

He’s speaking about the ethical & moral dilemmas of mixed reality at the 2019 AWE conference happening later this month, and he was a co-organizer of the VR Privacy Summit at Stanford University in 2018.

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The Conversation

I split my conversation with Kent into two parts. In this first part, I discovered Kent is exploring deep, foundational questions about truth, reality, and the human experience. He looks at VR and AR through the lens of the potential positive and negative impacts on those three elements.

He’s also pondering the ethical and moral dilemmas surrounding information technology and is putting together a framework to help people understand them and make better decisions.

We start with Kent describing how he went from being radar systems engineer to podcaster and philosopher.

Kent makes a ton of references, and I tried to capture them all below.

The Request

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Jason McDowallAR smartglasses, consumer, VR